Joy to the world

Finally some action on the Flickr front: something called Schmap wrote to inform me one of my CC-Licensed photos had been included in their online guide of Frankfurt.

Either way, that doesn't do much for me, especially after I checked their free travel guides and found that they exclusively focus on Europe, Australia and North America. But you should see some of the creepy, sycophantic comments people posted after having their pictures selected. It's that flickr-sickness again, which also makes 99.9% of people post such informative and constructive comments to photos as "great", "good shot", "excellent", "you're one of my favourites".

God forbid anyone come up with a critical albeit constructive comment. That'd mean having to turn on their brains while looking at all the pretty colours.

Who are you calling grumpy?

Sick?

Well, here we go. My sister thinks she might have gotten mono recently, and she would have passed that on to me over the course of last week's holiday in Vancouver. She's getting tested and I can start telling myself my sleeping patterns are disease-induced rather than plain old laziness.

Good times.

By popular request - a plan

I'd almost forgotten I made this for the textually-impaired who can't conjure up a map of South America before their mind's eye:


This itinerary is so rough and based upon conjecture it's almost not worth the effort of uploading. But at least now those folks who've been pressing me for "plans", "maps", and "where are you going to be on XYZ" are happy.

T-4 weeks

Here I go! Well, almost. Another 4 weeks till I get to South America.

The actual itinerary is a closely kept secret; so closely kept in fact, that I suspect there never was one or that I've simply killed off the braincells associated with it over the course of the last week in Vancouver.

As far as I can tell, I'm off to
* Buenos Aires - long enough to find me a flight to Ecuador, preferrably Quito
* Ecuador
* Peru
* Bolivia
* northern Argentina back down to Buenos Aires for my return flight.

I'm planning on trekking some of the Andes, spending lotsa time on buses, getting to know the locals, spending hours on the loo with grumbling guts, seeing archaeological digs, swimming in hot springs, drinking my body weight (not every night), brushing up on my spanish, riding horses (maybe), losing weight in Bolivia, only to gain it again in Argentina, meeting more crazy Canadians, telling everyone why I have such a weird-ass accent for the thousandth time, taking lots of pictures and not getting my camera gear stolen (the rest they can have).

Keep reading for details.