Howdy all, Steve here, reporting from the Hostel Estoril in Buenos Aires. I’ve made an executive decision as to how I’ll keep you posted while we’re over here. Flash blogs. Meaning, just short little posts filling you in on the basics, and some of my thoughts. Hope you’ll understand my brevity. There are better things to do than write on a machine. But thankfully, for the time being, the hostel has hooked me up with free access to updated the blog. The posts will be pretty much straight translations from my notebook, where I’m organizing my thoughts. When I get back, I’ll update these with pictures too hopefully. On we go…
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Welcome back to another, and perhaps my final post on our adventures in Morocco. My apologies for the slight delay between posts. I was off to Toronto for a conference, and had other family obligations. At any rate, on the plus side, we now have all of our pictures put up on flickr. I’ve even added a folder of videos as well, with a few clips that I shot in various places. For this post, I’m going to take you on two unique journeys. The first will be a camelback ride out into the dunes of the Erg Chebbi, where we spent the night in a Berber camp. The second part of the story will be our exploration of the ancient Roman ruins of Volubilis, an expansive site which was one of the farthest trading posts of the Roman empire. Both of these little adventures was pretty amazing, and this was the first time that either of us had ventured by camel into a desert, and spend the night under the stars in the desert. Once you’ve had chance to peruse the desert pictures and Roman ruin pictures, hop on back and read the whole tale.
16/02/08 to 18/02/08
Wow! Well, I’m back from another great weekend of tramping in the wilds of New Zealand. This time, I was tackling the Rees-Dart Track, as well as tacking on a full-day hike to the Cascade Saddle and back. Normally, they rate this as a 4-5 day tramp, but I was doing the whole thing including the Saddle side trip in 3 days. Perhaps that’ll give you an idea of why I took a day off when I got back. The third day was definitely killer, and took me 9 grueling hours of hiking to finish off. However, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, and I’m aiming to fill you all in on at least some of the details of those three glorious days. Read on for the details, and check out the maps (day 1, day 2, day 3) and the pictures (day 1, day 2, day 3). The day 3 map is highly abbreviated, as the batteries were dead fairly early that day. Oh well.
13/03/08
Hello folks, I’m coming to you live from Springfield, NZ at the moment. I haven’t located the Kwik-E-Mart or Moe’s Tavern yet, but I plan to do some exploration after this post just to make sure they aren’t here somewhere hiding. I must admit, I had no idea where I was going to lay my head down tonight, but as it turns out, I think I made the best decision in the end. So why Springfield? After all, it’s not even close to being on my route, and I had to bike uphill to get there. Well, there are a couple good reasons, first, I can say I stayed in Springfield. But secondly, and most importantly for me, it’s 10km from Sheffield. I remembered someone telling me some time ago that Sheffield has the best pies in NZ, and what better way to spend my last meal on the road then eating the best pies in NZ while rolling downhill all the way to Christchurch on a scenic route? I couldn’t think of any either, and that’s why I’m in Springfield. Another option was Darfield, but I’ve since found out that the backpackers accommodations I’d read about no longer exist anyway, so I would’ve been out of luck. Anywho, read on for the rest of my story, and check out the map too.
19/03/08
The byline for this post would probably have to be “Camera Survived, GPS Didn’t” Yup, that’s right, after months of faithful service and helping me create great custom maps of all my cycling trips, my little Garmin looks like it can now officially be called dead. She fought bravely in the cold ocean waters, but in the end, it appears as though it suffered death by drowning. Too bad, it had always been waterproof in the past, but I think some of the knocks it’s taken on the road caused cracks in the housing, and the salt water rushed in and fried the thing sometime while I was frolicking with seals. Seals? Yup, I made my way to Kaikoura today, and the highlight has got to be swimming with New Zealand Fur Seals. Hunted to near extinction, but making a comeback. Of course, you’ll have to read on for the whole tale, and you can check out a partial map of the day as well. Sadly, this will be the last map you see. Good thing I’m almost done. Looks like I’ll be on the market for a new training tool now as well. Jealous Kevin? I’ve already come to grips with it, and I’m not that upset about it. It functioned great for a long time.