gone living

an update to those of who you've been subscribers since the feed first launched -- i've setup permanent redirects from my site's original Atom and RSS feed URLs to my new FeedBurner feed URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoneLiving).

this shouldn't break anything -- if you were subscribed to the old feed address, your feedreader should pickup the new URL automatically. if for any reason this breaks your ability to read the Gone Living feed, please drop me an email so i can fix it. thanks!

when flying into australia on the next leg of our trip, we ended up on one of the many random carriers that our cut-rate one-way plane ticket company assigns us to. while this means that we save as much as we can on plane tickets, it also means that we don't choose the airlines we fly on, and that we rarely fly on the same airline twice. for the new zealand to australia leg of our trip, we ended up on emirates air.

let me prefix this by saying that we were on cut-rate, super economy class, one-level-above-the-pets-in-the-cargo-hold tickets. and it was one of the nicest flights i've ever been on... certainly the best treatment i've ever gotten flying in coach.

the airplane itself (an Airbus A340-500), had massive seats with a suprisingly good recline to them. then you add the over 500 channels of in-flight entertainment (including over 100 new movies. my picks: doom and the simpsons.), the fancy LED overhead seat lighting, excellent food and beverages, and even the fiber-optic stars on the cabin ceiling. and did i mention the in-flight wifi email checking, sms messaging, and laptop recharging stations in the galley?

i suppose the ability to get our tickets so cheaply on them is part of an effort to build brand awareness. and if so, it's working. now if i can just get a ticket on another great carreir (virgin atlantic) when we head to europe later... and will virgin america be running flights in the US by the time i get home again?

after trying on a variety of silly hats here in adelaide (photos coming soon), we settled on a couple of akubra hats to keep the sun out of our eyes while hiking in the outback. we picked up our 4wd toyota land cruiser yesterday complete with power fridge and rooftent (see the picture if you aren't familiar with the rooftent concept. it's not something you often see in the United States) from our excellent rental folks, and are now fully loaded with supplies and ready to head up north into the flinders ranges, entering the australian outback for the first time. our 1-way drive from adelaide to darwin will take us over 2,700 kilometers right through the middle of australia. (that's 1,670 miles for all the good folks not using the metric system)

our plan is to spend a leisurely three weeks heading north across australia on the stuart highway, with extensive detours at australia's national parks along the way. then we return the car in darwin, where i hop on a flight 1-way flight up to brunei to begin the southeast asia portion of the trip.

thanks to the wonderful weird circumstances of this trip, i'll be picking up my dive mask (fitted with prescription lenses) at the post office in coober pedy, which is about as far from any diving as you can get. i'll explain the circumstances of this one another time, and leave figuring out why i'm doing this as an exercise to the reader.

as part of our tour through the outback, we took our trusty land cruiser up into the flinders ranges to do some camping. (and took photos of quorn along the way) we arrived at wilpena pound in the late afternoon to check out the info from the visitor's center and drove out to check out a couple of campsites, before we settled on our camp at the "koolaman" campsite, where we happily found a spot in the 4wd section of the camp.

we setup camp easily thanks to the rooftent (which has been serving us well... i don't know why we haven't seen this handy invention before in the states), and Jean cooked up her usual camp delicacies for dinner (that night's dinner: lamb sausage with curry powder). my ipod provided some background downtempo music for us from the land cruiser's stereo, and we watched the night stars and made up constellations. while we slept at night, our camp was tromped through by what could only have been many kangaroos and/or emus.

we also did some great hiking here, where also witnessed the beginning of the "cloud of flies" feature that seems to increase in intensity the further north we travel (so far, at least). in addition, there were a decent number of large spiders in the trees every few feet, but they seemed content to stay in their webs and feast upon the flies that were pursuing us on the trail. but no kiler snakes, which was a good thing.

we regretted leaving the flinders after only one night there... i've got to return there again sometime in the future. it reminds me of arches and canyonlands national parks in utah, but without the massive crowds. a very well-maintained, well-preserved, and attractive park, with excellent facilities. if you're thinking about camping in australia, consider visiting the flinders ranges.

when i was buying some travel gear from flight 001 in san francisco before leaving on this trip, i found a half-broken sony ICF-SW12 in their clearance rack for 80% off. after the helpful girl working at the store swapped it with one that actually worked, i threw in in my backpack as a travel alarm clock, and i figured that if i used the radio at all, that would be a nice bonus.

lesson learned: any product where the floor unit is already partially broken means that the same breakage will probably happen to you too. when i pulled out the radio at our campsite in the flinders ranges to try it out, the clock/alarm part of the gadget were already broken. but a quick test revealed that the shortwave radio part of it was still functioning, so i started randomly scanning the shortwave stations that we could pick up.

there is nothing like standing in an extremely isolated place and hearing fragments of indian pop music, british-accented newscasts, and voices in every language coming out between bursts of static. we finally settled on one of the indian pop stations as a new day dawned over our campsite, and reflected on the "real world" which seemed so far away that morning.

the first encounter started innocently enough -- an old newspaper we picked up at the cafe to read while we waited for our flat white and long black coffees. the easy-to-read format of the tabloid size drew us in, and the delightfully opiniated headlines and bad puns (such as "MEATWORKERS TASTE VICTORY"), kept us there.

unlike US-based tabloids, these are not focused on far-fetched stories about the Bat Boy or front-page celebrity gossip (well, not purely focused, at least). instead, they're a highly editorialized view of the day's news with.

while i wouldn't subscribe to one as my only source of daily news, they make for very entertaining reading at lunch or in the car during our long stretches of driving, where we read each other stories about a baby Meerkat kidnapped from the zoo, and giant tuna.

so Advertiser, Courier Mail, Daily Telegraph, and Herald Sun, thanks for all the tabloid fun. i'll miss you when i head up to southeast asia at the end of this month. until then, i'll be enjoying every page of infotainment.

we're in alice springs for a few days. the days are intermittently sunny and beautiful, or overcast with dollops of warm rain coming down in irregular intervals. now that we've entered the northern territory, the beer of choice is Castelmaine XXXX (instead of Coopers in South Australia). Jean and I both became Coopers Pale Ale fans, and we miss seeing it in the pubs up here.

alice is the first "big city" we've been in since we left adelaide -- being able to restock at large supermarkets, find camping supply stores, and get fast internet access has been excellent. after this we'll be back to camping and small towns for the next week or so until we reach Darwin, so we'll be putting our new gear to good use. in addition, being able to find breakfast menu items like pancakes and french toast again (instead of the famous "Toast And ..." breakfasts that have followed us through the otuback) is a major plus.

after spending some time decompressing from our last run of camping, and taking care of necessary things like burning our photos onto DVD, downloading the latest episodes of Lost onto Jean's Video iPod via the iTunes Store, getting additional camping supplies (it never hurts to actually have mantels for your propane lamp), and so forth.

after another day or two here of seeing the sights, we'll proceed either south or north to start doing some more camping, and begin slowly making our way north to Darwin.

found at the carnival in alice springs:

jean also got a great video of the same carnival game.

we just drove back a few hours ago from three days of driving, camping, and hiking. starting off in alice springs, we then drove over to hermannsburg, and then over on a corrugated (and VERY rough) dirt road to king's canyon, and then up on the same road to the west mcdonnell ranges.

camping in king's canyon was run by one of those fancy "resort" campsite companies). as people tend to do when catering to the backpacker/camper market, the term "resort" is used very loosely. the wasp's nest inside the bathroom stall was a nice surprise, though.

king's canyon itself was a beautiful day of hiking, and i've posted up some of my favorite king's canyon photos from the hike.

the next day we drove up to the west mcdonell ranges proper, and jean made an amazing chicken tikka masala dinner at our campsite (in an actual national park campsite, which was well-maintained as usual for the AU park system), which i'm looking forward to eating the leftovers from for dinner tonight. props to woolworth's australia for having amazing off-the-shelf premade chicken tikka masala sauce, chutney and roti. (this fared much better than the 'el paso' taco shells that we'd purchased from another woolworth's to make tacos with.)

at this point we're nearing the end of the time in australia with our land cruiser. we're due in darwin by the 25th, so we're planning to head out of Alice tomorrow morning and start driving north, hopefully stopping in Kimberley for a few days to do some hiking and camping.

while it's exciting to be flying to Brunei in a week from now (thus kicking off the Southeast Asia portion of my trip), i'm going to miss the long 4wd excursions with jean, playing fatboy slim and downtempo music at volumes high enough to overcome the constant rattle of the corrugated roads, and seeing how much of the car we can cover in water by hitting that next deep mud puddle at top speed.

next stop, tennant creek!

we stopped here enroute from alice springs to darwin based on the advice of the moon handbooks guide to australia and camped for a night.

outside our tent last night we heard, in addition to the usual mumur of traffic, the sounds of shouting, screaming, obscenities, whistling, and barking in the evening air. sounding like a riot in progress, the volume ranged from faint to about a block away. the one sound we never heard was a police siren.

the noise continued until late in the night, and didn't let up until moning. we never did find out exactly what the source of the noise was. we left tennant creek and started driving north shortly after dawn.

after a long night in tennant creek, we decided to bypass the recently flooded catherine gorge at just drive the 1000km straight through to darwin.

we arrived tired, sweaty (cutting down on the a/c usage in the land cruiser to avoid having to buy too many $200 AUD gas fillups), and ready to rest. we booked a room at a backpackers called Melaleuca On Mitchell who had a few reasonable-sounding sentences describing them in our australia guidebook.

after a sleepless (and noisy) night spent trying to sleep in a tent on top of a land cruiser, and a long day of driving through the outback, there is nothing like checking into a room with large beds, air conditioning, fans, a private bathroom. except when you go upstairs and find out that there isn't just a pool, but a pool bar as well.

so today there are no grand excursions to report, no crazy experiences or canyon jumps, just uploading photos and videos, catching up on blog entries, and lying out in the sun with a cold cooper's pale ale. vacation rules.

as i sit here in my hostel using the internet and wondering how much i'll read of neal stephenson's phonebook-sized the system of the world (luckily i'm reading the british edition, which has a much better cover, as is usually the case with british paperback books) today, while increasingly stronger and louder winds of cyclone monica batter our building from the outside, i thought i'd post some cyclone factoids for all of you:

1. cyclone monica is a tropical cyclone, which is the same thing as a hurricane.

2. according to the caption on this photo from yahoo news, it's now only a category 2 (Australian Scale) cyclone. (On the US hurricane scale, this would rank it as a "tropical storm").

3. all stores on my street in darwin (mitchell st) are closed, aside from the grocery store which is open. however, the liquor store attached to the grocery store is closed.

4. speaking of beer, the bar in my hostel is on the roof next to the swimming pool, and therefore closed. (the drawbacks of a pool bar... looks like it will be a dry cyclone party.)

5. this is not the headline i need to read before i've had coffee: "'Perfect cyclone' bears down on Australian city - Darwin, leveled by winds 32 years ago, lies in Monica's path." (from yahoo's frontpage, accompanied by a picture of a big ominious cloudy spiral). this then changed to "Cyclone threat eases in Australia" when i dug deeper for a more recent headline.

stay tuned to your favorite news sources for details about cyclone monica.

cyclone monica ended up missing darwin and losing enough strength that it is now a tropical depression.

today in darwin ending up being a day with lots of rain and wind, and hanging out indoors. this meant reading trashy sci-fi books that i found on sale the day before, and working on blog tweaks and enhancements.

two technologies that helped out today: wikipedia for their great news coverage on cyclone monica, and apple's ipod radio remote which let me tune into local radio news on the cyclone.

today, besides visiting the amazing crocodylus park just outside of darwin, we returned our trusty land cruiser after 3 weeks of camping and roadtripping our way from adelaide to darwin. this ended up taking us over 6000km across australia.

returning the car marks the end of the portion of the trip with jean, who will be staying in australia for a while before heading home, hopefully to rejoin for a while later this year. i'll definitely miss travelling with jean, but i've done solo travelling before, so i'll continue forward the around-the-world goal. this means that i only have a few days left in australia before i fly to brunei and begin my tour around southeast asia.

australia, i'll miss you, especially given that you are the only country i've been to that is as completely simpsons-obsessed as i am.

after a 5:30am wakeup today to catch my flight to brunei, i officially began the southeast asia portion of my trip.

the flight on royal brunei air was ok, but emirates had probably set my expectations a little too high in terms of what to expect on an international flight. i arrived at brunei airport only to find out that my hotel reservation had gotten screwed up, and i had to make another one. after doing some serious bargain hunting, i managed to get a room over at the empire hotel for a great deal.

i'll try to post photos soon when i find a fast internet connection, but first i need to spend some time at the empire exploring the ridiculously nice grounds (not the least of which is an onsite bowling alley and a full-size movie theater) and go for a swim on one of the lagoon beaches. wow... all this at a 5-star luxury hotel for less than the discount rate at most santa monica beach hotels (i'll share the details of how i managed that one in a later post).

i'm off to explore the water village. i know i'm going to miss all this fanciness when i arrive at a budget backpacker resort in bali in three days...

you'll all be glad to know that the fine art of breakdancing is alive and well in brunei.

i was walking near the water when i passed a group of teenage kids. one of them said to me "Yo, man," and immediately broke out into his best breakdancing moves. i just stopped and stared.

there are rare moments where you feel surreal cross-cultural connections through pop culture. this was one of those moments. faith, i should have learned breakdancing from you earlier, or at least watched the movie "wild style" a few more times, so i would have had something to contribute back to the moment.

a quick aside: the people here are honestly friendly. being one of the few western tourists wandering around brunei's capital (bandar seri begawan), i get a few stares, especially from kids. but people here are nearly universally polite and friendly once you talk to them, and an unsolicited "hello" from a stranger is just a simply "hi", and not a "hi, i would like to draw you into some kind of scam or sketchy deal which will inevitably involve separating you from the contents of your wallet."

while (unfortunately) i didn't get any photos, please content yourselves with the mental image of breakdancing in brunei.

i am absolutely addicted to "Lost". but when i left home, i figured that there was no way that i'd be able to keep up with the show.

however, thanks to the fact that i can use my itunes store account anywhere that has itunes installed (or will let me install it in their internet cafe), and that i have a video ipod with me, i'm quite happily tracking the show from wherever i am in the world.

"but wait!", you say. what about the obsessive over-analysis of the show that you would go through with your friends when you were living back in california? what about that critical part of the Lost experience?

enter LostPedia.

LostPedia is simply amazing. hyper-obsessive analysis of every point in the show. for example, just look at their info on the map that locke recently found inside a door in the hatch. just the kind of thing that i need when i'm looking for something to muse over in between episodes.

now if they'll just start selling movies on the itunes store so i can have even more timewasters... nah, i'd settle for matlock episodes. ;)

actually, i'm trying to just look out the window, go outside, and enjoy the trip instead of getting caught up in watching TV. but being able to keep up on Lost is really cool.