I've seen quite a few places in the world, and there are still lots of places to see. Here you will find a few photo galleries and diary mini-websites from some of my trips.
After a 250 mile drive to Oban, Boo the Land Rover rolled onto the ferry to Mull. From there to the campsite on the west coast, with a view to the sea. Eagles flying overhead, gannets diving in the loch, and somewhere there were otters.
Okay, there was that one night when the wind blew, the rain hammered down, and the tent leaked. The otters never showed up. But the scenery made up for it, and the injuries were worth it. Ouch, those rocks are sharp.
In 2012 Olivia and I went to the UseR! conference in Nashville, and then hopped over to the west coast for a few days in San Francisco and Monterey, visiting a friend from the Earthwatch Sea Otter project who now lives there. We visited the Computer Museum, went half-way across the Golden Gate bridge, and went kayaking with the sea otters of Elkhorn Slough. Pictures from this trip are on this flickr set.
A freighter took me, Olivia, and my land rover across from Heysham to Dublin. After a statistics conference we headed off into the west, eventually finding a campsite right on the edge of the world, the next land being the USA. On the way back we stopped in the mountains and took in the scenery.
A trip to visit a Taeko in Oman. There were a lot of turtles. We saw the adult females laying eggs, newborn babies making their way to the sea, and watched them in their natural habitat while we were snorkelling. Away from the cooling sea, we spent a day on camels heading for a remote desert camp.
I flew out to Japan while Taeko was out there teaching and spent a few days travelling on my own and we had a few trips out together. Highlights were the snow monkeys, the overnight in the Buddhist temple, and my first earthquake.
This was my trip of a lifetime. After discovering sea otters on a trip to California, I knew I wanted to go back and work with them. So the opportunity of doing fieldwork for an Earthwatch project was something I was not going to pass up. I spent ten days with scientists and other volunteers living in a remote camp in Alaska, watching and surveying the sea otters and other wildlife.
For this trip I took a video camera, and made a short film which was shown at an Earthwatch meeting in Oxford and used by the project team in Alaska to show volunteers what to expect! I have it on DVD if anyone wants to watch it. It was a labour of love.
The Ridgeway Long Distance Path is an ancient way across southern England. The first half is footpath, but the second half is accessible to cyclists, and terminates at the massive stone circle of Avebury. Along the way we saw other remnants of ancient Britain - the chalk white horse of Uffington, the burial chamber of Wayland's Smithy, and also found ourselves in a modern manifestation - a crop circle!
"Hey Baz, want to go to Morocco?". "Uh, okay Sam". That was the start of an adventure that led to me rattling along a desert track somewhere near the Algerian border in an ex-Royal Marine Land Rover called Elsa.
After working with Adrian Baddeley in Perth for three weeks, I was ready for some travels. So it was onto the backpacker bus up the coast to the coral seas of the North West Cape, and then again down south to the more delicate countryside of the wine-growing regions of the Margaret River. This website has a collection of pictures from my trip. Note they are fairly low resolution since I took a video camera and made a short film.