Author Archives: jose

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

I love CouchSurfing. I have probably already said it, but I love CouchSurfing. For everything it brought to my trip – locals’ recommendations, discovering cultures from the inside, meeting great people, sharing joys and, most importantly, making amazing friends – I am eternally grateful, and in debt to all the CouchSurfers around the world. They will be most welcome at my place, when – or rather every time – I will be settled down somewhere.

Nevertheless, despite all the qualities of the CouchSurfing project, it does have one major drawback. It needs the Internet.

I am not talking about the problem of accessing the Internet, though. Travelers can find, nowadays, an access to the Internet – may it be a Wi-Fi hot-spot or a cybercafe – relatively easily (thank you McDonald’s and Burger King, aka Hungry Jack’s for our Australian friends); as for the hosts, it is obvious that CouchSurfing cannot expand to the regions of the world that are not reached by this powerful medium. This is something that will improve with time; and after all, on the other hand, it is sometimes a relief to find that you can be impossible to reach in some parts of this world. Yes. It is.

I am, actually, talking about the fact that CouchSurfing needs messages between the host and the surfer if they are to organize the latter’s stay. Such a conversation, obviously necessary, takes at least a week, if not several. Which means the traveler needs to know a week in advance where he is going. CouchSurfing is an amazing project, but it restrains the sheer freedom of travelers, especially those, like me, who are always on the move, always on the road, and only following the wind.

This is what I realized, the night before I reached Sydney, after a phone call to Kevin, a CouchSurfer that I thought would be able to host me when I would arrive there. In the silence of Newcastle’s train station, the fact that CouchSurfing was, after all, also a social act, implying social rules and roles, became all but too obvious to me.

After all, one of the reasons why I am traveling is to escape the constant demands of the society.

Maybe such a thing is impossible.

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Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

Yeah, Newcastle, but not the one in England. Several places bear the same name as others back in the United Kingdom, as if the founders of the towns had absolutely no inspiration at that moment, or maybe too much nostalgia for their homeland.

Because Australia, as some of you already know, was colonized (some would say stolen, conquered from the Aboriginals) by Captain James Cook, the first European explorer to reach the East Coast of Australia. It quickly became a jail, England sending entire ships of convicts there, on the other side of the world, for them to stay and live the rest of their lives in exile.

But the convicts flourished and thrived, on this land strangely harsh and full of resources at the same time – some would say resources stolen from the Aboriginals. And, in the end, they got their independence.

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Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

“You did Byron Bay, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Newcastle?”
“Errr… Yeah – how did you guess?”
“That’s what everyone does.”

And so I recently learned from Stephan, Dutch architect now living in New Zealand, that my itinerary on the Australian East Coast was kind of classical. I only looked at the map and decided to hit the biggest points along the way, though, but I guess that on a coast, you have not much of a choice when you follow that sort of thought process.

So I followed the touristic road, named the Pacific Highway, towards the south while the summer was giving life to thousands of tourists, so-called backpackers (I will come back later to these ones), and travelers.

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Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

“Aaaaaahhhh… Now THIS is what I came for.”
(James, traveler from London, England, as we discovered Byron Bay’s beach on the first sunny day of our stay)

Because, yes, to be honest, I did not really come to Australia in summer to see floods. Especially on the East Coast, goddammit. It was supposed to be an endless stretch of white sand, bathed by a generous sun, covered with people with so much sunscreen that they would shine while humongous waves would crash with an incredible strength on the coast, sometimes with blond surfers on top of them.

And, finally, that was it.

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Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

by jose

My last post about Malaysia was silent. I thought silence was a good way to express my grief about the hundreds of people dieing a few kilometers from me, trapped in the rubble of the Christchurch earthquake.

And then I thought I could do that as well for the next posts to save me the trouble and time of writing and laying out the page. I found myself choosing pictures.

And I told myself I had so much to say about them, about my travel, that pictures cannot express alone.

Words cannot either, but they help.

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Map update

by jose

Yeah, I know, I haven’t updated the blog for ages. I am now… what, three months late? It is becoming increasingly more difficult to find time, find a decent (and free) Internet connection. I have so much to do, so much to see, so much to travel.

But I found the time today to update my map, adding my whole Australian trip. So no, you won’t know where I am – sorry, I like my freedom – but you can see how much I have traveled, mainly by hitch-hiking, on the East Coast of Australia.

This travel is full of stories, full of emotions, and full of unforgettable memories. But as a Kiwi traveler noticed recently, a travel blog is a hassle. And I couldn’t agree more. It is really painful, whatever you might think on the other side of the world.

Still, I am aware that you would like some stories, maybe pictures at least. I’ll see what I can do in the next future. But for now – here is the map.

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Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia (Borneo) part 1: Mount Kinabalu

by jose

Freedom came back into my heart when I walked above the clouds.

No kidding. The fresh air (the coldness being intensified by the humidity of all my clothes, but well), the rocks, the climbers around me, the silence, the light of the dawn. My equipment. And this incredible landscape. Nothing above me but the dome of the sky. And under me, a sea of clouds.

A sea of clouds.

Welcome back, my friend.

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Technical note

by jose

The blog had a small problem with the overlay plugin (you know, the thing that happens when you click on an image) for… a certain amount of time now – I have no idea how long. Sorry about that. I am having a hard time accessing the Internet in Australia. Which might explain why I am not posting very often. And why I am so late. Or that might only be a bad excuse. Or that could be true and also a bad excuse.

Anyway. It is working now, at least on Opera and Firefox, I do not know about the other browsers – by the way, if you could give me some feedback about that, that would be cool. And sorry for the inconvenience; you can know fully enjoy the pictures of the previous posts.

To make it up to you, a more recent picture on which you can test if the plugin works.

PS: The post on Malaysia is coming, I am doing my best.