If you’re a subscriber to this blog, you could be forgiven for thinking I have abandoned it and that I’m not writing anymore. However, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m actually writing more now than ever before, a new post every single day in fact. You just need to know where to look.

I’m living life ‘on the road’ this year and you might remember that back in January I began a new blog called 366 Pictures. The concept is simple; Every day throughout 2012 I publish a single picture and write a brief blog post that relates to the photograph in some way.

It’s been a great exercise so far and I am really enjoying the results. I thought it would be a far easier undertaking than it has turned out to be, but already I’ve found that it’s changing the way I look at the world around me.

If you enjoy my writing and photography then I’m quite sure you’ll also enjoy 366 Pictures. There’s new content every single day, and you can be a part of the project as it unfolds by becoming a subscriber in just the same ways as you’re subscribed to BEFOREiFORGET.

Share my visual journey though 2012! Check out 366 Pictures and subscribe to the site via RSS or email. As usual I REALLY value the comments and feedback that people leave for me, so don’t be shy, subscribe and comment!

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Check out 366pictures.com now

The trouble with travel is that for all the countless new connections you make, there are the inevitable goodbyes. Today I bid farewell to Australia and all the friends I’ve made there. Watching the ground disappear beneath me as my Malaysia bound plane climbs to the clouds, my heart is heavy with the sadness of what I leave behind me.

Ordinarily this would be a time of excitement. Flying, while convoluted, theatrical and generally uncomfortable, still holds a certain romance and excitement for me. The magic of being transported from one place to another, catapulted from one culture to the next, still amazes me and fills me with a thrill of anticipation. But today marks the end of what has been an amazing personal journey. One that has taken me to the other side of the world, and in many ways beyond even that limit too.

Australia was the dream. For years I thought about what it would be like to live ‘down under’ where there sun always shines and everyone starts their day on a surfboard. America romanced me for more than a decade, but I always had an eye on the other side of the world. In 2009 I was finally able to set foot on Australian soil, landing with barely containable excitement in the glorious city of Sydney.

It took no more than two short visits to Australia in 2009 and 2010 to convince me that I needed leave everything in the UK and pursue that dream I’d had for so long. Sydney was my introduction but it was the art and culture of Melbourne that convinced me to buy that one way ticket.

As with most dreams, the reality was somewhat different. It wasn’t disappointing in any way, just a little more down to earth and tethered to the real world by the ties that dreams have little time for.

First off, not all Australians start their day on the beach. I knew this before I arrived, but that image of Australian sun sea and surf is so pervasive in the Northern Hemisphere that you can’t help but be a little swept up in the romance of the idea. In fact, not only is it not always sunny, but Australia can get cold, very cold as it happens.

Then there was the finincal surprise. An unusually strong Australian dollar coupled with the much higher cost of living meant that I was no longer enjoying the affluence that having British pounds in my pocket normally affords me. Suddenly I felt like a student, counting my loose change and re-evaluating my usual carefree approach to spending while abroad. After all, this was no vacation, I was living here now and I had to keep that in mind.

In fact, it’s fair to say that while I didn’t have much of a plan in the first place, nothing went to the faint plan I had sketched out ahead of my arrival. Every last detail of the dream was corrected and realigned in a series of reality adjustments that helped carve out the eventual adventure that Australia would become for me.

Melbourne was home, but the road was my constant invitation. As winter descended upon the city I bought a converted van and took to the road, heading north in search of sun and excitement. Never before had I embarked on such a lengthy or ambitious road-trip. From Melbourne to far Northern Queensland, then across to Darwin and down again through the arid desert of the so called ‘red centre’ all the way past Uluru (Ayres Rock) to Adelaide and finally back to Melbourne.

It took months to complete and spanned a distance of many many thousands of miles. And while I may have been solo for much of my time at the wheel, I was rarely alone for long. My path through Australia threaded its way through the vast landscape entwining with with locals, couchsurfers, hitchhikers, backpackers and fellow ‘rubber tramps’ like myself. Sometimes those encounters were brief, sometimes they lasted for days, but at no point did I feel alone.

And so it was that I returned home to Melbourne. Back to the cafe’s the coffee, the art and wonder of the city I had come to feel a part of. I could give tourists directions and tell them of hidden out of the way places to visit. I knew the tram lines, their numbers, and the routes many of them would take through the city. As strange as it may seem, in the relatively short time I had been there, I had come to know Melbourne better than I knew almost any city in my native England.

Maybe I just engaged with the place more, knowing that our time together would, in the end, be only fleeting. Or maybe the city engaged with me, igniting my senses and feeding my own creativity? Those new found familiarities and fine friends have given me more than I ever expected. And so it is now that Australia, and particularly Melbourne, has embossed itself upon my soul.

I’m leaving Australia today, and I don’t know when I will return, but whenever that day is part of me will simply be coming home.

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Don’t forget that I am blogging EVERY DAY throughout 2012 at 366pictures.com. If you have’t already checked it out go there and subscribe to the daily email.

Happy New Year everyone! I hope wherever you are that 2012 has gotten off to a good start. Some people are forecasting that this is the year the world ends, so let’s hope we all go out on a high note! Personally I think we’ll all be here this time next year, and with that in mind I’ve started a new photography project today.

I know a few of you enjoy this blog more for the pictures than my writing. With that in mind I hope some of you will want to check out a new photographic journal I’ll be working on this year called 366 pictures.

Each day I will endeavor to publish one photograph that I take on that day. The pictures will then be published at 366pictures.com where visitors to the site will be able to leave comments in the same way you can here.

Given that I am still travelling, I’m not entirely sure where I’ll be as we go into 2012. Right now I am in New Zealand, but I am scheduled to return to Australia in March in time for the first Formula One Grand Prix of the year. After that it’ll be off to Malaysia for round two, but then who knows where I’ll find myself.

Although I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while, the project has come together pretty quickly. Just 4 days ago, while taking a walk with my friend Phil, Kerry-anne, and their almost two year old daughter Grace, I mentioned that it might be a fun and interesting undertaking to chronicle a year in pictures.

As soon as we got back to the house I began working on the site and while it’s not perfect, it’s online now. There are a few kinks in the design that need to be ironed out (mostly surrounding the immensely buggy and technically flawed Internet Explorer web browser), but hopefully those issues will be resolved soon.

I’m still going to be writing my usual blogs here, and yes I will be retrospectively writing about and sharing pictures from ‘North,’ my road-trip around Australia.

So check out 366 pictures and know that, just as here, I love reading all your comments.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Hey everyone. This is just a little note from me to all of you, wishing you all a very Merry Christmas from the sunny side of the world!

I didn’t build this snowman, and given that it’s now summer on this side of the world, this will likely be the only snowman I’ll see on the streets this Christmas. But hey, we’ve got mince pies and a big Christmas pudding soaking in brandy too. For me Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without them.

The problem with road-trips and good intentions is that they’re largely incompatible. I had planned to make regular posts from the road, to spend the day having adventures and the rest of the time writing about them. Maybe if I had done an extensive road-trip before, where my life had been shrunk to the size of a small Toyota van from the late 1980′s, I would have understood the limitations with that plan.

With each passing mile, or kilometre as it is here, my blog was falling farther and farther behind. Maybe if I had a big motorhome I would have been more disciplined, and updates would have come at more timely intervals inline with my actual location. Certainly it would have been nice to enjoy the luxury of such a vehicle, with a table to sit at, a small kitchen, and maybe even a shower. But my Tarago was fine, it suited my shoestring budget and my ‘rough around the edges’ approach to life on the road.

I’ve finished the trip now, but if you’ll forgive me the indulgence, I’m going to let the blog catch up with me. I’m going to allow those miles and kilometres, pictures and stories, to beat a path to the present day through the twisting wires or the world wide web. I’m going to complete the tale of this, the most ambitious road-trip of my life, before I forget.

I’d been told that Fraser Island was an essential stop on my road-trip along Queensland coast. It’s considered to be the world’s largest sand island which sounds to me like one of those claims that really doesn’t mean that much when you think about it for a moment. Nevertheless I decided to make my way there if only to have another point on the map that I could point at and say, “I’ve been there.”

Rainbow Beach was the point on the mainland where I would catch a ferry over to the Island. Tours were fully booked so I spent a couple of days at the beach before heading over to Fraser Island. I stretched out a towel, moulded a seat in the sand, then sat back to browse through magazines, bask in the sun, and snooze. I don’t really do the whole beach-bum thing, so this was a novel and really relaxing time-out for me.

That night, while I sat on the beach looking at the stars listening to some music and sipping a cup of tea I’d just brewed, a dog came out of the darkness and cautiously approached me.

I reached out my hand and did that whole doggie talk thing. You know, the usual “Hello boy. You’re a beauty aren’t you? What’s your name?” He looked at me and sniffed while I glanced around for his owner, but I couldn’t see anyone. As he came closer I stretched out my arm slowly. He sniffed at it then let me stroke him.

Pretty soon it was like he was my dog and we were just at the beach together for a little after dinner recreation. I stroked him while asking him a few more questions he had no way of understanding. He was pretty friendly, and even let me ruffle his neck and jiggle his ears. After a while I my four-legged friend decided to leave me to the stars, and he wandered off down the beach and back into the darkness.

When I picked up my 4WD drive tour over to Fraser Island I saw a poster. ‘Dingos are dangerous’ it warned. And there beneath those words was a picture of the ‘dog’ from Rainbow Beach, ‘my dog,’ my benign canine who I was now learning was a savage baby-eating beast from the wild!

Maybe Dingoes are misunderstood animals, I thought to myself. Perhaps, like Brits abroad, they’re reputation has been tarnished by a few ‘bad apples.’ That could have been the case, but this wasn’t Benidorm, and the savage Dingoes weren’t wearing baseballs caps and Burberry to identify themselves. Maybe I’m a gifted Dingo Whisperer, but it was a skill I decided not to test again for for fear of becoming Dingo dinner. From then on I decided just to avoid all dog like animals until I was clear of Fraser Island, and perhaps even Australia as a whole.

FRASER ISLAND

As we drove off the ferry from the mainland onto one of Fraser Island many long golden beaches it quickly became apparent that this was something of a wild place. My tour guide drove the Toyota Land Cruiser like it was a rodeo horse. He told me that we were weaving wildly from side to side to get better grip in the deep sand, but I got the impression this was just a trick to add a sense of danger to the experience.

When we weren’t speeding along the beach we were driving through forests thick with tropical trees that heralded the fact that I was very much now in the tropics.

Ordinarily you might expect a place like Fraser Island to have long since been invaded by developers building resorts and vast hotels to claim their share of the tourist dollars that pour into Queensland coastal regions. However, along with beaches full of wild dingoes, the waters around the island are thriving with sharks ready and willing to take a chunk out of anyone brave enough to venture into the surf.

Tourists do flock here in the droves, but Fraser Island feels like a place where nature is still very much in charge. For this reason the island is largely unspoiled, leaving you feeling like more of an explorer than a tourist.

As usual I took the opportunity to take to the air in a light aircraft that took off and landed on the beach. From the air we saw several whales with their calves swimming not far off shore, as well as the shipwreck of the SS Maheno. The once luxury passenger ship ran aground on 75 Mile Beach back in 1935. Since then the rusty ruin has become a popular landmark that is slowly sinking into the sand and eroding away.

I enjoyed Fraser Island a lot, and seriously considered spending more time there. But this was a road-trip and for three days all I had seen was sand and forest. It was time to get back to the mainland and back to the reassuring strip of black that would take me north.

Last week I went out to see a movie with a friend. It was pretty heavy going, so to lift our spirits we decided to hit some bars after the credits had rolled. A few hours later I’d long since missed the last tram home and somewhere in a haze of strange concoctions I’d had this moment of literary inspiration.

It’s a bad habit I have, sending text messages while enjoying the swirl of a moment of intoxication. To be fair, such moments are not common for me. I rarely drink to excess, and in truth I rarely drink at all. I am a cheap drunk. After three beers, four at a push, I’m ready to dance, laugh at crap jokes, and eat greasy food from establishments of questionable health standards.

But what was I trying to say in the text I sent to my friend Theresa. I do remember sending it, but like all texts I never bothered to read it back when I awoke the next morning.

So yesterday, when we met one another for lunch, she took great joy in reading it back to me in a style befitting the works of a fine English poet.

“Wetl are the drunk duckstes in the jourd ule sky.
Lol. Dity would glee
Fuck the sky for money.”

I’ve looked at my ageing phone with its number pad smoothed down like a bannister from an old staircase in a building with outrageously high ceilings. The assistance of predictive text was clearly powerless to assist me at nearly 2am while I enjoyed the intoxicating embrace of another cocktail from the Black Pearl on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy.

Wetl are the drunk duckstes in the jourd ule sky. What? The jourd ule sky?

And that last line. “Fuck the sky for money.” Did I really mean to write that, or was predictive text attempting to fathom the notions of a somewhat sozzled Englishman?

I’ve heard it said that some artists enjoy their most brilliant and creative moments in the haze of an intoxicated binge. But it seems clear to me that the same oil that loosed the genius in some has revealed that there is sadly no genius or wonder in my pixilated soul.

I’ll try to refrain from reaching for my phone the next time I’m making that transition from my second drink to drunkard. But I’m making no promises. After all, lest we forget wetl are the drunk duckstes.

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Tambourine dream
A mans guide to drunk texting
Texts from last night

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