A recent email asked “Is there another site where you are posting your blog? I haven’t seen anything new since you were in Singapore…”
No, this is it. Since we’ve been in Australia (starting April 6), we’ve been doing a lot more visiting, so have had much less time in evenings for blogging.
More critically though has been the lack of decent Internet access. There have been locations, but most have either been very slow, expensive, or limited to just a browser.
We have addressed the issue by buying a USB wireless device that lets us get a decent connection wherever there is service from Telstra, Australia’s equivalent to Bell Canada. (And I won’t go into how similar the two monoliths really are here; suffice to say we are as frustrated with Telstra as we are with Bell…)
Our main focus for the past couple of weeks has been to catch up on photos, and we’ve uploaded several Australian sets to our Flickr site. Now we can add photo links in our draft blogs to start backfilling the gap since we arrived here in Oz.
Use the “Select posts by week” pulldown at the bottom of the right panel to see older posts.
As I write this on June 7, we are in Karumba, on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Apparently the port here was once part of the only air connection between Oz and England when flying boats refuelled here. Now it is a fishing mecca—and has a large prawn and barramundi fish industry. The other thing it has are crocodiles: the largest ever shot was from near here, and was 8.5m and ~3 tons!! We shall be careful while swimming...
It has been fun travelling with my sister Jan & her husband Ron in our “chubby campers”. They are equipped with sink, counter & cabinets at the back lift up door, and a good queen sized sleeping platform behind the front seats with stowing spaces under where we lay the foam cushions. The vans are basic Mitsubishi panel vans, and kind of gutless (4 cylinder) but have extra power so we can charge batteries and use our computers.
This post will stay at the top until we are caught up—hopefully before too much longer, but certainly by mid-July.
