The little things

When you’re in the outback, there are the obvious things that geeks miss - cell phone reception, high speed Internet (satellite isn’t too bad though). And even that stuff I can happily live without for two weeks when the intent is to relax and disconnect.

What I wasn’t expecting however was something that I didn’t miss. On our way back up to Darwin we stayed at a hotel last night. Suddenly I realised that for the first time in nearly two weeks I didn’t have to put my shoes on and walk to a nearby building to get to the toilet & shower
The holiday is almost over now. The only flights to Brisbane leave at 1am (on the same plane that just came up *from* Brisbane) so we’ve booked a budget room to get some sleep before I go.

I didn’t take a ton of photos, but I do have a few and will hopefully post them in the next week or so.

 

Oh it’s a hard life

This (at the bottom of the post, silly WP iPhone client) is the view from my chair as I write this

Hopefully it looks ok… It seems pretty average viewing it on the phone, the camera on this thing is worse than I thought.

Apart from the heat (which is gone today), it has been a nice couple of days travelling around litchfield national park (look that up yourself, I’m not linking stuff from my phone!).

It was all waterfalls and termite mounds, but I did get some nice photos (and dropped my phone through a boardwalk - luckily onto a dirt section and not over the water!)

The locals said that yesterday was the hottest it has been this month, so I wasn’t alone thinking it was hot. We had a nice quiet powered site in a small van park Tuesday night, but yesterday was so hot we upgraded to an air conditioned cabin

We’re in an unpowered site on the outskirts of Katherine tonight and I’ve managed to chew through most of my battery catching up on emails etc, so if you’ll excuse me I’ll get back to my relaxing now….

(edit: wow that is really bad. I took one with my normal camera, and will post it later…)

 

Attacked by an eagle!

I was sitting on the grassy area at wangi falls today eating lunch, when suddenly this eagle swoops down and tries to make off with my sandwitch!

I didn’t have my camera on me, but I did take a pic of the scratch on my finger to prove it
(unfortunately the iPhone camera is crap for fine details so I used my normal camera, I’ll update this with the photo over the weekend when I have proper net access)

 

I forgot the heat

(Backdating this after I wrote it on Thursday out of phone range!)

The one thing I forgot to mention in my last post was the heat. It’s bloody cold in Brisbane so it is good to get away, but after a nice couple of high 20s days in the city, wandering around tourist spots in the bush with the sun beating down at 30+ is a bit much (that’s ~90F for my american readers, and this is late winter!)

My mum had this nice campervan setup so we had a quiet night at a van park (I’ll post pictures later). We had a powered site but were both exhausted from walking in the heat so the only power we actually used was the kettle and my phone charger
I’ve also discovered something interesting about the iPhone GPS - it finds my position nearly as fast with no cell signal out here as it does in a big city. No maps with out a data connection, but it does find my exact position and I have been bookmarking everywhere I take photos. This “assisted GPS” doesn’t help that much, the iphone must have a good chip after all

 

Dust, dirt and holiday

After a month of hard work on the next release, I’ve just started a nice two week holiday
I’m visiting my mum - currently in Darwin, we’ll spend this week making our way south via touristy spots to hodson downs station where she’s been working this year. The second week will be really kicking back while mum works, and then head back up to Darwin for my flight home friday night.

I was quite surprised to learn that optus has a 3G network in darwin so my phone works just fine, but once we head off that will no longer be the case so I wanted to get a blog in while I think about it.

Should be a fun time, I apparently have the usual crop of computer issues mum ropes me in to look at but otherwise it will be total disconnect from the fast lane.

It’s the first real holiday I’ve had all year so I have really been looking forward to it

 

Completely Disconnected

Once again I find myself blogging when I should be packing. Oh well, guess I’ll be packing under the influence when I get back from town - not as bad as it sounds with the list I made as I was packing to come here

I originally came up with this post, and another that I’m going to leave for working on during my trip home, while we were in Chiang Rai around the time of my Birthday (that post is up now, btw). I had no idea just how much it would ring true, and it only seems fitting that I’m writing this on the last day of my holiday.

I thought that my time in Songkhla would be back to my usual ways of geekery and computers - but it’s been far from it. Having my Dad around for the third week of my holidays has contributed to that a lot, but I’ve also found myself preferring to curl up with a book or hang out with Dad over any sort of computer activity. I’ve managed to switch off far better than I’d hoped.

I’ve had a fantastic time here, between the first week of touristy activity and the last two of hanging out, drinking, going on bike rides, hash runs, more drinking, and listening to Dad discuss old stories with his mates (while drinking).

The first week was a forced disconnect from everything technical, because the hotels we stayed in did not guarantee the safety of anything in your room - you had to take it to the front counter and put it in a lockbox (a free service). This meant my iPod and DS were locked up for basically the entire week, which was good because I couldn’t charge them anywhere (as a result my iPod battery lasted until we were almost home).

As much as it will surprise some people, I didn’t miss any of it. It was a very relaxing time, for the first few days we took trains and taxis to various sights in Bangkok itself and on one afternoon even took a trip up north (I think) to an elephant / crocodile farm. We only spent a couple of days in Chiang Rai, and the only activity there I haven’t posted about is an elephant ride we went on. I have tons of photos, far to many to post them all…

[hours later, my dad and uncle got me drunk and my uncle tried to hook me up with 2 hawt thai chicks for the night]…

As I was saying, I have an absolute ton of photos (end of holiday count is something like 580 before ditching the ones I don’t want) but although I’ve had a few chances to sit down and create a flickr account to post them on, I just can’t be bothered. This I feel is a very good sign, as I described above doing anything on computers has been very low on my priority list for the last 3 weeks. In fact anything outside the little world I’ve been living in has mattered very little to me. It’s been almost completely about having a good time while I’m here.

I’m going to stop trying to post while drunk now, lest I fall asleep before I finish packing. eh, it’s only 1:30am. I don’t have to leave the house to catch my flight until 9

 

No hash name for me this trip :(

One of the things that my Dad has been involved in around Songkhla (where he lives) for years is the Hash House Harriers. It’s a running club, but the Songkhla chapter is usually more about drinking beer with mates (particularly during the week). They run every Saturday, almost always through scrub / jungle with their favourite areas being in rubber tree plantations where there are plenty of tracks and places to put false trails.

The way Songkhla performs their runs is a little bit varied from the wikipedia article, but it will give you the general idea of what happens. In any case, after a few runs on my trip here nearly 3 years ago last weekend was my 5th run - at which point they give me a hash name.

This run was being set by my Dad, so I went along to help him - but we got held up in the morning and didn’t get started until 10am which really was far too late. It was an absolute scorcher of a day, even under the trees it was hot. The typical 1-1.5hr run takes 3 or 4 hours to set, and we took a little over 4.5. Luckily we took extra water, but I was completely drained from wandering through not just the jungle but also the hill we were setting it on. I had a headache, am sure I suffered from heat exhaustion and more than a little dehydration too.

By the time we got home and had a shower it was only about 2hrs before we had to be back at the run site - I hadn’t planned to run after what I’d been through, but when we were due to leave I felt too tired to go and even in the aircon I still had a bit of a fever. Dad came back to get me later so I could attend the circle and receive my hash name - but I didn’t feel like standing up at all, much less getting iced just to receive my name. I was afraid that it would make me seriously sick, I’ll explain what it involves and you’ll see why.

Getting iced means you sit on a block of ice for at least 5min with your legs straight (to make it more painful) while the circle discusses why you’re there (Songkhla tends to pick just about any reason to ice someone) and then they sing a little tune. Towards the end of that, you have to scull half a cup of beer as fast as you can because people are standing around and at the end of the song anyone left has buckets of ice water dumped on their head

 

To make matters worse, flights to Brisbane are packed and so I can’t change my original departure time of Saturday morning - Dad neglected to tell me it’s the date of the 25th anniversary Songkhla Hash run, during which they’re playing host to this years interhash on their way through. Not only will it be a fun day with 400 people on the train running at 5 locations plus a larger than usual collection of locals, the party on Saturday night will be huge and I’m not happy that I have to miss it as well as my last chance to get a hash name for at least a year.

Oh well, always next time eh?

 

Playing cards until 4 in the morning is also fun

(note: I haven’t updated my timezone on this blog, so keep in mind all holiday posts are 3 hours behind. It’s 4:30am right now).

We were at a party tonight, and I got suckered into sitting down to play some cards. Since we were within walking distance of home, I was left with a set of house keys and some money that I’d borrowed to get started. After borrowing more during the night I’m not 100% sure if I ended up even or not, but each round was cheap enough that I don’t think anyone really cares

I even managed to find the game we were playing on wikipedia - Thirty One. I’d never heard of it, but it’s a lot of fun and surprisingly what we were playing reads straight from the wikipedia article.

I still have a few blog posts that I want to write up, but due to some unforseen circumstances I no longer have this week to myself so I don’t know if I’ll even feel like spending the time before my holiday is over. I’m not sorry, because enjoying my holiday is much better than sitting around blogging. Besides, this is why I wrote them down on paper - I can post them after I get back

 

Riding home while drunk is fun

blog posting while drunk?…. sorry, doesn’t compare. Does prove my inner geek isn’t too far gone tho.

Went for my first bike ride in a very long time tonight, ended up at only about 11k of offroad riding before my legs died and we took the main road home. After ~20k we stopped at a corner shop, and through my dad and uncle buying rounds we had about 4 cans of beer each, by which time it was dark (luckily dad brought his front light, ‘cos we only had back lights!). On the way home from there we stopped at the golf driving range and had another, which made the last 15 mins home all that much more fun

 

Not dead, just having too much fun to blog

I’m alive! The holiday is going quite well so far

I’ve got some posts I’d like to make, to the point where I started jotting down notes on paper because there wasn’t a computer nearby and I didn’t want to forget the details. I’ve only just organised a reasonable setup for internet access so I can actually communicate again - but I won’t be doing it at the expense of having a good time. Of the three weeks I’m spending here my dad only has time off work for the first two; so next week I will no doubt have plenty of time to start that flickr account and talk about some details of my trip. Whether I post anything before then will depend on how much time we spend sitting around. I doubt it’ll be much.

I have spent a little bit of time writing, last night I put together a post about my birthday but it still needs some polish. I’ll be backdating it, so keep an eye out for that entry to magically appear

I also had this huge rant planned about how much my day on Saturday sucked, and it did - but I’m over it now, which is a missed opportunity for a spontaneous blog entry but also saves you from reading my bitchings. I haven’t decided if that’s a good thing or not