Oceania

Travel through Oceania by country:

Australia, Indonesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu

Travel through Oceania by popular city:

Auckland, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Wellington

Travel through Oceania by popular things to do:

Cook Islands, Sydney Opera House

Travel through Oceania with our writers:

In the Corner of the World, Work and Play in Queensland

Friday Funny: Simpsons Episodes

by Erik Olsen on

As always, we try here at gadling very hard to make sure that our Friday Funny is somehow travel-related. Sometimes we fail. today, I offer you a virtual bonanza of lunchtime, sit-in-front-of-your-computer viewing. And for Simpson’s fans, well, this is about as deliriously wonderful as things get.

This link here takes you to a magical page where virtually very Simpsons episode ever made can be viewed for free on your computer. Don’t ask me how they did it, and don’t expect it to be up forever. I can already hear the footfalls of Fox lawyers galloping to shut this site down. But for now, this comedic cartoon cornucopia is all yours.

And so that I don’t backtrack on my promise to make this FF travel-related….I offer you links to two of the best Simpsons episodes ever made, both of which take the Simpsons away from the cozy confines of Springfield:

The City of New York vs Homer Simpson from Season 9
Bart vs Australia from Season 6

On the Road Australia Style

by Erik Olsen on

With his laptop’s guts all burned out, writer Mark Kotting hits the road anyway in Australia, considering at length the barbied roo he just ate and trying to make up his mind what to do with the rest of his time. So he hits the Killer Whale Museum in Eden and with Johnny Cash blaring, dives into Aussie clture. A fine, fast-paced peice from the Guardian, with a whiff of Hunter Thompson. Oh to be in the Land Down Under.

Travelistic

by Erik Olsen on

With the explosion in online video, it’s a bit of a surprise that we’ve seen so few companies dedicated to travel vids. There’s Travel Channel which for the most part repurposes stuff that they’ve put on TV. There’s Turnhere, which is a fine site, but also hit or miss when it comes to quality. Also, their films…a generous term…focus on specific cities and destinations. Other than these two, not a lot of serious players have emerged.

Until now? (yes, that’s a question)

It looks like the former CEO of MTVi (MTV‘s former dot-com division), a gentleman by the name of Nicholas Butterworth (of the syrup dynasty?), says he is in “stealth mode” (meaning it’s not ready yet) to develop a new online travel channel called Travelistic that he describes as “YouTube meets the Travel Channel meets YouTube”.

Whether that sounds exciting depends, I suppose, upon how much you enjoy watching people’s lousy home movies or the Travel Channel, and whether you believe that a mix of these two things creates “synergy”, to use a little industry vernacular. Personally, I sometimes find the Travel Channel unwatchable, and YouTube’s offerings work for me about .056 percent of the time. But the online video thing is changing damn awful fast, and someone is going to score big in this arena, so we’ll keep an eye on this one.

Double Tall Skim Catpooccino To Go

by Iva Skoch on

If you’re a coffee lover, maybe you’ll want to make a special flight on Japan Airlines to buy “the rarest coffee in the world“: civet coffee. But this specialty brew is sold only in business class, to the tune of $600 for 100 grams.

You’re not going to find this in any Starbucks. Your other options for getting the coffee are limited: if you’re not heading to Japan, a single coffee shop in Vienna sells the beans. If you’re really adventurous, maybe you can sniff out the source directly: the Philippines. An environmentalist husband and wife team, named Reyes, has made a multi-million-dollar business out of its harvest. Non-coffee drinkers themselves, they accidentally stumbled into the civet’s special gift while doing conservation work on sugar palm trees outside of Manila in 2003.

What makes the coffee so rare? It’s made from the droppings of the civet cat. Apparently, this nocturnal, ferret-like cat eats sugar palm fruit and coffee cherries. (Oh, and you can catch SARS from it too.) The coffee bean is not digested, but ferments in its digestive system and is excreted, much to the delight of locals, who collect the ready-to-roast beans, but try to keep the origin secret. The roasted beans give off a “sweet chocolatey aroma” and produce a “strong and earthy” brew.

Ah, I can just imagine the aroma!

Last Best Places

by Erik Olsen on

We post a lot here about various things to see on the net that we know will be of interest to those with a passion for travel. And occasionally those posts contain some activist aspect since, let’s face it, travelers tend to be curious, passionate people who share an interest in preserving the wondrous places around the world that always inspire us. Well, I’d like to direct you to one of the better sites I’ve seen in a while that mixes travel with environmentalism. This wonderful interactive and educational series over at the Minneapolis Star Tribune should be viewed by travelers with a green sensibility.

Called The Last Great Places the site offers vivid photography, audio slide shows, and thoughtful commentary on three places that best represent a specific type of ecosystem. They are: Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Grand Canyon. You can spend a solid spot of time here, and I suggest you give it a spin, as you will undoubtedly learn a few things you didn’t know about each of these places, including insights into science, travel and policy. It’s been a while since I’ve come across something so well put together, not to mention inspiring from a travel point of view.