In isolation at home

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WELL hello friends. Long time no see. It's been quite a long time since I've done any travel at all - perhaps for obvious reasons. I'm coming here from my little home office.

I'm in the process of doing a little bit of a revamp on my website walkaboutjeff.com. It's looking a bit old and tired now and very bloated with years of content on it, so I'm refining it a little bit. I'm particularly working on the photography section. So you will see a new banner up here and a bunch of really good photos. What I have been doing you probably have been seeing I have been loading two photos a day (on the Facebook page) most days over several months. I've been watching which photos have been getting the most clicks, the most likes and the most comments. From that I have been picking out the best of the very best and been presenting them in a simple photo catalogue. So if you don't like the really long trekking blogs, this is for you. It will be a couple of weeks before this comes out but in the meantime, you can keep following the photos (on Facebook) hitting like and commenting and the ones that get the most response will be going on the photography page. So keep your eyes open for that.

Anyway. Travels. Let's get back into travels. Obviously I'm stuck here in my home office, have been for a time but I am still very keen to do my travels. As you know one of my big goals this decade is to travel from here (Antarctic Circle) all the way up (through the Americas) to here (top of Alaska) this decade. As you probably know I've just done this little bit probably up to about here (Santiago). So I still haven't done much of it yet, still a long way to go. But obviously with everything going on in the world at the moment with all the borders closed and all the craziness happening all around the world, I certainly won't be doing any more of this anytime soon but I certainly will get back out there when it is safe.

Fortunately here in Australia and I see over there in New Zealand as well we are just starting to ease off on restrictions a little bit. As of this coming weekend we (in Queensland) will now be able to travel up to 50 kilometres from home. There are still a lot of restrictions but they are starting to open up some of the national parks. So for me that means the area I will be able to travel will be about one square millimetre on this globe which is hardly anything compared to travelling the world but we can run with what we have got so you will see me out there a bit more.

I'm thinking that travel in the future is going to be quite different from now on. You probably remember back in 9-11 travel changed quite significantly after those event. Airport security really ramped up and we all had to go through x-ray machines and scanners and all sorts of weird and wonderful things. It added an extra layer to the whole travel experience. Every time we transit in between airports we had the same thing and go through security. That's completely normal now.

Obviously with this situation not clearing up anytime soon I don't think, I'm thinking there is going to be an extra layer at the airport and going on cruise ships with the quarantine thing going to really ramp up. I think we are going to see everyone having to carry doctor's certificates to say that we are healthy. For those of us who have travelled to some of the tropical countries we have had to carry our little yellow fever card. I think from now on they are going to be a lot more stringent with having a lot more vaccinations on our cards and also medical certificates and they will be doing the little test as well - the temperature test and goodness knows what so that is going to add a whole new layer of inconvenience to travelling. The security thing is a fairly straight forward process once you are used to it and familiar with the process it should only take a few minutes so long as it is not too busy. I think quarantine is going to be a lot more tricky so I think the time we are going to be spending at airports and crossing borders is going to be greatly extended. So it will be interesting to see how it is going to pan out. Anyway that's enough speculation from me. We'll leave this up to the experts. I'm sure they are working on that right now.

But let's not let something like that stop us from travelling around the world when borders do open again and when it gets safe. But in the meantime I'm going to start really small, start with my little square millimetre of travel here and start exploring the local area again, and we'll take it from here. I'll let you know when the new website gets loaded.

Anyway, ciao for now.