Crossing the Atlantic
A good friend of mine (Andy Hunt) has recently begun the massive task of crossing the Atlantic! He’s making the journey on his aunt and uncle’s 46 foot Sun Odyssey yacht (named Trucial Coast), which looks something like this (and this).
Flickr Places
Yesterday, Flickr released a very cool new feature called Places. Put simply, it brings together on one page all public photos on Flickr that have been geotagged to a place, so if you want to see photos of London, Cardiff, Glasgow, etc. you can just search on that place and there are all the available photos on Flickr in one place! As with the Organizr, Flickr have done a great job with the design of the user interface and it’s both incredibly easy to use, yet genuinely powerful. If you’d like to find out more about Places, then first of all have a read of Flickr’s blog post announcing its release.
Photophlow.com
Get yourself over to photophlow.com if you’ve got a Flickr account – it’s fascinating! It’s … as the blurb from the site says … “an easy and fun way to talk about and share Flickr photos in real time. Think of it as the ultimate Flickr communicator: invite your friends, search photos together, chat and comment all at once.”
And that doesn’t really do it justice. One of the best Web 2.0 apps I’ve seen this year! It’s still currently in private beta and is invitation only, but click the sign up page and you should get an invite as it’s early in the trial. Make sure you watch the introductory video and quick tutorial so you know all the things it can do.
When you’ve had a play with it, come and join my room! If I’m not there, I’ll get an IM notification so will join you shortly!
NZ Photos & Videos
Currently sat in Auckland airport and have so far killed time quite well! Only another 3 hours before the proper flying starts! Oh joy. At least I’ve managed to get all of my NZ photos onto Flickr now, so feel free to peruse them at your leisure now they’re all together …
flickr.com/photos/stokes/sets/72157602173416211/
All of the videos are now on YouTube too, so you can see them all in one place …
Doubtful Sound, Queenstown … and it’s all over.
Our trip to the Fiordlands was fantastic. It was a bit of an effort to get there – a 2 hour drive past Queenstown, a one hour boat ride, followed by a one hour coach journey, before reaching our main vessel for the trip – the Fiordland Navigator. But it was all worth it. We went on the overnight cruise, so set off at around midday and spent the afternoon sailing down through the fiords, stopping to either do some kayaking or, as I did, go out in the tender boat (small speedboat) and explore a bit further into the fiords where the main boat couldn’t go. I got some good photos of the little waterfalls we came across.
Video clips under Comments
I messed up some of the links to the video clips on YouTube so they were playing fullscreen and that meant the quality was a bit rubbish. I’ve updated all the links now (and added some new clips) so that they play at a more sensible size and look a bit better! Just click on the Comments link for any of the posts (or scroll down when in the post) and check those videos again!
Wanaka
A pretty quiet day today really. After breakfast, we hit the road on a 250km drive down the West Coast to Wanaka. This was the part of the drive that must have featured in the Top 10 in the world as it was truly stunning … and great fun to drive, with lots of twists and turns. So much fun without any traffic on the roads. We made a few stops on the way (Knight’s Point being one of particular note) to take photos.
Fox Glacier
Made it through the night and still alive, so all is well! Woke up to blue skies and glorious sunshine so the heli-hike was definitely on. After so many full cooked breakfasts, I opted for a bowl of cereal and slice of toast. We headed down to Fox Glacier, checked in and then took the chopper up the glacier to about half way up (we got dropped off at about 6km up; there’s a further 7km beyond that). It was great fun flying up in a helicopter – they did a tour around, banking sharply, so that we could see all around the glacier and take some great photos and video.
Franz Josef
Woke up this morning to the start of another rugby match – it’s on everywhere; they can’t get enough of it – and watched Argentina narrowly beat Scotland in the quarter-final over breakfast. Then we said our goodbyes to our host, Chris, at the Hokitika Heritage Lodge and headed down the coast about 130km to Franz Josef Glacier. It rained pretty much all the way (and had been raining all through the night) so we didn’t get to see very much en route, but then it brightened up and turned into a glorious, sunny day once we arrived the township of Franz Josef.
Arthur’s Pass & Hokitika
Got up early this morning to watch the All Blacks game on TV and were stunned (but quite pleased) to see them lose to France. Michael was trying to check the football scores on his mobile and discovered that England actually beat the Aussies! We didn’t even bother trying to find out as we thought it was a foregone conclusion! Couldn’t watch the game as it was on at 2am or 3am over here. Good news all round. The few Kiwis we’ve spoken to are obviously not happy but are now fully behind England, as I think they hate the Aussies more than we do!
