GR5 Topographic Maps

GR5

I’m off to the Alps this weekend with my brother to walk the GR5, 400 miles of mountains from Mont Blanc to the Med. They’ve had a record snow year over there (best in 50 years apparently), and we’re rather optimistically starting in June – should be quite interesting on some of the high passes..! I’ve been using the French Geo Portail site to stitch together some topo maps for trip, thought I’d post the finished map set to save someone else the bother :)

Get the maps:
Here’s a link to the Zip file to download (250mb).

It’s a PDF of 77 A4 maps to colour laser print (doesn’t bleed when wet like inkjet), I’ve mapped out most of the main alternative routes (GR55, GR52 etc) and some other variations that looked interesting. The orange line has mile markers along it to make it dead easy to gauge distances at a glance.

Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico

Just back from my first trip to Mexico, other than briefly stepping over the boarder when starting the Continental Divide Trail. It didn’t disappoint – the weather was hot and sunny, the food was hot and spicy, and plenty of tequila to wash it down :) Not a bad recipe for and short winter break. We flew into Cancún, hired a car and worked our way down the Peninsula along the Caribbean sea.

2 days in Cancún

Lovely beach, sea was a bit strong for swimming, too many big concrete hotels for my liking, Nicky loved the swimming pools and air conditioning though.

3 days in Tulum

Tulum was lovely, all the accommodation along the coast was wood and thatch Robinson Crusoe style cabana’s. Everything had bags of character. We visited the ruins nearby, interesting enough, there’s access to an awesome beach by the ruins, make sure you take your trunks, we forgot…

1 Week in Mahahual

I really liked Mahahual, it’s about a 5 hours drive from Cancun, if I came back to the Yucatán I’d just drive straight here. We spent 4 days in the town, lots of beach side bars and nice places to eat, very relaxing and quiet. We quickly found our favourite bar – Chiquita’s, they had swings hanging from the roof as bar stools. An innovation I’d have to say I quite liked, a very relaxing way to enjoy one of their mean margarita’s. On the 3rd day two cruise ships pulled into town and the place was transformed, we quite enjoyed watching the sleepy little village spring to life to service all the cruise ship passengers before they embarked later in the afternoon. The sea is that amazing turquoise blue colour, calm and great for swimming, there’s a reef just off shore so it’s a bit like a lagoon. We stayed at Luna de Plata just on the outskirts of town, 700 pesos a night (about £35) very good value for money.

Then we drove down the coast road for a bit and stayed at Almaplena eco resort, probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at. It was twice the price of Mahahual, but it felt like it was worth the extra. Extremely comfortable rooms, right on the beach, nicer water than at Mahahual – deeper and bluer, palms trees hanging over it, awesome. I wanted to continue down the coast to the ‘naturalist retreat’ Playa Sonrisa, but once we’d found paradise Nicky didn’t want to budge.

All in all it was a pretty awesome break, wished we’d gone for longer. I’ve uploaded a set of holiday pics on Flickr is you want to check it out.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

Finally! First post in ages… This blog hasn’t changed a great deal since 2006, it was in desperate need of an update, so here we go. I’m just going to start out with the standard WordPress template and design it as I go, I need to learn a bit more about designing in a browser – these responsive layouts have made Photoshop fairly redundant.

The thing I most want to explore with this re-design as you might of guessed by the title of this post is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). I was shocked how shite to internet looks on Nicky’s new retina display laptop, fuzzy scaled up bitmap graphics when they have to potential to look so crispy clean is a sad thing to see. The future looks like it’s all about the vectors (again – r.i.p Flash).

It’s a bit of an arse though, even though SVGs have been around for ever, they still aren’t that well supported. I had to install a plugin so WordPress would recognise them as an image format. If you’re look at this blog in Safari you’ll already see the bug which scales the width but not the height… But I’ve only just started to scratch the surface, more soon.

New Zealand Highlights

Last week was the opening ceremony of the trail me and Nicky walked in New Zealand – Te Araroa. To mark the occasion I thought I’d share some of the progress I’ve made on all the photos and video we brought back.

I edited the photos first, there was about 25,000 to go through so I’ve only just finished! I got them down to reasonably easy to flick through 200 photo set of the highlights. And then a slightly longer 1000 odd photo set that covers the trail in a bit more depth.

We even got a few photos published in Geoff Chapple’s official trail guide, got our copy through the post the other day :)

If you followed our progress on Nicky&Cookie.com, you’ve probably seen most of these before, but you might be interested in checking out this short highlights video I’ve just finished putting together. It’s roughly in chronological order from the Top of the North Island to the bottom of the south, unfortunately I don’t have any footage of us getting to the end due to a memory card malfunction… Hopefully I might be able to recover some of it though. The rest of the video should be finished in the New Year.

Across New Zealand in 3 and a half minutes:

Help, we’re homeless!

So we’re back, we’ve found a new home in sunny Shadwell, but… We can’t move in until the 1st August, problem is we start work at the beginning of July – ~~we need a place to stay in London Town for 4 weeks~~. Weren’t sorted now thanks :)

Whoop Whoop! We Dun It!!

In case you missed it, me and Nicky have finished our walk across New Zealand! We’ve been swanning about the South Pacific for a while, but are back in the UK now so normal bloggin’ should resume shortly :)

What are we up to now? You’ll never believe this, but we’re about to start work on a project for the New Zealand Tourist board, ha ha awesome!

Ebay’s Galore!

I‘m a bit of a hoarder, I’ve been moving around stuff I don’t really need from house to house for years. Next week though, we have to put all our stuff into storage for the next 7 months, so I think it’s time to part with some things :(

My loss could be your gain though, everything starting at only 99p so garb yourself a bargain! Some highlights include the best looking pizza bike you’ll ever see, a near mint condition 1974 Honda Cub with only 4311 miles on the clock! My Apple MacBook Pro, only bought it 4 months ago to work out in Amsterdam so almost new. A load of vintage Bang & Olufsen stuff, including this tastey reel to reel tape deck. A Voigtlander 90mm f/3.5 SL Apo-Lanthar lens (plus Canon adapter) which I’ve decided not to take to New Zealand, plus loads more.

You can check out everything to sale here, happing bidding!

Te Araroa Trail Maps

May not be of much interest to most, but if you’re planning on doing the Te Araroa trail in New Zealand, or just fancy having a closer look at what me and Nicky are going to be doing for the next 6 months, then here’s all the maps (268.4MB).

I can’t guarantee the route I’ve drawn on is accurate, the route itself is constantly changing, but also expect a fair amount of human error! If you use these maps follow your judgement and common sense, over the orange line. I didn’t get around to making all the map notes I’d of liked too.. but I’ve run out of time now and need to get on with other stuff. My plan is to check for the latest route descriptions and read people’s journals to find out info about the next section as we go and then doodle these notes onto my printed out maps. I’ve left a space on every page to be used for this purpose.

Info about the maps:

I made them A4 size for printing (ink-jet or laser)
They are all .gif format (small file size, no artifacting)
The route drawn on has little white dots every mile (can’t get my head round distances in KMs)
There’s 103 maps in total, so you’ll need 52 pieces of paper to print them all out (both sides)
Split into North Island and South Island folders, all numbered consecutively from north to south
I’ve also done a total of 57 sheets of alternate routes, more on that later..

I always enjoy the pre-walk planning and mapping stage, although I’ve never bitten off anything even remotely as complex or long as this before (CDT maps were already done by Jonathan Ley). Got to say a big thank you to Land Information New Zealand who made all the 1:50,000 scale topographic maps and hats off to you for making them all freely downloadable :) The Te Araroa Trust for building the trail in the first place and providing all the route descriptions on their site. And most importantly to Geoff Chapple who founded the trust 16 years ago and who has been spearheading it’s development ever since.

When you’re following a pre-defined route, there’s always the temptation to work out a few variations that suit you’re own preference of terrain etc. While mapping the trail I managed to rack up more than I was expecting, 57 maps worth in total! I’ve got no idea how many, if any of these we’ll do, those sort of decisions usually make themselves at the time. But if you’re interested, these can be downloaded too (164.9MB).

Word of warning though – I’ve never been to New Zealand, so have absolutely no personal experience whether these are any good or not. I think they are all probably longer and more difficult than the official route.. But they do follow the same numbering as the official route maps (just with a ‘b’ after the number) so you can see where they fit into the trail.

If anyone other than me & Nicky end up using the maps, let me know how you get on!

International Kings of Sport

Well I’ve been meaning to post some pics and video of my brother stag do for a while and never got round to it.. Well better late than never!

Deciding what to do ‘as the main event’ for Giles’ stag do was a pretty simple decision as it was a continuation of a theme that’s been ongoing for the past 16 years. Me and Giles had a tradition of trying to drink our age in pints on each others birthdays. To prove that we had done it and quite frankly to help ourselves keep count, we would take a notebook to keep a tally of drinks. Usually it was only me and Giles that believed in the purity of starting at 11am when pubs open. So after we’d exhausted topics of conversation, we’d start filling up the notebook with not only the pints we’d drunk but also the scores of all random games we’d be playing from pub to pub. Influenced by a television programme of the same name, these bi-annual competitions of drinking stamina and pub game prowess become known as International Kings of Sport.

I’d always wanted to do something more like the original TV show, which itself was based on a surrealist concept from the 1960’s called the Flux-Olympiad, it followed the same format as the normal Olympics, with one small difference – the events were just plain stupid. Well no point explaining any further because I can just show you, first up is the..

Long Jump (head first)

Rules are pretty much the same as the normal long jump, but instead of measuring from your back foot, you measure from your furthest outstretched hand.. you know the superman dive! Shanks topped the charts on this one with an almighty jump of 5 metres 75 cms, although there was some controversy involving a double movement, but we let him off.

Photo by John, check out his photography portfolio – Cloverleaf Images »

Here’s the video:

100m Sprint (around a 10m circular track..)

In retrospect I’m not sure this was the best choice of event, running round and round in circles with a belly full of beer isn’t that good for your guts.. and the contents of my guts were all over the beach soon afterwards..

Here’s the video:

Photo Finish (the 3 metre sprint)

I actually think this should be an Olympic event, it’s really exciting because it’s always so close you can only tell who’s won by examining the photo finish afterwards. No video for this one I’m afriad the 5D was taking the bursts of photos.

Tennis Whack (with a cricket bat)

Simple rules, who can whack a tennis ball up in the air for the longest. We also played who can chuck a tennis ball the furthest, but to be honest the footage wasn’t that thrilling. The two greenies dominated this event, with big greeny just pipping his brother by 4 hundredths of a second.

Here’s the video:

Who was the King?

Hedgy! – long live the king of sports! I’d like to point out that I came a very respectable joint second with Greeny :)

Well I could go on but I think this post is already quite long enough. If you we’re wondering where you have to go to find such fantastic weather, beautiful (and empty) beaches, the answer is North Wales! Harlech to be precise.

Back to Blogin’ (almost)

Leaving for New Zealand soon!

Just wanted to let you know our New Zealand trip is just around the corner! We fly out on the 16th of October and should hopefully be starting the long walk south about a week later. I finish working this week (yay!) but alas still won’t have much time for bloggin’ as we still have to move out of our house and finish up the last bits & pieces of preparation. If anyone needs a house to rent in Dalston for the next 8 months, we’re still looking for someone to move in! Details and pics on this Flickr set (it’ll be cleaner/less cluttered by the time we move out!).

Well the exciting news is I’ve got a new blog! Well it seemed a bit retarded to write about travels abroad on a blog called Made in England.. Can’t spill the beans yet as it’s still half built, but I think it’s going to be pretty damn good if I don’t say so myself :) When I showed Nico my ideas for the blog, he said:

“There’s pretty much nothing on there that is out of the box for a wordpress blog :) Which makes it really hard to estimate how long time it would take to put together.”.

Sorry Nico.. It might break the blog mould a bit, but I think it’s going to be a great way of documenting our trip. Plus with all the awesome images from the Canon 5D, it’s going to look amazing!