At last I have found a soul more bitter than my own. He says the things we all think but are too well mannered to say out loud:
- Do you smoke, have tattoos and wear bits of metal sticking out of your face because you think it's co-o-ol?
- Do you wear ridiculous pseudo-ethnic clothing/a stupid hat/no shoes/a gitty goatee beard/a 'Free Tibet' t-shirt/all of these?
- Are you an Israeli, or just generally a git?
If you answered yes to all or most of the above questions then......... congratulations! You are indeed a Lonely Planeteer! May your tie-dyed t-shirt and batik pants never fade....you wanker.
When i set this website up in late 2002, i thought about how to maximise the effectiveness of my site design with search engines' ranking methods. I remembered back when i was doing my own hunt for information on cycle-touring in Asia, and what was most effective.
What seemed to work for me was hitting google with obscure town names, like "Sin Ho" in Vietnam, or "Lugu Lake" in China. It is really difficult to sift through the commercial 'brochure sites' to These places are not huge tourist destinations, and the people who had visited and written about them on their website travelogues were likely to be travelling slowly and have interesting things to say. This tactic worked quite well.
Combine this with an understanding that for Google, the word used to link to a page is a succinct description of the contents of that page. So I made sure the navigation used descriptive text links, such as the town names.
Three weeks after I finished setting it up, I surfed in from a cafe in China, and was surprised to see my site as the top result for cycle touring asia, cycle touring vietnam, cycle touring laos, even though i hadn't written anything about laos yet!
I'd almost forgotten that i've always wanted to go to Frenchmans Cap in Tassie for some expedition climbing, until i stumbled onto an old trip report on the Sydney Rockies website.
Cresting the narrow pass the sheer size of Frenchman’s SE face and its exposed lower slopes assaults the senses. A dominating 400 metre precipitous bluff, its dramatic height renders the idea of climbing on it seem dangerously misguided if not downright ludicrous.Swallowing a sudden urge to spend the rest of my holiday leading ringbolted routes at Nowra I continued on, following the path as it contoured high above the valley lakes. Another two hours of staggering and the trail dropped into Tahune hut with its alpine lake nestled in a cirque below Frenchman’s massive cliffs.
