Some truth in the rumour

I wrote a little while ago about the urban myth of the traveller and his 100 slides BUT I have just seen a video called the Art of Walking,Great Ocean Walk, Victoria, Australia



One of the walkers is John Francis, also known as the Planetwalker. His story is remarkable and includes a period of 17 years where he did not speak, just wrote, gestured and played his banjo. He now has a lot of common sense to say about environmental issues. John is also remarkable in that he keeps wonderful journals as he is travelling in which he writes, paints and sketches and then gives them away to others he meets will walking to carry on the story.

An Urban Myth?

I’m sure you have all heard a variation of this urban myth. I have been told the story several times

“A hippy (or extreme adventurer, or lone traveller or …) was traveling the world by himself with just a backpack and an expensive SLR camera. He only has room for two slide boxes in his simple backpack. So every time he had some more photos developed he would sit down and carefully go through them and select maybe one or two and then discard or give away the rest to his friends. He would then take some further time to review his 100 photos in his slide boxes and take one the one or two required to be replaced by his new slides. So his collection of 100 photos just got better and better as he travelled.”

Anyway I’m going to have a bit of fun with this myth and put my personal favourite 100 photos up in a “pseudo” slide box in the cloud (ok its just an album within my Picasa Web albums). Watch them get better and better!

The tea tree flowering myth

There was a myth when I was a boy growing up in beaumaris (just south of melbourne) that the snapper would start biting as sson as the tea tree started to flower. All the boats boobing around out on the bay suggested to me it may just be a truthful bit of folk lore. This weekend I saw the first tea tree bloom of this year and the beach was packed with fisherman. The myth must work for the salmon running as well.