Photo of the Day (12.06.08)

I booked a ticket to Australia a little while ago, and now that we’re in the new year, the reality of my journey is starting to hit. In the throes of planning our itinerary we considered a variety of destinations, including wine country, in the South of the island. Scenes like this, taken by colmdc in Barossa Valley make me even more certain that it’s a place that I want to visit. We’ll see where the winds take us.

Have any cool photos you’d like to share with the world? Add them to the Gadling Pool on Flickr, and it might be chosen as our Photo of the Day. Make sure you save them under Creative Commons though, otherwise we can’t use them!

Photo of the Day (8/14/08)

Today’s photo of the day comes from Flickr user fiznatty who shot this in Yorkshire, in the U.K. I love how the sun lights up the landscape while the sky above begins to turn dark. Throw in a single tree and a house and you have a piece of art.

Way to go fiznatty for capturing a moment that most people would have rushed past.

Are you a Flickr user who’d like to share a travel related picture or two for our daily consideration? Submit it to Gadling’s Flickr group right now! We just might use it for our Photo of the Day!

Why take the Buddha Bus?

I don’t understand why the OzBus is popular. Why would you want to spend 13-weeks on a bus, traveling with a rigid itinerary and a bunch of people you don’t know?

People say: it’s the most environmentally friendly way to travel, it’s the hippy way to travel (?), it’s a different experience. To me, just the thought is excruciating and exhausting. That’s just me though, no strings independent travel is more my thing and I can travel in an environmentally friendly way without being handcuffed to a bus.

Anyway, I bring this up as I read news of the launch of the Buddha Bus: a bus that will take you from London to China in 16-days. The first “Zen bus” will depart from London on September 6.

“To broaden the mind, to stimulate the senses; the perfect antidote to the stresses of the modern world,” is it’s philosophy. It plans to average about 800km a day (with the occasional rest days inserted here and there) — that’s at least 8-hours of daily bus journey. To me that translates to: a sore bum from bumpy roads, waste of time because of numerous bathroom breaks, 60-odd chattering strangers, traffic jams coming into and leaving the city, occasional overnight travel, departures at dawn — urrmm — how exactly is it an antidote to stress?

The longest time I have spent being on a road at a stretch is 4-days/3-nights on a train in India. It was air-conditioned, I was only with my family, the train had sleeper-bunks; it was a typically smooth ride, I can’t complain but I wanted to strangle my parents at the end of it, and other than green fields and a few dirty bathrooms at the train stations, I saw nothing.

I have not been on the OzBus, or any such journey — so it’s really not my place to rant. I’d love to think that the “environmental-friendly experience” is the whole and sole reason why people choose to take such long and organized road trips, but I have my doubts about that.

Have any of you been on a similar journey? Was it worth it?

Drivers Beware: The Most Dangerous Roads in the World

Living near the Rocky Mountains, I thought I had some experience with dangerous roads. The ones I frequent twist and in turn around, over and under the huge, jagged mountains, through avalanche plains, with only a guardrail protecting your car from plummeting off a cliff’s edge. It wasn’t until I started travelling that I realized that the most dangerous road that I’ve encountered in Canada would be considered a smooth, luxurious ride in other countries.

So if our roads aren’t dangerous, where are the dangerous ones? I did a bit of research and here are the most dangerous roads in the world according to USA Today (click here for the full list):

  1. Bolivia’s The Old Yungus Road, from La Paz to Coroico
  2. Brazil’s Interstate 116
  3. China’s Sichuan-Tibet Highway
  4. Costa Rica’s Pan-American Highway
  5. Croatia’s coastal roads (any of ’em)

Judging by this article on the Old Yungus Road, I think I’ll pass on taking a trip on it anytime soon.

Band on the Run: A Roadie Without The Heavy Lifting


Alright, this is the first post of a new series entitled “Band on the Run,” (as you can see above.) This is a blog about travelling on the road as a musician here in North America. It’s about what we see and where we’ve been – the stories that go along with those journeys and the images to accompany them. It’ll be like you’re the roadie that gets to witness what happens behind the scenes without having to carry any heavy equipment.

Lucky.

(I mean, I’m the bandleader and I don’t even get out of carrying the heavy stuff!)

Specifically, I’m a Canadian musician with a Canadian band who performs more than half of my shows south of the border. And yes, I have provincial license plates on my van and work permits for the U.S.of A. for all of my band members, so I’m down on American soil legally, don’t worry!)

We are on the road A LOT, which sometimes means that we’re home less than we’re away. In fact, at one point just a few years ago, we peaked at 200 days on the road during the year. I am happy to report that we’ve calmed down slightly and probably are out only half the year now. That’s slightly healthier all around, for everyone.

The downside of this life is the fact that we’re travel-tired most of the time and we spend copious amounts of time in moving vehicles, most notably our van (or occasional rental vans if there’s a flight involved.) Sometimes we joke that we’re professional drivers who moonlight as musicians.

Sometimes it feels like that.

The upside of this life is that we get to make music for different audiences sometimes four and five times a week. Music is what we love to do the most in this world. Music is the drug of choice for this band; it’s the art; it’s the heart; it’s the fuel. Without it, why would we do this to our bodies? Why would we sit in a van for ten hours in a row, for example?

Honestly, music has taken me far and continues to pull me farther still. I am tempted by its long distance promises and its moments of brilliance on foreign stages, no matter what it takes to get to them. (So tempted that I sometimes make bad touring decisions, but I’ll leave that for the blog as they happen…)

Music is my nightlight. It’s the good dream. It’s consistent.

Stylistically, it’s a rather mixed-up folk-jazz-funk-pop-world combo (check out samples here). It’s lyrically-driven music and the show is as much about what’s being said in the songs themselves as it is about what’s being said between the songs. I sometimes write about topics that people don’t want to discuss. I also write about love and beautiful summer days and funny situations worth laughing at. All in all, the music has listeners and that’s all that matters.

After ten releases (counting the 2005 documentary-stye DVD, of course), five vans (we’re on our fifth now), uncountable tours across various parts of Canada and the U.S., eight trips to Australia, two tours to New Caledonia (link to where that country is, as it’s little known!), and one solo trip to China, the adventure continues.

We’re not famous, but we’re well-known in some circles. We have fans – listeners and supporters and friends – and we continue to sell albums. We continue to perform live. People continue to buy tickets to hear those shows.

Life is good.

We’re independent, too, which is important. These tours are not being funded by big label tour support or sponsorship dollars or product placement. We aspire to sustainability and this means we ride waves of occasional prosperity and occasional poverty. In the midst of it all, we find the balance of a living and breathing career that has careened along the corners of mountain passes for over a decade now.

No complaints.

I don’t think it’s poised to stop anytime soon. It always changes shape a little as time loops around us, but the wheels keep turning on these travelling vehicles and we keep finding ourselves in them along with gear and contracts and passports and a well-calculated number of clean underwear tucked away in our suitcases and stashed around guitars and amps and on top of boxes of CDs to stop that incessant rattling of plastic against plastic.

It’s not all glamorous, but what is really?

Behind the scenes is just behind the scenes. It’s my job to strip the scene for you, I suppose. It’s my job to bare all.

(But it’s not that kind of show, so get your mind outta that sticky trench now!)

Now if you do enjoy these stories and we end up in your town all of a sudden, we won’t deny you the opportunity to lift some heavy stuff if you show up early to help us load in or you stay long after the rest of the audience has gone home until we’re finally loading out.

In fact, temporary roadies are the BEST.

They have enough strength to lift the bass amp…

And that same strength didn’t require a meal buy-out.

Love it.

[All photos except the van shot by Desdemona Burgin, a fantastic friend and photographer]