So after much hesitation, I decided to go all the way up to the Whitsunday Islands and head back to Brisbane afterwards. When booking at the travel agency, I was proposed a cheap flight to the Whitsundays. “Well that’s great but what about the bus?”, I asked. “The bus?! Well it’s going to be 18 hours for the one-way journey and it will 3 times the price”. Ouch, sticking to my rule is definitely not easy… “I’ll take he bus then thanks.” The travel agent couldn’t believe it!

Sailing in the Whitsunday Islands

The bus wasn’t as bad as I feared it luckily and the journey went rather fast. One day later I was boarding on the S.V. Whitehaven in the port of Airlie Beach. I was off for a two days, two nights trip in these magnificent Islands. We stopped several times for some snorkeling and to visit the amazing white sand beach of Whitehaven. At night the skipper gave us a lesson on stars and showed us the different constellations and galaxies. I love the stars in the Southern hemisphere and had missed them a lot since the 6 months I spent in South Africa.

After my boat trip I had planned to stay a couple of days in Airlie beach, the city from which most boats leave. But I really didn’t enjoy the atmosphere there: all hostels are noisy and dirty with huge bars that look a lot like (very) cheap English clubs. To be honnest this is not really an exception and most very touristic cities on the East coast look like that. Probably the biggest plague I found when visiting Australia. So I decided to leave quickly and to head to 1770, halfway between Airlie Beach and Brisbane.

Riding a chopper around the town of 1770

1770 has a great vibe, the locals are really friendly and the hostels are the best I’ve experienced on the East Coast. I had a great time in my hostel, called Cool Bananas. I ended up staying there for 5 nights! During that time I mainly relaxed, went to the beach, cruised around the town on a chopper to find kangaroos and wallabies, and finally learnt to surf! I absolutely loved it and it made it harder to leave Australia as I would have been glad to stay longer to become a bit better at it. However it wasn’t as though as I thought, I already managed to stand up several times and catch some good waves during the first lesson! I might make a little detour to Indonesia to practice some more!

I would have been stuck in Airlie Beach if I had booked flights and I would not have been able to discover 1770! So I’m very happy to have stuck to my rule so far! But the biggest challenge is still ahead of me: my 13 days on the cargo ship are approaching fast!

It’s been a long time since my first update, so it’s about time that I update this blog!

Sydney Harbour

I’ve been having a really good time in Sydney and stayed there for nearly three weeks before I eventually decided to start my journey towards Europe. Sydney is a cool city nested in an impressive natural location with its famous harbour. It does really feel like a big city with its wide busy streets and tall skyscrapers but I have found people to be more relaxed than in most European cities, or at least they appear to be so! It is quite polluted though and at the end I was getting a little annoyed by all the cars everywhere. It very much ressembles american cities with huge streets and urban design that is totally optimised for cars and not at all for pedestrians.

Surfer in Byron Bay

So after three weeks I had seen most of the major attractions and it was certainly time to move on! My first stop on the East coast was Byron Bay, where I enjoyed the beach and the relaxed atmosphere in the town. The town used to be full of hippies in the 80s and a few are still around today.

Our 4x4 on the beach

The first real highlight of my trip was still ahead of me so I quickly moved on further north towards Fraser Island. This is the biggest sand island in the world. To explore it I signed up for a self drive safari with ten other people in a big Toyota 4×4. The other people turned out to be very cool and we had a good time camping for three days on the island.

A wild female dingo on Fraser Island

Fraser is home to a lot of dingos (Austalian wild dogs) too, and we saw a couple on the way. Dingos are said to have become overly agressive these last years towards tourists. Feeding them made their fear of humans vanish, causing them to attack when they are too hungry. Feeding them today is strictly prohibited. Interestingly the local aboriginals that I met there had a different opinion: it is because they can’t feed them that the dingos now sometimes attack. Their elders have always left food remains for the dingos in the past and it is because that food source dissapeared that they became aggressive. In any case the ones I saw didn’t look aggressive at all!

So far I’ve been having a great time traveling and have met loads of interesting and surprising people: a producer of the UK Big Brother show, French cancer researchers, the gardener of an English lord traveling the world, countless other people having left their jobs to travel for a while and many more improbable characters…

My next stop before returning to Brisbane to catch my cargo ship will be the Whitsunday Islands where I’m going for a three days eco sailing cruise. I can’t wait!

A beach in Wollongong with factories in the background

Time went by so quickly! I just arrived in Australia and am already starting my journey. It’s a strange feeling to have what always seemed to be like a distant dream finally become reality!

Leaving wasn’t easy though. I spent the past three years of my life in Dublin and have left several very good friends behind there and of course in Belgium. I will miss you all!

But of course I’m also very excited about my trip. During the journey, my goal will be to focus on environmental problems through my photography. I’ll try to photograph changes to the environment caused by human activity in the countries I’ll visit. However I will also do my best to meet people involved in positive initiatives, and will hopefully come back full of optimism and ideas on how to change things for the better. If you have any contacts of such people who are on my way, please let me know!

As a first illustration here is my first picture that I took in Wollongong, where I’m starting the trip. It’s the most southern point that I’ll see but luckily going north also means that the climate will get warmer because it’s pretty chilly here (15 degrees Celsius)!

Finally I plan to stick to my initial rule of not flying. Things turned out not to be as simple as they looked on the map. Indonesia and East Timor indeed look so close to Australia, but in reality crossing by boat is much harder than I expected! As I wrote in my previous post, there are only two options to do so. In the meantime I found out that November and December are right in the hurricane season and that no sailboats cross at that moment. This left me with one single option: the cargo ship. I managed to find a cabin on a German freighter and will board on the 15th of November in Brisbane for a 13 day trip to Singapore. It promises to be a very interesting experience!

The most difficult leg of the journey from Australia to Europe to accomplish overland is to cross from Australia to Asia without taking a plane. During my preparation of the trip, I read so many different opinions on this that I didn’t know what to believe! Here is what I found out:

Is it possible to cross without taking a plane? The short answer is: Yes! You have two options:

1. Find a spot on a Yacht as a crew member. The only way to do this is to go to Darwin in May or July when most Yachts make the journey North. A great website to find more information is: www.sailindonesia.net. You can also leave a message on the Darwin’s Sailing Club‘s message board.
2. The other option is to book a cabin on a cargo ship. The only existing route is from Brisbane to Singapore. A couple of companies organise this like Globoship (email them they speak English), or Strand Voyages. The trip lasts approximately 10 days. It includes food and a private cabin with bathroom but is still quite expensive unfortunately.

These are the two only options that I found and were confirmed by several sources, but if you hear about other possibilities let me know! I wanted to write this blog post simply to prove that if you really want to do it without flying it is possible!

Last week, I decided to leave my job at Google to fulfill a dream I’ve had for some time now. I have bought a one-way ticket from Brussels to Sydney. From there, I will try to go back to Europe without taking a single flight. This will also be my only rule: there’s no time limit and no fixed itinerary. The line I draw on this map is just a vague draft and the itinerary might change a lot on the way.

I’ll focus heavily on my photography during the trip, and I’ll make sure I update this website and blog. So expect it to become more interesting than it has been so far!

Departure date: 7th of October 2009

“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
- St. Augustine

Click on the picture above to see the photo album!

Since my trip in Israel in July last year, I didn’t go for a long trip again until last April. In March, I suddenly felt the urgent need to go on holidays! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any friends who were willing to go on a short notice, so I decided to go alone, something I always wanted to try. After a bit of investigation I found a cheap ticket to Nepal, and three weeks later I was on my plane!

I arrived very tired in Kathmandu after a two day journey, and a horrible night in New Dehli airport (not recommended). I wasn’t disappointed: Kathmandu was like no other city I had ever seen. By far the busiest! Even a bit too busy for my tired self so I stayed only one day. I moved on to visit Bodnath and its magnificent Stupa and the impressive Hindu temple of Pashupatinath. I continued and stopped for two days in Bhaktapur. I was also lucky enough to be in Bhaktapur at the time of the Bisket Jatra festival, to celebrate the Nepali New Year with the locals. This was a truly unbelievable experience: the whole city was packed and the atmosphere was incredibly festive.

Afterwards I left Kathmandu Valley and headed towards the town of Pokhara at the foot of the Himalayas. However I stopped halfway to stay one night in the lovely village of Bandipur. Rarely have I experienced such a warm welcome in a village: all the inhabitants were really friendly and the town very picturesque.

So finally I arrived in Pokhara, which was very disappointing to me, especially because of a heavy layer of fog that prevented me to see any mountains! But of course Pokhara was only the base to start my trekking in the Annapurnas. Due to a lack of time I took a flight to Jomsom and from there trekked up to Kagbeni and Muktinath and then all the way down to Marpha. I enjoyed the trek a lot, the scenery is stunning, the locals are lovely and the trek is varied and not too tough. However if I had to choose a trek again, I would probably go for another one as they very recently built a road along the trail and the tranquility is often disturbed by jeeps going by very fast and leaving a big could of dust behind them.

I finished my trip by visiting Kathmandu and Patan in depth and the monkey temple of Swayambunath.

To conclude, I’ve had a fabulous experience in Nepal. I won’t forget the lovely people there who have been so friendly all along my trip. It is also a precious mix of culture, landscapes, architecture and spirituality that is very rare. Traveling solo has never been a problem either: I’ve met loads of people and have experienced the culture much more than I ever had before on trips with friends. This is certainly an experience that I recommend to everybody to try once in their life. And to be really honnest: I don’t think it will be my last solo trip!

The pictures from my 10 days trip to New York are uploaded to PicturesFromEarth. Visiting New York was a great experience. So many movies were filmed in New York that a lot of places already looked familiar. What really surprised me was how close my idea of New York was from reality. A strange but nice feeling!

I spent most of my time in Manhattan, and I was staying in a friend’s place in Upper East New York. The view from the rooftop was quite impressive. Central Park was only a few minutes away so I enjoyed a few walks in this huge park right in the heart of New York.
Of course we didn’t miss most of the most popular tourist attractions such as the Fifth Avenue, Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street and the New York Stock exchange.
I spent my last day in the Bronx to see another facet of New York. Indeed the atmosphere in the Bronx is totally different from Manhattan. I finally couldn’t miss the Bronx Zoo, which is the largest metropolitan zoo in the United States.

Since this was one of the first questions I asked myself while creating this website, I thought a little blogpost would help to explain you this important SEO issue. Canonicalization refers to the choice of choosing the best URL structure possible for your site. Should you use a www in your URL or not? I’ll refer to all my choices chronologically:

Should I use www in my URLs or not?

The short answer is: it doesn’t really matter! Some people will argue that it has become a standard on the internet to use www in your URLs, others will say that it is useless and should therefore be avoided. Personally I think it doesn’t matter! What matters is to make a choice since the very start and to stick to it! I chose to go for the version without www simply because my domain name is already quite long so I wanted to avoid too long URLs appearing in search results. So my preferred domain is http://picturesfromearth.com

301 redirects to your preferred domain.

So why is it so important to choose a preferred domain and to stick to it? For search engines the two versions of the URL will be considered as different. So to avoid confusing search engines with different versions that it would consider as duplicate, it is better to stick to just one. Start this good habit since the beginning in the way you link internally to your site and always use the same version. Unfortunately, you can’t force other people to link to you to the right version. Some will probably use the www version or the non-www version even though you never do. It is to avoid diluting or losing these links that it is wise to make a 301 redirect to your preferred domain version. You can achieve this very easily through the .htaccess file on the root of your server.

.htaccess 301 redirect.

To create a 301 redirect to your preferred domain, add it to your .htaccess file on the root of your site (or create a file that you name .htaccess and place it to the root of your site on your server). The code will vary according to the preferred domain you chose:

If your preferred domain is the non-www version ( you want to redirect www to non-www version):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Replace “domain” with your domain name.

If your preferred domain is the www version ( you then want to redirect non-www to www):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

What if I have subdomains?

The code will cause problems if you have subdomains so you need to exclude them from the above code. I had the problem for my blog.picturesfromearth.com which was causing errors. To avoid this, simply add this code above the RewriteCond (and under “RewriteBase /”):
# Stop mod_rewrite processing if “example” subdomain requested
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.domain\.com
RewriteRule .* - [L]

There you go! This should not have taken you very long to implement but it will prove very valuable for you in the future!

The second gallery is now uploaded to the site and it covers my trip to Cuba that I did in October 2006, just after university and before I started my first job.

We stayed two weeks in Cuba where we rented a car to cruise around the island. Here is a short story of our trip:

We landed in Varadero, and we didn’t stay more than half an hour in that town! It really should be avoided at all costs, it is full of horrible huge tourist hotels that totally ruin the beautiful place that Varadero must once have been. Unless you enjoy sunbathing on ugly beaches being surrounded by hundreds of other tourists, just avoid this place!

So instead we went straight to Santa Clara, which is an important town in Cuban history as it hosted the last battle of the cuban revolution in 1958. We had a look at Che Guevara’s monument there.
We really wanted to relax on a nice beach as well so we continued east until Cayo Coco, an island linked to the mainland by a 27 kilometers long road! The beaches there were very nice, even though we didn’t fell in love with the island which had a bit of a fake deserted holiday resort feel.
From there we headed back west towards Trinidad. On the way we stopped at the Manaca Iznaga, an old monument in la Valle de los Ingenios. There is an old tower which was used to watch the slaves in the fields. The view from the tower on the valley is really worth it.

We then finally arrived in Trinidad, which is a charming town where the colonial architecture is remarkably preserved. Trinidad was certainly one of the highlights of our trip. It is sometimes being referred to as a real life museum and we agreed with that. Not only the monuments and the architecture are typical, but the whole atmosphere just has a pleasant cuban feel.

We continued driving west stopping on the way to admire the Turkey Vultures or to go for a swim in the famous bay of pigs where the US unsuccessfully tried to invade Cuba in 1961.

The next stop for us was Viñales, where we stayed just next to a tobacco field in a lovely Casa particulares. The town and its surrounding valley have recently been listed as a world heritage cite by UNESCO. We were also lucky to find the world famous Alejandro Robaina tobacco plantations and had a visit of the fields and infrastructure. We even had the pleasure to meet Don Alejandro himself.

We reached the western part of Cuba and decided to rest a little in Maria La Gorda, a gorgeous place with white sand beaches and palm trees. It’s ideal for snorkeling and scuba diving as well.

Finally we concluded our trip by a few days in La Havana. A fascinating city with majestic colonial buildings that are sadly falling apart. It’s still a great experience and it feels as an experience back in time.

Some general tips and information:

• Life is expensive, don’t expect to have a cheap holiday. Tourists have to use a special currency (the CUC, peso convertible) that makes everything much more expensive for them.
• For hostels, I’d recommend Casa Particulares. These are places where the locals arrange some rooms in their houses to serve as a hostel. It’s nice because you really have the chance to meet the locals who are always really friendly.

My aim with the site PicturesFromEarth is to get my pictures exposed to a wide audience. Whenever I surf on the web and am searching for pictures, I’m appalled at the way pictures are presented. Everything seems to be made for people not to find them!

At first, I joined flickr. I think these guys did a great job to create a lively community. It’s also great to find pictures if you search directly from their site. However, for other search engines, I think it is a disaster. As an example, just look at the URL of my most popular picture on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fanz/134271077/. I mean what does this tell users about my picture? Lions? Africa? I don’t think /134271077/ tells them much! When surfing I saw plenty of examples like that and decided I wanted to try something else.

I wanted to create a simple site, but made for the internet, users and understandable by search engines. I want my URLs to be descriptive, my pages to have a nice title and a little description of the picture. But I don’t want to spend hours coding every page manually either!

So I went looking around and decided to give Plogger a try. It looks extremely simple and promises SEO friendly URLs. That’s a good start! So far I have been very happy with my choice, but I had to do a few tweaks to make it look exactly how I wanted it.

The first thing I did was to enable the option “Generate Cruft-Free URLs”, to have SEO-friendly URLS. However my first problem with that was that URLs were ending with the extension of the picture (.jpg) which I didn’t like since these are html pages and should not be labeled wrongly. To fix this I used this simple tweak:
http://dev.plogger.org/changeset/528

After that I was left with URLs without trailing slashes which annoyed me as well, so I applied this two revisions:
http://dev.plogger.org/changeset/546
http://dev.plogger.org/changeset/547
To apply these just download the zip archives at the bottom and replace the relevant files on your server.

Now my URLs look a lot more like I wanted them to look. Check this one for example:
http://picturesfromearth.com/travel/madagascar/grand-tsingy-national-park-valley/

Isn’t that much clearer?