While traveling for a couple of weeks around China I have been posting notes, and a “Travel Stream” over at my travel blog. It’s primarily for my own travel journal of where I’ve been and thoughts along the way. It includes “meanwhiles”, which are the flickr/twitter/etc. posts inserted in between the actual blog posts. That way even if I’m just putting up quick notes (tumblog style) or photos, they still show up in the blog stream.

Using GeoPress, I can add locations through the web interface, but I’ve also added in-body location tagging, such as including GEOPRESS_LOCATION or geo:lat= and geo:lon= to set the location. This makes it easy for me to use an offline editor like Ecto, or even Wordpress’ email a post capability to easily post to my blog without necessarily having to login and use the web interface. I was hoping to have an N810, complete with built-in GPS, to take along, but unfortunately the developer discount codes aren’t working yet, so I was stuck with my N800 and an old iBook.

It’s getting easier to create a travelog enroute by utilizing a number of tools and then aggregate these together. Another great example is the BBC’s Bangladesh River Boat trip that uploaded GPS tracks, photos, twitters. For some reason, the potentially very useful Plazes doesn’t really fit into my workflow and I don’t find it very easy to update my locations quickly. Perhaps I need to investigate the API and make a simple offline widget for building up a set of travelled locations that can sync when I get back online.

More thoughts on China and travel soon.

Kia Ora!

After much traipsing about the world, I finally made it back from the wonderful, wild world of New Zealand.

Let me state first, and foremost, you must go. There is little doubt why Lord of the Rings was filmed there. The landscape is simply stunning, the people are friendly, the native Maori culture is engaging, I have a new appreciation and fascination with birds (yay Weka!), and the beers are amenable when you can find a brewpub (the wines are already well known).

Some Advice for the Traveler

A couple of bits of advice: go a little off-season, like March. “High Season” isn’t Disney{land, world}, but it’s still a little more difficult to find some accommodations/reservations. Apparently March is an excellent time: still warm, calm weather, and the baby seal pups are just becoming curious and exploratory and are fun to play with.

Rent a camper-van, one of those mini-van conversions with a bed and little cook area. This will allow you to camp besides streams, in the mountains, picnic with astonishing views, but still allow you to navigate the roadways and stay in better accommodations every once in awhile.

Prepare thyself for some exciting driving. The roads are almost all two-lane, incredibly windy (think looking over a cliff less than a foot away), narrow, and on the wrong-damn-side. And that’s just the highways (because they’re paved). But everything is very well labeled/signed, but take along a GPS-system too, just to make sure you’re going the right way.

Don’t eat Vegemite - it’s something that was made in times of dire need, which we don’t live in, so don’t eat it. Munch on something like cute cuddly lamb instead for goodness sake.

But what did you do?

All said, we drove more than 2700 miles through (deep-breath): Auckland, Waitakere Ranges, Nikau Caves, Whangarei, Matopeka, Russel, Kauri Forests, Poor Knights Island, Rotorua, Taupo, Tongariro National Park, Wellington, Picton, Renwick, Nelson, Motueka, Abel Tasman National Park, Hokitika, Fox Glacier, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Invercargill, the Caitlins, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Christchurch.

The great part about driving around a country like New Zealand is the ability to stop and enjoy the view or tramp through the woods whenever the fancy strikes you. For us, this was quite often. As a rule of thumb we added 20% travel time during any of our trips for these stops.

On the road IT

Each night I spent probably about 30 minutes dealing with “data management” - downloading GPS tracks, pictures, annotating, journal entry. There really must be a better way to manage this much data, especially en route, but also not be overwhelmed with it on return. I’ve found that internet access on travel is unreliable. Even when it is available it can be expensive, and restricted to a kiosk-type machine without any ability to upload your own data through them.

The photos are available on my Flickr page. I still need to go through an geotag them, as I was having problems geotagging the EXIF of RAW images using some of the automation techniques. I’ve also put up a blog of the travels in the GeoPress demo blog at http://location.highearthorbit.com/travel.

Over the next week I’ll be cleaning up more photos, and uploading the megabytes of tracklogs I’ve accumulated to OpenStreetMap in order to hopefully kick off interest in the project in New Zealand (or at least to other OSMers traveling to NZ)

Unfortunately, due to traveling through Wellington on New Years Day, I didn’t get to meet up with some of NZ’s finest mappers, ProjectX Technologies (developers of ZoomIn), or Mark Zeman (developer of TripperMap).

It was a tremendous endeavor that really introduced us to a lot and was thoroughly enjoyable, if a little fast paced. After just 3 weeks in New Zealand we spent 2 days whirlwind through Seoul, South Korea, and then back to Washington, DC via San Francisco, and a long 10 hour drive back to Michigan.

More to come…

I have some rather exciting announcements to share, but as it’s late, and I’m all kinds of jet-lagged/worn out, I’ll post about it later.

Still alive and busily mapping New Zealand. I have 6 days of tracks to sort through and upload - and already 416 photos. Tomorrow we head across Cook Strait to the South Island.

I tried last minute to setup a meet-up of New Zealand mappers such as ProjectX Technologies and TripperMap Mark Zeman - but I was late and it’s high-holiday-traveling season here, so we had to drink on our own.

I have to say, there still isn’t a good tool for dealing with all the GPS and Photo data and information. GPSPhotoLinker doesn’t currently handle Pentax RAW files, and I frequently have to jump to Parallels Windows to use Garmin’s manager for getting and dealing with maps.

Along the way I’ve been drawing up ideas and plans for a piece, or interconnected pieces of software that would simplify this process both on the trip and for dealing with when you get back from a trip. Something that handles a mixture of travel planning, updating/downloading en-route, and then cleaning up and publishing from afterwards.

The first resource any traveler to New Zealand should use is the excellent, Webby award winning, and official, newzealand.com. At its simplest it is a large listing of the cities, activities, accomodations, and information on New Zealand. What makes it really interesting is that every page includes an “Add to Travel Planner” button. When you add a page to your Travel Planner is sits in a list of collected items. So you can browse through all the cool things to do, mark interesting ones, and even pull in “collected travels” of suggested trips through various regions.

After you’ve gone around and collected all the things you’ll want to do, you actually go into your travel planner. Here you can pull back up short descriptions, web sites, phone numbers and addresses of any of the collected items. You can also drag and drop these into a calendar to build up your itinerary. When you put successive activites in different regions a small link will appear that will give you travel information between the areas. This includes driving times and distances, airline carriers, or rail options.

If you’ve selected a “pre-designed trip” it will be brought into your calendar as several days of activities. For example, I brought in a 3-day driving trip of the southern cities of Dunedin, Invercargill, and Te Anau. I then added accomodations at the end of each day and other activies to do on the route.

And of course, after you’ve built up your calendar you can then view a map of your collection or your actual itinerary along with suggested or defined routes.

After you’ve done all this, you can then share your itinerary and contact information with a travel agent, friends/family (so they know where you’ll be and how to get in touch), or for your own use for saving or printing along the way.

For general information that isn’t part of a location you can add your own “Notes” and attach these at any point in the trip. This may be for suggestions you’ve received from friends or contacts.

Overall, NewZealand.com is an incredible resource and should serve as a model for any travel site.
Gusto uses the model of gathering up sites and locations, but just isn’t quite as smooth as NZ.com does it.

A couple of things I wish the site did:

• The map and calendar hold a lot of information and should be resizable to view larger
• Export a set of driving directions and option GPX file for loading into a GPS or Nav system. Obviously this also includes exporting GeoRSS and KML for viewing in other maps, feeds, or GoogleEarth
• iCal export of itinerary

Later this week, I will performing a very important ceremony. After this - we’re off on an adventure to the land of Kiwis, Mountains & Dwarves (or somesuch).

Of course, this is a bright time in online tourism. There are a lot of resources out there for travelers who want to find out more about destinations and share their travels.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be reviewing some of the excellent New Zealand travel resources we used to plan our trip and of course arm ourselves with all the necessary mapping and neogeography tools.

Of course, I’ll be posting geotagged photos to Flickr, and using GeoPress in my Travel Blog.

Here is a quick list of basic travel sites for gathering & sharing travel stories:

• TripHub - Easily plan and organize your trip for free
• MapSack - Travel in the Know
• TripTracker
• GeekyTraveller
• World66 & WikiTravel
• TravelBlog - GlobeTrotting Documented
• Gusto - travel + lifestyle
• TrekEarth - Learning about the world through photography