G’Day, mate! That’s the morning salute of the Aussies 🙂 We are just back from Australia, where we have been travelling for a month. What a nice country, and what a bunch of friendly people we met down under!
With the idea of going so far away, we had prepared ourselves, finding a software to help us find our way, downloading maps locally to my new gadget: an HTC tablet (with which I’m very happy, by the way). We took the plane and landed in Sydney where we visited some days, enjoying ourselves in that cosmopolitan city. We bought even a local SIM card (even though the maps were locally stored, the software needed an internet connection to act as a GPS and give directions) and then went for the real countryside to Alice Springs, in order to see their sacred mountain Uluru.
All our setup lasted 20 minutes after leaving Alice Springs… that’s the time our 3G connection lasted in Central Australia. I should have guessed it when seeing in our 4WD rental agency leaflets for satellite phones! 90% of Australia is not GSM-covered, something you tend to forget, as in the cities Internet is so present: every small shop has its own website, everywhere you look at, the URLs are big in display.
So we laugh at ourselves, and did it the ‘old way’, following the road with paper maps and signs. But have no worries, even the kids survived without Internet for some days J. Here is the mythical mountain in the sunset light: as great as they said!
