Through the Interface

I <3 Hockey (but probably not the one you think)

Back in the UK, during my teenage years, I got into field hockey in a big way. I spent several winters playing hockey on frozen grass pitches around the East of England. When I went to University I played a lot more (between the 2nd and 1st teams, this time mostly on astroturf), and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Once I started working things became harder… I still managed to play a few times, but mostly ended up joining teams to play other sports: Field hockey just turned out not to be a sport I could play regularly, for one reason... Read more →

The world seen through social media (or not)

Something has been nagging at me, since returning from our world trip. Perhaps it’s best described as the impact social media is having on travel. Interestingly it’s been talked about very recently in The Guardian in an opinion piece entitled “Instagrammers are sucking the life and soul out of travel”. While we didn’t necessarily plan our trip to be able to take iconic pictures, having our own Instagram feed (which we’ve made private now that the trip is over, although I’ll accept connections if it’s obvious you’re a reader of this blog) meant that we weren’t completely immune from... Read more →

The end of our 6-month adventure

So, that’s it. 6 months flew by in the blink of an eye, and we’re back home in Switzerland. On the one hand it seemed to go quickly, while on the other hand we feel as though we’ve come back to a house we barely recognise full of stuff we don’t need… We each have a room of our own to sleep in (if we so choose)! And look at all those clothes! Detaching from most of your former existence – while retaining and strengthening ties to your core, your nuclear family – is an interesting experience. During the... Read more →

Cape Town

We arrived in the Cape on New Year’s Day. Leaving Swellendam we stopped by Robertson to see the house in which my wife’s grandmother grew up. A nice bit of family nostalgia. We then decided to swing by Franschhoek for a quick visit… on the way we passed by the Theewaterskloof Dam: one of the main reservoirs supplying the Cape. It was depressingly empty: the Cape has been suffering a multi-year drought, to the point that they currently have level 6 water restrictions in place. To get to Franschhoek we headed across the lovely Franschhoek Pass. Franschhoek is a... Read more →

The Western Cape

Happy New Year! Hopefully you all managed to take a break during the last few weeks; from our side we were focused on spending an enjoyable Christmas with our family in South Africa and then squeezing the last few drops out of our 6-month adventure. After Addo we spent a couple of days in Port Elizabeth, with some old friends. We visited a few beaches for walks, but the bulk of our time in P.E. was actually spent at the mall. Yes, at the mall. On our night safari in Addo, the driver had mentioned going into P.E. to... Read more →

Addo Elephant Park

This is likely to be my last post of the year, so for those of you who are still reading this in 2017, I hope you have a peaceful, relaxing holiday season and a fantastic start to 2018. If I don’t manage to post sooner, I’ll certainly do so once back in Switzerland from our 6-month round-the-world trip (I’ll be back at work on January 5th in some capacity). We were very excited about our visit to Addo Elephant National Park. While not the Kruger, it’s certainly a large, impressive park and the most easily accessible large park for... Read more →

The Karoo

Having left Lesotho, we had two main items in our calendar for the rest of the year: we had two nights booked in Addo Elephant Park from December 17-19 and then a family gathering in Knysna starting from December 21, give-or-take (my wife is half South African, so we’re making the most of this leg to enjoy a family Christmas). We left Lesotho on December 14, so had a few days to kill before needing to be in Addo. We had a couple of options: head southeast to the Wild Coast or southwest to the Karoo. As we expected... Read more →

Lesotho

We had originally planned on leaving KwaZulu-Natal to enter into Lesotho on December 10th, but that morning two things happened: we awoke to find it raining heavily, but – more importantly – one of the kids had some gastric problems. We ended up extending our stay in the Tower of Pizza for an additional day, which we spent in front of a roaring fire, making handmade Christmas ornaments and watching seasonal movies. It was really the first serious feeling of Christmas we’ve had, this year… it was very welcome, too. Anyway, back on the road the following day, we... Read more →

KwaZulu-Natal

The trip to Durban from Bangalore was a long one: partly because the departure from Bangalore airport was at 3:45am, but mainly because we had to take three flights to get to our destination. We left our place in Bangalore at midnight: the first UberXL I tried to book was a phantom, so I cancelled it (I’ve seen a number of these since arriving in Asia, for some reason). The second one I booked stayed at 1 minute away for quite some time… I ended up realising it was parked a few metres up the street. I walked up... Read more →

Displaying a round-the-world itinerary with Google Maps – Part 6

Here’s a quick recap of the series, so far: Creating a basic map for our round-the-world itinerary Adding a photo for each placemark Adding labels for the approximate timing of the journey Overlaying the actual path visited from a tracking device Downloading the actual path in multiple queries A few weeks ago – while we were in Tahiti, but again in New Zealand – I noticed that the “visited” path from the Garmin site wasn’t being integrated properly into the Google Map integrated into our family blog. After a little bit of analysis, I realised that the amount of... Read more →

Bangalore

Being back in Bangalore brings back floods of memories. My wife and I lived here when we had our first baby. This wasn’t part of our plan, particularly: we found out we were expecting during the first week we moved here, back in late 2003. That was a challenging time for us: workwise I was building a new team in Bangalore for Autodesk’s consulting division, while Celia was dealing with all the issues related to a first pregnancy in a foreign country. Not to mention my father being diagnosed with terminal cancer, back in the UK. Our two years... Read more →

Kodaikanal

In total we stayed for 5 days in Kodaikanal, India. It’s really not the ideal time of year to visit Kodaikanal: the Northeast Monsoon is just getting started, so you can end up staying indoors more than you’d like. But then when you’re on a world tour you’re inevitably going to experience imperfect timing at one point or another (another example from this trip includes being in South America not long after their mid-winter). So it goes. As luck would have it, during the first 3 days of our stay in Kodaikanal we had near-perfect weather. It was a... Read more →

Arriving in India

We left Singapore from Changi airport on Tuesday night. I always enjoy flying from Changi: there’s so much to see and do, and they have some great traveller-oriented features such as security at each gate rather than in a central location. Our kids came across a Kinect-based experience where you could see your outline projected onto a large screen with physical (i.e. not electronic) pixels. Like a huge e-Ink display, I suppose. Our next destination was Coimbatore. Coimbatore is a smaller Indian city that had two main benefits as a stop on our tour: it has direct flights from... Read more →

Singapore

We’ve spent the last 5 days staying with our good friends, Rishad and Shefali, in Singapore. This was one of the three “must see” destinations chosen by our kids, having been picked by our daughter, Anokhi. (The others being the Great Barrier Reef (Kalan) and Machu Picchu (Zephyr).) Mainly because she loves spending time with our friends. One of the first places we visited was the Botanical Gardens – a UNESCO Heritage site and a great place to wander around and experience the native rainforest that once covered the island of Singapore. After real trees, we simply had to... Read more →

Kuala Lumpur

Our path to Malaysia from Cairns took us via Sydney, where we had to recheck bags and change terminal. The flight was delayed by over an hour because of a medical emergency – not on the plane itself, someone in a stretcher would be occupying a section of the plane as it flew onwards to Kuala Lumpur. It was a little strange seeing the curtained-off stretcher in the economy cabin: it’s not something I’d seen before. I hope the person arrived safely and is getting the treatment they need. The flight itself was about 8.5 hours. Over half of... Read more →

Airlie Beach to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef

After the somewhat disappointing end to our boat tour from Airlie Beach to the Whitsundays, we licked our wounds and headed back on the road towards Cairns. Our next stop was at a very nice Bluewater Park Rest Area – a free campground on the outskirts of the boringly named Townsville. It was pretty nice staying in a place with mango trees growing everywhere: we did pick a few, to try, although the local ants did their best to aggressively protect what they apparently considered to be their property. By this point we felt we’d finally broken the back... Read more →

Rockhampton to Airlie Beach

We continued our path northwards from Rockhampton, and did a big chunk of the drive to Mackay. We stopped for lunch at a rest area in Marlborough, which ended up being a great place to take a break. About 40km south of Mackay we found a place to stay via CamperMate in a place called Ilbilbie. It looked fairly non-descript from the road… … but we soon realised we’d struck campervan gold: the farmer lets people park in a big, flat field down by the river on their property and charges A$10 for the privilege. No power, no toilets,... Read more →

Brisbane to Rockhampton

We arrived late Thursday morning in Brisbane: the flight took 1.5 hours, but – due to the fact Queensland doesn’t observe daylight saving – we arrived at 11:40 after an 11:10 departure from Sydney. When we originally budgeted time for Australia we scheduled 5 or so days for Sydney (which were eaten into by us extending our stay in New Zealand) and then about 10 days to get from Brisbane to Cairns (flying into Brisbane on the 2nd, flying out of Cairns on the 13th). When we came to book a campervan we realized we didn’t have as much... Read more →

Sydney

As we’d extended our stay in New Zealand, we knew we only had one day to enjoy the fine city of Sydney. The flight from Queenstown was fairly short (3.5 hours) but really pretty: both the take-off and the landing were spectacular. On arrival we were happy – given the fact we’re 5 people with quite a few bags – to be able to get an UberXL from the airport to our Airbnb in Glebe. It took some work to find the car – the Uber app does a horrible job of suggesting a workable pick-up spot at Sydney... Read more →

Christchurch to Queenstown

After spending most of the day in Christchurch, last Wednesday, we headed towards Lake Tekapo. Much of the drive was fairly flat and straight, so we made good progress despite starting out late. As we got closer to the lake the weather set in again, though – it started to rain fairly heavily – so we opted to stay in a place called Fairlie, which was half an hour closer than the lake. Musterers High Country Accommodation ended up being a great place to stay: when we woke – thankfully to much better weather – we found ourselves basically... Read more →