The iPad is holding up pretty well as a laptop replacement. Getting pics off my camera is painless. I’m reading the fantastic “Web Analytics 2.0″ as an eBook (sunlight is -not- an issue, at least where I tend to read – in the shade” and a trip to the beach, although nervy, went well. I’m also using the ipad as an audiobook player ( listening to “Freakenomics” – also pretty good) so it’s holding up pretty well.

It does not agree with suncream, nor with being left in the sun, or, I imagine, being splashed with water. In fact holiday is quite a dangerous environment for iPad with sun, sea and sand all able to reduce it to ijunk pretty quick. I have however had people stop and Declare “iPad” to me on three occasions, with one gentlemen professing to purchasing one the moment he got home having seen me surfing the web on the bar’s balcony.

So check out the pics on flickr and a couple below. One more blog coming on Friday!

Rob

The iPad is holding up pretty well as a laptop replacement. Getting pics off my camera is painless. I’m reading the fantastic “Web Analytics 2.0″ as an eBook (sunlight is -not- an issue, at least where I tend to read – in the shade” and a trip to the beach, although nervy, went well. I’m also using the ipad as an audiobook player ( listening to “Freakenomics” – also pretty good) so it’s holding up pretty well.

It does not agree with suncream, nor with being left in the sun, or, I imagine, being splashed with water. In fact holiday is quite a dangerous environment for iPad with sun, sea and sand all able to reduce it to ijunk pretty quick. I have however had people stop and Declare “iPad” to me on three occasions, with one gentlemen professing to purchasing one the moment he got home having seen me surfing the web on the bar’s balcony.

So check out the pics on flickr and a couple below. One more blog coming on Friday!

Rob

I decided to make this the first holiday in a while i didn’t take a laptop/net book on to see just how well this iPad thing works. My objective is to keep myself entertained and informed using the ipad while keeping in touch with folks back home. A little overkill for a week in Greece maybe!

I spent Friday buying a couple of movies, stocking up yon podcasts and audiobooks and downloading a few relevant eBooks into the Kindle app (boo iBooks!) so content wise I’m good to go. I bought the camera connector kit from Apple to enable me to uploAd my photos and I also downloaded a few apps like wordpress,photogene and flickrstackr to facilitate on-the-hoof blogging.

So far all goes well. I picked up my new geotagging camera at the Airport (panasonic TZ10) and charged it last night. Some of the pics are below, or you can checkout the photos page by clicking on the camera above. They should also now be on a map on flickr if all has gone to plan!

Logging off for now to nod off!

Rob

Part two:

We are now on day two of the holiday having spent today at the beach. Unfortunatly after writing yesterdays blog post I ran into the old geek travellers bug-bear: connectivity. The hotel wifi was down, which was acceptable for an evening, this being Greece. Imagine my horror, however, when 24 hours later connectivity has not been restored. Yes, incredibly, it seems the hotels ISP does not offer a decent SLA. Time to take matters into my own hands. After a quick assessment it transpired the routers dhcp service was clearly not functional, and after a a quick selection of standard static ip setups it soon transpired that the router I’m currently connecting to is most likely a linksys (192.168.2.1 ftw) and I’m now probably the only hotel guest with wifi access!

I’ll write up a blog post tomorrow after our trip to corfu town, as today was rather uneventful, filled with sand sea and sun but little else!

We are now in the awesome New Zealand, land of the long white cloud. I will, however, pick up where I left you – in the hostile depths of Australia! Wow, we’ve done a whole lot since then…

Sydney and Melbourne

We spent our second day in and around Sydney and their impressive Powerhouse museum which used to hold the generators for their metro network. We went around an awesome Starwars display, as well as a practical hands on science bit and a transport exhibit. Some pics of steam trains and red post boxes for Dad are in there!

On the next day we had the worst day of our trip with a cold day at Bondi beach, an accidental trip down a toll road and a parking ticket for $135 (70GBP) for “parallel parking in the wrong direction” – bastards.

Our chins did not drop and a few days later saw us arriving in Melbourne, and meeting up with Rob’s uni mates Tom and Sam, before heading into town for a good night out (plenty of drunken pics). The following day was spent in the melbourne museum which was featuring a dinosaur exhibit (it was easter Sunday too!), before we met up with an old school mate Ric!

We spent three days with Ric which were really, really chilled out and fun. We played Mario Kart, went surfing on a Victoria beach and just slobbed about a lot which was a nice change from driving 3 hours+ every day and camping with one stove for 3 weeks. Thanks Ric!!!

We cancelled Fiji, and gained about 300GBP for the priviledge, and headed to NZ last Thursday.

New Zealand

And oh my, am I glad we ended up with an extra week here. If Elee wasn’t intent on seeing Disneyworld and Vegas I’d be here for another six months. The people are incredibly friendly, the scenery is awe-inspiring, the accent is hilarious and the prices are down on Aus. Before I skip through the time so far, in three back to back days I will have:

• Been to a naturally heated spa / geyser pool powered by sub-surface geo-thermal activity
• Been zorbing (rolling down a hill in a ball filled with water)
• Been caving/tubing through 2kms of caves 25-75m underground with a rubber tube
• Been skydiving

Need I say more?

Auckland to Taupo

We arrive late Thursday and checked into the best hostel so far, the Brown Kiwi. Friday saw us exploring Auckland and going up the largest tower in the Southern Hemisphere (forgetting the camera…*sigh*). The next day we started our trip on the -amazing- Kiwi Experience!!

We headed north to the bay of islands, where I plan to retire (I’ve been assured broadband is arriving there shortly). A bay of over a hundred islands, where we went dolphin spotting/swimming. The swimming involved overtaking a pod travelling at 30km/h and splashing with them as they swam past. We were then advised to “catch them up”…

We were in the bay of islands for two nights at a fantastic hostel called the mousetrap. I would have gladly stayed for two weeks. We then headed back to Auckland for a night before leaving the Big Smoke for our first stop Mercury Bay. The Kiwi Experience has, so far, been an absolutely brilliant decision. Stopping off at free and interesting stuff, taking care of accommodation and activity booking, an interesting but not too persistent commentary have all led to the best week of my travels so far. We’ve weaved across the north island, meandering south, through Rotorua – an area of intense geo-thermal activity where the pavements are heated naturally, to Waitomo with enormous and beautiful caves. We’re currently in Taupo, home to the worlds largest volcanic lake. Tomorrow, we should be falling out of a plane at 15,000 feet to see all of it beneath us….wow!!

So yes, Rob’s fallen for NZ hard. The good news is they’re after IT Professionals, so I should be able to move over pretty soon! I best go, been in this internet cafe for 2 hours uploading photos/videos/blogging/enjoying coca-cola and peace and quiet whilst Elee does the washing back at the hostel! Mwuuhahahahaaaa!

I’ve stuck up a load of photos and a few videos

http://www.backpackgeek.com/photos/album/72157616727522778/videos.html

Enjoy!

Since our last blog we’ve been to Rockhampton, beef capital of Oz, had, just one (much to Rob’s dissapointment), tasty steak between us where we were entertained by some v drunk crazy girls dancng very oddly! We then drove on down to Hervey Bay, Fraser Island stop by point basically. We booked our trip to Fraser Island, we decided to go on a guided tour rather than a DIY 4WD, mainly because of time constraints but ended up getting good value for money we thought! Although we had a problem getting there as our credit card decided not to work as we went to pay for the rest of the trip 15 mins before the boat set off, and there were no cash points near by… so we missed out. But rearanged everything for the next day where we made sure we had the cash.

Fraser Island itself was beautiful! Once there we went on a walk through the rainforest, then for an all you can eat lunch (with pumpkin soup – pumpkin is our new favourite food, VERY tasty!). In the afternoon we drove along the beach on the east of the island, around 60-70km? On the way we stopped off at a shipwreck called The Maheno, which has just been sat on the beach for around 60 years. Then we stopped off at the ‘coloured sands’. Rob and I could see about 4 shades… there’s supposed to be about 75! We also stopped off for a swim down Elis Creek, the islands freshwatwer stream that runs straight into the ocean. Refreshing is the best word for that! Finally we stopped off at the tip of the island and climbed up a huge rock to look out onto the gorgeous sea. Dinner was also an all you can eat affair, much to Rob’s delight, but no pumpkin soup.

On the second day (after an all you can eat brekky) we went to Lake Woubbie in the morning. This is a freshwater spring that is now blocked in by a big sand dune. Because the dune continues straight into the lake, it gets deep very fast, its about 4 metres deep about 5 metres in! It was really pretty and we got about an hour to play! Then back for an all you can eat lunch, still no more pumpkin soup In the afternoon we went to the beautiful lake McKenzie. This consists of pure rainwater and has absolutely no water flowing in or out of it! It really is a postcard picture place! After that we got the ferry back across and went back to our campsite, with Rob for once, feeling less hungry than he has been since February.

We will update you soon on the rest!

Elee and Rob!

This one is coming from the campervan as we travel from Mackay to Rockhampton. We’ve been in the chubby (the campervan) for five days now steadily making our way south along highway one from Cairns. The first two days was spent cruising round the Tablelands to the west of Cairns. This national park was really with some magnificant waterfalls and views as we meandered up and down the hills. We camped at Granite Gorge, a small creek inhabited by hundreds of small rock wallabies and small turtles.

By the second day we were heading southwards towards mission beach, which is currently occupied by deadly jellyfish. The next day we proceeded southwards again to Townsville where we visited the Museum of Tropical Queensland. Here Rob fired a cannnon, Elee was clamped in leg irons and we learnt about the shipwreck of HMS Pandora.

On Friday we drove out to Airlie Beach and had some fish and chips before sunbathing on the man made lagoon. Yesterday was an early drive down to Mackay where we stayed on the beach and spent the day planning the rest of the trip and enjoying a BBQ on the beach!

The front of our van is incredibly geeked out. We have an inverter attached to the cigarette lighter which provides a proper australian power socket. We’ve then got a spiltter in that to give us two sockets before having two converters to British plugs! Out of that comes A laptop charger with external 3G modem, and an iPod charger for the ipod/iphone. All in all it just about fits in the glove compartment!

We’ve also listened through the first 2.5 books of Harry Potter on our travels, determined to finish the series before we arrive in Melbourne in 20 days time!

See you all later!

Rob and Elee

Hello everyone!!

Blog post number two comes from the train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. We’ve slept the night on board and are now sat on my bed admiring the sceneary as we climb northwards into the jungley area of the northern city.

Our trip to the beach 2 days ago went very well, with a 2 hour car trip to Pattay and then a 40min boat trip out to “Coral Island” (aptly, if commercially, named). The beach was gorgeous (see attached pics) but despite 5 applications of factor 25 suncream and staying out of the sun between 1 and 3, my face still managed to get a little burned (missing my Aunty’s Pizz Bun sunblock stick!)! Elee’s back was a little burned too, but she already has really prominant tan lines!

Yesterday we whacked on the factor 50 and headed out to the Grand Palace which was truly spectacular. Shorts and open shoulders wern’t allowed so I had to wear some rather fetching borrowed pants, but it was certainly worth it. Check out the pictures we’ve put up! Im hoping to get some videos up shortly, but forgot to install the software to convert it for YouTube. Downer was it being the hottest day yet (I’d guess early-mid 30s) and Elee getting -more- burnt.

Today we get off the sleeper train at 10:30AM and check into our (relatively posh) hotel (With pool!). We’re planning on a day in the shade next to the pool, then a visit to the night market tonight for some shopping (I have my heart set on a bandana!).

Ciao for now!

Rob

Three days until we leave! Elee’s packing her bags now, and we made a little, silly, unprepared or rehearsed video. Enjoy!