The Rallies and Trials of a Nuremberg Rock Fest

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Australia is great at many things. Attracting musical talent isn’t one of them. If you go to a big Aussie music festival you can’t be too surprised or disappointed if it’s headlined by a tap dancing chook. Which is a bad example because that’d obviously be sick.

Australia is too far, has too few people, and is too expensive to tour. When the Rolling Stones hit Adelaide in 2015 I’m pretty sure I saw Mick Jagger squint and mutter ‘Prague’s changed a bit.’

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Corfu and the Mediterranean Blues

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I love cheap knock-offs. Paying the 80,000% mark up for a pair of Ray Buns that somehow still only cost 45 cents or a Billabang towel that is made of tissue paper will always be far more rewarding to me than heading to JR Surf & Ski to get the real deal. I once saw a watch that was branded Hugo Bus. I found it really funny.

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“Do You Speak English?” – A Guilty Convenience

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Despite growing up in a town of 1000, I was never a kid who dreamt of running away to join the circus. That was probably as much about Jamestown not exactly being stop one on the circus route as anything else. Might’ve been keener if I’d seen just one fucking lion sitting on a stool.

But while lion stoolage is one thing, I didn’t see myself sailing the seas, climbing mountains or hacking through the jungle either. Cheers world, but Jamestown has a creek, a hill AND a forest. Yep, for the first 17 years of his life this little fishy was pretty content with his little patch of Mid North South Australian earth.

But just as many grow out of that running away to join the circus dream, I’ve grown right on into it.

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Adventures of a Reluctant Circus Freak: Travelling Africa White and Bearded

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From afar, celebrity life seems glamorous. I used to think it was all sunbathing on yachts, smoking cigars lit with burning cash and slipping a nip every now and again to keep the punters interested.

How naïve I was.

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Hot Enough For Ya?: The Danakil Depression

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About 5 years ago, when I was in a dead end job that thankfully gave me a computer screen which faced a wall, I’d spend about 93% of my workday fucking around watching YouTube videos. While I was all for wasting this particular company’s time, mama Speed raised an honest boy, so I did eventually feel as though I should do something productive. That something productive was hitting the Random Article button on Wikipedia, because EDUCATION.

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Why Walk When You Could Die Instead: Transport in Africa

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Death is coming for us all. This song and dance we call life is fleeting, and the curtain could close on any of us at any time.

This is the thought train that leaves my mental station whenever I find myself seated between four or more wheels here in Africa.

Africa is what my Nana might’ve called fuller figured, and what I’d call fucking massive. The fact that I want to see a lot of it necessitates a lot of transportation, and this transportation is what my Nana might’ve called interesting, and what I’d call fucking horrifying.

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The Shit Hiker’s Guide to the Transkei

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It’s been a while between shit hikes for this shit hiker. Hiking badly is an addiction for me, and the skin was starting to feel itchy. But where? Where on earth should I hike shittily next?

Experts consider South Africa to be the cradle of humanity; it has the earliest evidence of humans as we know them today. It’s likely where we as a species came down from the trees, straightened our spines into an upright position, and first strutted across grassy plains. It’s the motherfucking home of shit hiking. My mate Sharky* was keen to see what this part of the world was all about, so we made plans to hit it up, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other style.

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A Tale from the Garden Route

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South Africa’s Garden Route winds through the mountainous coast between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Excusing my French, it is fucking beautiful. It’s called the Garden Route after its discoverer, Gordon ‘Garden’ Route. That’s not true at all.

So we’ve just torn through this lovely part of the world after realising we spent approximately heaps too long in Cape Town. But that didn’t mean that we were too rushed to smell the roses. Oh, you want a story? Here’s your bloody story.

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But What the Hell is this Africa Thing Anyway?

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So after a year of working from the comfort of my own couch in the comfort of my own jocks, I’ve finally decided to tog up and hit the road again. It was a big decision – will the thrill of adventure even come close to matching the thrill of never really having to put pants on? Only time will tell.

I just arrived in Africa, and for a trip that has so far consisted of an hour long drive from the airport to a house, it’s already been eventful. I’m still in the clothes that I sported on the plane and haven’t worn underwear in 24 hours, as Singapore Airlines thought that my backpack looked good enough to keep. I can’t blame them, it’s a nice backpack. But they have agreed to give me custody in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

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How Online Freelancing Became Our Ticket to the World

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Having run a blog for a while, my senses have become deadened to a lot of the material produced by other blogs. Specifically, blogs that serve up clickbait.

Titling an article ‘You won’t BELIEVE what Don Burke wore to the Hawker races’ or ‘7 mind-blowing tips to freshen your knee pits‘ is the go-to strategy to get people to look at your shitty, shitty content.

MEDICAL QUESTION: what is the term for the armpit of your leg?

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