Antarctica trip Jan 2016 Day 2

Had dinner in the hotel restaurant and went to bed early and got a good 4 or 5 hours of sleep before my body thought I should be up doing things. I repacked my bags and got ready for an early transfer to the airport for the next stage of my trip. Sitting in the hotel lobby waiting for the bus and listening to a medley of David Bowie music that they are playing. So sad to hear he had passed away overnight.
Lucky that I arrived at the airport with a couple if hours to spare as it was chaos. I managed to pick the correct very long line and eventually got checked in. Even the locals seemed confused by the process. For the first time I had to remove my shoes for the security check and managed to get through alright. Relaxing now in the gate lounge after the mêlée.
The flight got delayed a bit and after loading and unloading a bus to take us to the plane we finally got going. I think things are a little more chaotic than usual as it is school holidays here as well. The trip was very smooth and unfortunately I didn't have a window seat this time so I couldn't see the falls as we came into land. After picking up my luggage I found my tour guide who then drove me into town and dropped me at my hotel.
They didn't quite have my room ready so I went for a walk into town to have a look. Boy was it hot and humid. The town seems to be set up for tourism, with lots of hotels and restaurants.
Like most of Argentina that I have seen so far, it also has a rundown feeling to it.  With old incomplete buildings and infrastructure that looks like they ran out of money and simply stopped building. Back at the hotel I had a nice cool shower and relaxed in the air con before doing a bit of washing and organising for tomorrows tour. Then a buffet dinner at hotel restaurant before an early night.

Antarctica trip Jan 2016 Part 2

NZ to Arg.
After a couple of hours layover in Auckland it was back on another plane. The Auckland International airport is pretty big but still seems to have  the same sort of stuff as the Brisbane one, booze and perfume but they replaced opals with honey.  I still had a window seat but down towards the back and luckily a spare seat beside me again. This flight seems much more crowded with a very high percentage of the passengers returning home to Argentina from holidays in Aus and NZ, in fact there are dual announcements in English and Spanish.
The sunset was spectacular and dinner, consisting of stir fry beef and rice with ice cream for desert was pretty good as is the merlot they served with the meal. The entertainment system in this plane is much better with the touch screen being much more responsive. I started off watching the Fantastic Four and while it wasn't as bad as the reports, it wasn't a particularly good movie. I'll have to find something else interesting to watch now before I try and go to sleep. Only 9 hours to go, maybe I'll have another glass of wine.
There's now just 2 hours to go and the lights in the cabin have come on and brekkie will be served soon. I dozed off a few times but didn't really get much sleep and my bum is feeling very numb at the moment. Brekkie was scrambled eggs and sausage and baked beans and hopefully the coffee will wake me up a bit.
We've come in at the bottom of Argentina and we are flying north over dry brown areas of Patagonia. From the air it looks similar to what I have seen in outback Australia around Lake Eyre. The countryside got greener the further north we flew and it ended up being overcast and drizzly when we landed in Buenos Aires. Passport control and customs went very well, my only worry was that my luggage was amongst the last to come out. :( I was getting a little worried.
After some hurried directions I found the shuttle bus stop for the hotel and after about 15 mins wait the bus turned up much to my and 3 other tourists relief. The drive to the hotel suggested that the lanes on the road were there as a suggestion rather than a rule. Even though it was overcast the grass verge beside the freeway was bring used for picnics and friendly soccer games. Checking in went smoothly and after a nice hot shower I almost feel human again. I think I'll have a little snooze before dinner and an early night in bed.

Antarctica trip Jan 2016 Part 1

AUS to NZ.
Had a problem checking in via the kiosk as Auckland was just a stopover not my final destination. The nice Air NZ lady had to enter some primitive command line hell and sort it out but I eventually got my boarding passes and they took my luggage away.
Then it was off to stand in line for awhile until they checked my passport and took the form that said I was leaving the country. Immediately on leaving immigration I entered a shopping mall with all sorts of duty free items available, no Stolen Spiced Rum however. I tracked down a quite nice coffee and sausage roll and relaxed for awhile before going for a walk to stretch my legs. I found a comfy out of the way spot and watched as they unloaded and then loaded my plane. Boarding was painless and I ended with a window seat just behind the wing and a spare seat beside me do that I can spread out a bit. We ended up leaving a bit behind schedule but with a tail wind we should make up the time. Leaving from Brissy we flew over Stradbroke Island and then past the Gold Coast which looked nice and sunny.
The inflight entertainment system is driven from a touch screen tablet in the head rest of the seat in front but the touchscreen is not real sensitive.  But they do have a USB port to charge up phones and tablets. After searching the in flight entertainment system for something to occupy me, I ended up with the best of Queen to drown out the roar of the plane.
I wasn't sure if I was getting food as not all economy tickets got anything to eat. I ended up with Caribbean chicken and rice but I don't think I could have dried it out anymore if I had taken  it into the lab and put it in a vacuum desiccator with a kilo of silica gel beads.
The trip was very easy with no real worries to speak of. Hopefully there is free WiFi at Auckland airport so I can post this to my blog.
Had to go through security again even though we just came off an international flight. Looks like I get 30 mind of free WiFi, hopefully enough to get this posted before heading off to a 12 hour flight.

New MacBook Pro 13" Retina

With the upcoming trip to Antarctica next year, I decided that I needed a new laptop to take along for photo processing and photo storage. Currently, I have been using my iPad quite successfully on the Australian outback trips that I have been taking but felt I would need more for this trip as I expect to take quite a few more photos, since it is specifically a photography trip. For my home computer I seem to alternate between a desktop system and a laptop, with my current 27" iMac still doing a very good job. I've included a photo of my laptop purchases over the last 15 years or so. 

Those with good eyesight will recognize a non-apple system in there. I used the Acer Aspire netbook (running WinXP) for mapping on several trips with it hooked to a Garmin GPS System providing the location information. When the Garmin broke, I started using an iPad with built in GPS as my main mapping system and I've been very happy with that. The poor old netbook would struggle when things got a bit demanding (I.e. Running more than one program at a time) and I haven't used it in awhile. 

The Australian dollar has been going down lately, pushing up the price of imported electronics and also Dick Smith has said they will not be doing as many 10% off Apple days so when I saw that JB HiFi had a 10% off Apple computers, I just had to decide which of their laptops I wanted. The cheaper 13" MacBook Air was my first thought but after looking at the retina screens on the other two machines it dropped down the list. Couple this with the fact that the 10% deal only applied to the models in the shop and not the build to order computers which I would need if I wanted a MacBook Air with 8 GB of ram. So this ruled out the MacBook Air. 

It was down to the new 12" MacBook and the recently updated 13" MacBook Pro with retina, both had retina screens (although the Pro's was slightly bigger) and 8 GB of ram and were roughly the same price ~$1620. The pros for the MacBook are it had a larger SSD (256 vs 128 GB) and was substantially lighter - in fact it is amazing how light this machine is. While for the MacBook Pro the main benefit was a substantially better processor, in case I wanted to do anything that required some computer power, like video editing. The MacBook Pro also had the advantage of having multiple ports and not requiring a whole heap of new adapters to connect to the single USB-C port of the MacBook. 

In the end I went with the MacBook Pro with the smaller SSD (128 GB), because as a travel computer I don't need all the extra stuff I keep on my home computer so a small storage option wouldn't be too much of a problem. Then I went into the Robina JB HiFi store to see if they had a machine in stock and luckily they did. I think I confused the salesman a bit when I told him what I wanted and that I would take it now, he didn't even get a chance to get in his sales pitch although he did try to get me to buy some extras like extra warranty cover, Microsoft office, virus protection, etc. I suspect this is where they make their money when they have these discount sales.

Normally, when I have got a new Mac I simply hook it up to the old one and use the Migration Assistant to copy everything across to the new machine, so all my photos, music, bookmarks, etc. all end up in the right place but with 500 GB on my current machine and only a 128 GB SD on the new machine, this was never going to happen. The setup however was still pretty easy as once it was on my home wifi network I ran the system software updater to get to the latest version of MacOSX (10.10.5) and then connected it to my AppleID which let me download any Mac App Store purchases, synchronized my contacts, calendar and bookmarks. Then it was a simple matter to install Dropbox, Google Drive and Evernote which let me access the same files in the cloud and I was good to go. The boot time on this new machine is phenomenal and is not much longer than simply waking the machine from sleep, I think I will replace the old spinning hard drive in the iMac one of these days with an SSD. I'm sure there will be a few more things to get sorted out before the trip but I have a few months to work on that. 😄

Gulf and Kakadu tour, 2015 Day 12, 13 and 14

We had a bit of a sleep in and a leisurely pack up before heading off towards Kakadu a bit after 9 am. There was a quick stop for fuel and a magnum in Pine Creek and then we headed into Kakadu, Dave had to stop off at the visitor's centre to fix up his pass and then we headed into Jabiru and checked into the caravan park for three nights. After a quick setup we headed into town for a late lunch at the bakery where I had quite a nice buffalo pie. We had a very lazy afternoon looking around town and then headed back to camp for a swim in the pool. Later that evening we were treated to fire works as it  was Territory Day. 

Another leisurely start to the day as we were heading off to see Jim Jim and Twin Falls after dropping into the bakery to pick up some snacks and lunch. The drive out to the camp site was very easy but after that it became a bit of a track. Then to go from the day use area out to twin falls we had to cross Jim Jim creek and it was showing about 0.75 metres on the markers, the cars made it with no worries and they all had a bit of a wash. 

We hasn't planned it but we ended up catching the boat that connects to the Twin Falls walk and I'm really glad we did as the falls themselves were spectacular and it was a very pleasant walk. On the way back we saw a fresh water croc sunning itself on a rock as we cruised past. 

We had a quick lunch at the car park day use area before heading back across Jim Jim creek and onto to Jim Jim falls. The walk into Jim Jim falls is much tougher than the Twin Falls walk, with lots of rock hopping. Unfortunately, there wasn't very much water going over the falls so we ended up heading back to the car park and then back to camp. 

Back at camp my knees were not feeling so good, but a swim in the pool, some dinner and an ibuprofen or two and I was feeling much better. After some planning talk we booked a Yellow Waters cruise for the morning (9 am) and headed to bed for an early night. It was very warm that evening in the swag (about 24 deg at 10 pm) but to keep the mozzies at bay I had to stay in the swag. 

We were up early and heading to Yellow Waters for a cruise of the wetlands. This was excellent and we saw heaps of crocs, Jabirus and other wild life. Lots of photos were taken. 

After the cruise we went for a bit of a drive along some of the less driven tracks at the back of South Aligator River. It was getting a bit rough and closed in so we stopped for some lunch before we turned around and headed back to camp at Jabiru. We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing, having a swim, etc. 

Then just before sunset we headed out to Ubirr where we walked around the Aboriginal Art sites and then went up to the lookout to see the sun set. The view was spectacular but there was tons of people so we headed off a bit early to dodge all the traffic. 

Back at the caravan park we had quite a nice Barra dinner at the restaurant and chatted about our plans for the next day, when we would be heading off to Litchfield National Park. 

Gulf and Kakadu tour, 2015 Day 10 and 11

It got quite cool overnight and there was a lot dew on the awnings and tents in the morning. We let them dry out a bit before packing up and heading north to Butterfly Springs. The camping ground here was much busier than where we stayed the previous night so it was good that we didn’t continue. I was very disappointed wth Butterfly Springs as I didn’t see a single butterfly. :( It was however quite scenic but a little chilly for swimming.

Then it was onto the ranger’s station to see if we could get the key to visit the Western Lost City, unfortunately no rangers around so I’ll have to save that for my next trip up this way. We kept heading north and went to look at the mouth of the Roper River where we had a bit of lunch before heading back into Roper Bar where the others refuelled their cars while I had a Magnum for afternoon tea.

We then continued onto to Mataranka where we checked into a caravan park with some nice hot showers and had a quite nice Barra and chips for dinner.

The next day we had a leisurely pack up before heading north towards Katherine, on the way we dropped into Cutta Cutta caves and took a tour.

Then it was on to Katherine for lunch and a restock at the supermarket before heading on a short drive out to the Gorge for a quick look. We picked up some brochures to have a look at, as we were going to stop in for a cruise on the way home. We had decided to head to Edith Falls to camp the night and we were lucky to get the last couple of spots as the place was full of Bloody caravans. After setting up camp we headed off for a loop walk to the Upper Falls which after a bit of a climb provided a great place for a cooling and relaxing swim.

A pleasant walk back down the hill to camp site almost tempted us to have another swim but we settled for going back to camp and having a hot shower before dinner and a few drinks sitting around discussing the plans for the next day.

Gulf and Kakadu tour, 2015 Day 8 and 9

We slept in a little as it was chilly but then just as we were about leave Phil broke the power connector for his fridge. This took a little bit of time to fix so we ended up leaving a bit late. On the way out we turned north at Lawn Hill station and headed towards Doomadgee. This crossed several different properties so there was a bit of gate opening and closing to be done but the scenery was nice and it was a pleasant drive. 

We refuelled and had an early lunch in Doomadgee before continuing west. We made a quick stop at Hells Gate for an ice cream and then continued on to cross the border into the Northern Territory. 

The road got steadily worse the further west we went and we ended up camping the night on a cattle property at Snake  Lagoon. It was a bit rough but the sunset over the lagoon was pretty nice. 

It was chilly the next morning so it took a little while for us to get up and get going. We continued west to Borroloola where we refuelled and had morning tea. A little bit out of town we took the turn off to Roper Bar and Limmen national park, once again the road seemed to get worse the further we went. 

Around lunch time we got to the Southern Lost City camp ground and decided to stay for the night. So we set up camp and and had a late lunch before going for a walk around the Southern Lost City rock formations. They were pretty spectacular and many photos were taken. 

It was back to camp for a cool drink and a restful afternoon in the shade.