About - Walk the World

How we plan our trips

We love travelling and have been going away together since 2009. We share some interests and these have a big influence on where we travel and what we do when we are there.

Generally we do all of our own travel bookings using internet sites for flights, hotels, trains and ferries. So far we've usually been pleasantly surprised when we arrive at a place we've booked to stay, and our stories usually have a little section on our accommodation.

During one of our trips to Bali we discovered a vacation club called Karma Group. Karma has over 30 properties in Europe, India and South East Asia. It also provides access to the worldwide RCI collection of vacation properties. Many of our vacations have been planned around one or two-week stays in properties in the Karma network. One of the best was two weeks at Karma Minoan in Crete. You can take the trip with us by looking at the story we wrote about it.

One way to save on accommodation costs is to become a house-sitter. We've joined Trusted Housesitters and completed a number of house/pet sitting assignments around our home state of Victoria. Trusted Housesitters is headquartered in the UK and has sitting opportunities around the world. Building a good profile locally should stand us in good stead when we look for places while travelling.

When we lived in Melbourne we were members of a bushwalking club, Boroondara Bushwalkers. We mostly did medium-hard day walks of up to 25 km within a couple of hours drive of Melbourne. But we've also done a number of multi-day pack carry trips and a few base camps. Between 2011 and 2015 we lived in Perth, Western Australia and became members of Perth Bushwalkers Club and did a lot of walking around Perth as well as a few road camping trips around WA. Now that we have moved to Cairns, we need to make contact with the Cairns Bushwalking Group.Many of our international travels are either planned around walking destinations (e..g. Mt Semeru, Indonesia; Vilcabamba, Peru) or have walking areas planned (e.g. Cinque Terre; Leysin, Switzerand; The High Tatras, Slovakia).

We love live music, particularly jazz, blues, and classical. Whenever we get to a city, we look for shows to see when we are there. Our nephew, Michael MacManus, was formerly Director of the Melbourne Guitar Festival, before he moved to Seoul. Through him, we have met and become friends with some of the classical guitarists he has brought to Melbourne. Whenever we can, we try to meet then if we are passing through their home town.

In the long term, we plan to retire completely and go travelling more, or maybe settle in a country and use that as a base for more adventuring. We've taken off on a very long trip through Europe, the UK, Egypt and Jordan through 2022-23. If you go to the News page, you can see the posts we have been doing while we are away.

City walks

The internet is a vast source of travel and tourist information, but for trips in Europe it's hard to beat Rick Steves' travel information. His site has a huge number of articles and videos, most of them free to watch or download. There is also a Rick Steves app for Android and iPhone. The map and audio for walks can be downloaded to be used offline if you don't have a mobile data connection on your phone.

One of Rick's offerings is a series of audio tours, with maps, for a lot of walking tours around European cities and cultural sites. Whenever we go to a new city in Europe the first thing we do is see if Rick has a walk for it. They are a great way to introduce you to the main sites and provide a bit of information to get you started on your explorations. As well as being much cheaper (free) than the ever-present hop-on-hop-off buses they have the advantage of getting some exercise into your day.

Rick doesn't have walks for all the places we've been in Europe, so we also use one called Izi.TRAVEL, but there are a few others in the apps stores as well. The walks in some apps can be downloaded for offline playback.

Day walks

Chris has an interest in GPS navigation and uses a number of sites to find and download walking routes to a Garmin eTrex hand held GPS device and to his phone. The phone is usually OK for day walks but the eTrex has replaceable AA batteries which means it can be kept charged and working for multi-day walks.

The three sites we use most for international walks are: All Trails, Wikiloc, WanderMap and outdooractive, and for Australian walks: Bushwalking Victoria, Trail Hiking Australia and for walks near Perth, WalkGPS.

Between them, these sites have tens of thousands of walking, hiking, cycling and riding trails, often with track notes, photos and downloadable GPX files. These sites are free to access but some require a free registration.

Be aware though, not all have good (or any) notes, and even if they do they may be in another language (Google Translate gets a workout for these ones). We've found out a couple of times that no notes can mean some very interesting surprises on walks!

For the eTrex, Chris uploads the GPX files using the free Garmin Basecamp mapping program and installs free Open Map Project map files for the regions we are walking in. To see tracks on a phone we use the MAPS.Me app. MAPS.Me works with KML files, but the GPX files can be easily converted on-line. Attach the KML file to an email and send it to yourself. When you download the KML attachment on your phone it opens in MAPS.Me and automatically saves as a Bookmark.

The stories

Over the years we have tried to capture our travels in photographs and sometimes by way of simple emails to friends and family as we went along. A couple of years ago, while searching for a better way to record our trips, we stumbled across an obscure new Microsoft product called MS Sway.

Microsoft seem to be developing this program as an alternative to Power Point. It has some limitations, like not being able to be accessed off-line, but it has some nice features for our purpose. We upload the stories about our trips, and the best of the photos we have taken and, through some sort of AI magic, Sway formats the whole thing into an on-line show.

The Walk the World Our Travels page has links to all of the Sways we've made so far, organised into travel regions. So far we've created around 30 Sways, either on-the-go for the last couple of years or by transferring notes, emails and photos from earlier trips into the new format. We still have a few old trips under construction, but we plan to be adding new ones from future adventures as soon as we have put them together.

Keep coming back to see more stories about where we have been.