Tibet Here We Come
Tibet here we come! Not entirely content with missing Tibet off our trip earlier this year it’s time to start planing to put that right with my lovely Kath. After much research and feverish checking of weather patterns (read “looked it up in Lonely Planet”) we’ve plumped for March\April next year. Hopefully far enough away we might have some spare money by then too!
We’ve checked the situation about travel to Tibet after some conflicting messages we’d received and it says it’s all good to go. Now just need to decide on a transportation and route. Hitching, biking, bussing, 4×4, trekking? One thing I do know is, I really want to go via Everest, and if possible up to Everest basecamp. Do we go in via China and catch some terracotta warriors and great wall? Straight in to Lhasa? In over Nepal border and see Everest first? So many things to think about!
I made a map!
Well this is old news now, but one last map post! Courtesy of Microsoft (silly name) Bing Maps 3D here’s the full world tour route working out at around 65,000 miles by foot, flippers, rubber ring, canoe, kayak, zorb, segway, bike, motorbike, moped, car, tuk tuk, cyclo, bus, train, sail boat, motor boat, catamaran, rowing boat, ferry, truck, yute, Tsong Tao, Russian 4×4, and plane (no helicopter, due to bad weather).
This is going to be first two pages in my little book project (a personal combination of diary and photo album) of our travels, I might well add some more historical posts here as I get going. Some people seem to still take a look at this site now and then! Just looking at the search stats and there’s no way you’d guess what people are searching for to get to this bog. People are strange! Right up there is “around the world itineraries” which is predictable maybe but ”Abandoned Theme Parks” and “Dog Meat Market”, “Rucksac Injury” and “Leg Irons” are right up there too, also “Pictures of Boobies”, my personal favourite!
Click the map for a full size version! and here for the itinerary.
Making a Book!
Yup, I’m making a book! Notice I didn’t say “writing” a book, which sounds far too complicated… although it will having writing in it. Anyway, basically a fancy combined photo album and diary of my travels around the world but all nicely bound and using the most artworthy pics that can be Photoshopped out of trouble. And some pretty amazing Google Earth shots of the GPS trail we left behind us (now I’ve finally got that working brilliantly). None of this Boots photo book stuff, a nice bit of leather binding I reckon and a limited run of three so far.
No messin’ about here, hopefully it’s going to look pretty good. National Geographic is what I’m aiming for but we’ll see! Already started on the graphics though and I reckon I’ll have a host of graphic stuff for sharing by the end. Writing of which… if anyone ever wants one, I’ve created a film negative frame that you can just layer your own pics in. The full Photoshop file is here. JPG version here. Free for non-commercial use but it would be great if you could leave a comment saying where or what you’ve used it for if you do. Cheers! (commercial use: please contact via this blog)
Geotagging
Now I’ve finally got this GPS data sorted and in the absense of being able to think of anything at all sensible to do with 13,000 pictures I thought I’d try this Geotagging malarkey. I just found this, and it actualy works! Don’t be scared by the command line interface and the thousands of options, all you need to do is:
- Get your GPS track into GPX format (other formats are supported)
- Copy your GPX file to the folder containing your images to be tagged
- Download and open this zip file
- Save the single file in this zip file to your Windows directory
- Rename this file to exiftool.exe (instead of exiftool(-k).exe)
- Open a Command Prompt and change to the directory containing your images to be tagged
- type “exiftool -geotag nameofgpxfile.gpx FolderContainingImages” eg. exiftool -geotag trip.gpx c:\Images\
exiftool creates duplicate files so you end up with the original file and the file with the newly added geotags just in case anything goes astray!
Finally!
OK, now I’m glad I took a GPS logger with me! It was touch and go, and battling with so much GPS data has not been fun especially as it is indeed sooo geeky. Sometimes I just want things to work like everyone else! Not too much to ask?… plug the thing in and get a lovely map of your trip out.
I’ve only tried one device of course (GlobalSat DG100) but I’d imagine they are all similar, the software you get is pretty much only good to save the data to your PC (in various formats), the main battle then is getting the data to show up on a map like Google Maps\Earth. In between collecting the data and getting it to display there’s a whole world of pain including connecting all your individual data files together, sorting out duplicates in the files (if you’ve been an idiot at least once and not cleared the memory after saving the data etc!) and figuring out what format to work in in the first place. It’s taken ages, about 5 different software downloads and tries at using on line tools too but I’ve finally found the missing link. The missing link I found is free software called GPS TrackMaker (downloadable here). This is what I used to gather and connect all my separate tracks and then export them to Google Earth. I didn’t complain about the file sizes (which seems to have been a problem with other programs) and you can even edit the tracks by dragging points around. It doesn’t have any maps built in though and doesn’t seem to be connected to Google Maps – maybe that’s the difference betwen this and the commercial version.
I tried out Google Maps, Google Earth and Everytrail.com to actually display the tracks and the only one I could get to work originally was EveryTrail which all seemed very nice but looking at it closely it seems to really reduce the track resolution right down. I kind of thought that would have to be the way it was, maybe I just had too much data. Tried Google Maps until I went slightly deranged and got nowhere. All these programs you can download\buy use Google Maps data inside them but try uploading a track direct to Google Maps and it just looks stupid. There are other sites that take your data and write them over google maps (like GPS Visualizer, that worked really well but doesn’t allow more than 3Mb files so that was no good for a worlds worth of data). Lastly I tried Google Earth and decided against it due to it being harder to share with others. Got over that now. So in the end I used the GlobalSat software to go though the files and remove duplicates (just a really horrible manual process), then save the files as GPX files. I split the trip in two (UK-Cook Islands and NZ-UK) to avoid the problem that none of these things seem to be able to deal with going over the date line, then used GPS TrackMaker to merge the GPX files for each part into two KML (Google Earth) files. I then just opened the file in Google Earth and it worked!
Here are just a few results…. making it all worthwhile and really bringing back the memories. To see the whole trip in as much detail as you like you can check out the GPS Route Tracking section
Our Route down the Amazon River, Teotihuacan Temple of the Sun and Moon (Mexico), Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat
Blogging Again!
OK, been a long time coming and for one day only…. We’ve been in our final country of Thailand for five weeks now, four of them with friends both from jolly old home Brighton, one just on a holiday and the other VSOing in the North near Burma which we just had to pop into. We’ve traveled the length and breadth of this place as you can see from the last map (next post).
Just one day left of our around the world trip now and it’s quite surreal. We had to forget the last and, for me anyway, possibly greatest, last two countries on our trip… Nepal and Tibet. But there’s plenty of time for them some other day.
I’ve got so much more to write about but that’ll have to wait for a little while. We’ve got a flat to put back together, phone and internet to sort out and a new job to start. So much more to write about … Vietnam,Cambodia and Thailand. I really wasn’t going to write anything about Thailand as it’s got to be one of the most traveled places ever and another load of info could be nothing but boring but I’ve seen loads I wasn’t expecting. Some of that was due to staying a while in Mae Sot on the Burmese border with our friend Claire who is VSOing (and can speak Thai!) and the rest is just because there is so much to see in this place!
Anyway, hope some people stay tuned a bit longer, might be a while but also might be worth it hopefully.
Songkran!
My birthday and it also happens to be some minor little Thai festival known as Songkran. This is just a bit of what happened today down the Ko San road…
Trip so far!
After some pretty boring internetting I’ve finally uploaded the “trip so far”. Looks like the software doesn’t like going around the back of the planet and it seems to have taken the long way from the Cook Islands type area to New Zealand. It was actually only a little skip and jump! Pretty darn boring though, playing with GPS data so this will have to do for now!
Bamboo Train
A little legend and not that easy to find. The Battambang Bamboo Train. It’s a DIY, collapsible portable (Bamboo of course) train and it needs to be really. When the real train comes it’s gotta get off that track pretty sharpish. Fortunately there is only one train a week at the moment after the passenger train was indefinitely cancelled.
To catch the train, whatever you do don’t ask anyone where you get it, or follow the signs. The signs just kind of end and people were directing us all over the place. Find the railway track…. and wait a bit.
The passenger station might not see another passenger. Instead, it’s a slightly unlikely tourist attraction for the few tourists who venture this far.
it’s only 79 years old, plenty of life left in it yet.
What Mosquitoes?
Mosquitos and midges can sometimes be a problem. Shown here around this lamp shade in a fairly rubbish attempt to capture the moment.
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