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?
Continue reading How Online Freelancing Became Our Ticket to the World
So we’re back at home base. Settled in to little old Adelaide, South Australia, as if nothing ever happened. And judging by the state of affairs that we have come back to, nothing has.
Adelaide, consistency is both your blessing and your curse.
‘So what did you like best?’ – an understandable question, but one that I’ve had to repeat the answer of about 38 times now. So to shut you guys up, I thought I’d throw down what I felt were the very best bits of South America through this funky guy’s junky eyes.
Continue reading The Best of South America: Fishy’s Favourites
Ask yourself: What should I see in South America? If you are a normal person who is home to a normal brain, the first words to pass through your lips should be ‘The Amazon’.
We’ve been in South America 10 months. We’ve seen plenty of stuff – enough, it seems, to think it deserved its own URL. But somehow, somehow, we haven’t managed to check out the Amazon.
We had an eventful and adventurous Christmas and New Years spent with wonderful friends in some pretty incredible places. I’m going to let the pictures do most of the talking with this one…
Continue reading That Won’t Stop The Roast – Our Festive Season in Bolivia and Chile
Overnight buses are a way of life for the South American backpacker. Not only do you spend bugger-all money getting to a place, you also save cash on a night’s accommodation.
That may sound like the most tight-arse thing in the world, but it’s moments like this where you have to remember that the bloke who owns Jim’s Mowing asks for a doggy bag for soup and still buys toilet paper and glad wrap in pallet-sized catering packs to save 2c per metre. I saw it on Today Tonight so you know it’s a watertight fact. He seems like the sort of bloke who you’d run into at a party and immediately regret running into at a party.
Sicknesses are like dreams, in that everyone wants to tell you about theirs, but you as the listener feel like you’re getting your ears slowly and boringly punched. The ins-and-outs of a body breaking down are interesting in the same way that desert succulents or proper lathe technique are. Not really.
Let me tell you about mine.
I recently got laid up for a week or so with a bacterial infection, bed-bound and sweating bullets. We were at the top of Argentina at the time, trying to move South, but little Fishy’s rig was saying ‘woah there sailor’.
For the last two weeks, we were back in Colombia. We didn’t do anything particularly special, or see anything particularly special, but it was a bloody great two weeks because we just friggin’ love Colombia.
We started our South American travels in Cartagena, on Colombia’s north coast. At that point we spoke bugger-all Spanish and didn’t have any other South American country to measure it against. Having spent the last 4 months in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, we are confidently calling it – Colombia is our favourite.
Continue reading These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things – Colombia (again)
From Fish’s posts about our time in Ecuador I’m sure you can imagine how pissed off I became over the last month. From Mike’s Palace Of Misery (Fish didn’t mention my least favourite thing about Mike: he’s a raging misogynist who believes that women shouldn’t use shovels because it’ll cause irreparable damage to their ovaries) to generally getting the sense that Ecuador is going to hell in a hand basket (there’s not one person we’ve met in the last month who hasn’t either been robbed or been in a hostel that’s been robbed), I was ready to tell Ecuador to go fist itself and then run away in tears.
I was super pumped to get to Ecuador. Jumping out of my little Fishy skin. There was something about the joint that just spoke to me. I’d obviously never been there, and in reality, I knew bugger all about it. It just seemed cool, you know?
It straddles the equator. That’s cool. It has some super fine beaches. Mint. It’s cheap, but still uses the American dollar, so there’s none of this ‘Oh, 2 000 000 Souvlakian chestnuts for this bust of Michael Bolton yep that sounds fine’ business. Rad as heck. It just seemed like a sound choice in ideal destination.
Siz and I have spent the last few weeks volunteering in exchange for a free stay in the little town of Puerto Cayo, Ecuador, which is home to a sliver of beach that is piled high with aging American pensioners who thought that spending $13,000 on a beachfront property was worth leaving behind everything you know. And all power to them.
LOOK WHAT WE DONE! 