The Great Travel Tip - Off

This is me and my brother. He's big, he's white and he looked completely out of place living in the Northern Territory. This goes double when you consider he was residing down in the hot and humid Katherine where he was working as the legal aid representative for local Indigenous population.

Katherine is a town that gets a few tourists, usually on their way to Mataranka, Edith Falls or one of the many National Parks.

Now my brother and I clash a little - even when he is out of the courtroom he acts like he is in it but when I arrived back in Australia for a short break I wanted to take my girlfriend on a trip to see somewhere I considered a real part of Australia, so I knew he had to help with making it memorable.

We touched down in Darwin and waited for my brother to turn up to take us back to the Katherine. We spoke of our plans. The only places I knew there were all the usual tourist spots, but in typical lawyer fashion, my brother rubbished my naivety and told me he had a few beauties that very few tourists went to.

So after the 3 hour drive to Katherine and a dodgy Chinese feed at the local RSL, we woke up to a blisteringly hot and humid October day and hit the road. An hour out of Katherine we heard a strange sound.

Thump, thump, thump.

We'd blown a tyre. It's 42 degrees on a stretch of highway hours from anywhere, there are more flies than grains of sand and I'm on my haunches jacking up the car. My girlfriend started saying she felt like she was in the film Wolf Creek.

Anyway after hallucinating from the heat and humidity we got back on the road and soon came to a tiny signpost reading 'Bitter Springs'. I'd never heard of it but my brother was adamant. I swear if you didn't know it was there, you'd drive straight past it. So we swung the car and followed the track to its end. No other cars, no real car park, just a rudimentary wooden railing and an overgrown path.

But then we saw it. My brother had that 'told you so' look. It was magnificent in its natural, unspoilt beauty. No concrete, no souvenir shop, no tourist coaches, no toilets. Just a small wooden platform and the springs. It was like stepping back in time 40000 years. I can't even describe how much I loved it.

We stayed for an hour, swimming in the thermal water amongst the trees, reeds and fauna. We had it all to ourselves, a small piece of Dreamtime. My girlfriend was amazed, totally unbelieving of how a place like this could be so undeveloped and uncrowded. She said in Israel a place like this could never exist - it would be overrun completely. So we left with big smiles all round and as we drove back to the highway a tourist coach roared past coming from the direction of Mataranka.

To me, this is what travelling is about: not only finding a really cool spot, but seeing and doing something that most people don't get to. If my brother wasn't living up there I would never have found this place because when you're looking for advice, friends and family are the ones you turn to. Since this trip I've recommended Bitter Springs to the people in my Clique and the few who have visited Bitter Springs have all been thrilled with it. And my brother has since moved to Micronesia.... as part of my Clique, I'll have some awesome reliable travel recommendations for those beautiful islands that the average traveller probably will never know about.

Chik Chak Juk (Faster Cockroach)

When you're travelling one of the best experiences you can have is seeing an aspect of the country that you would have never dreamed existed. I recently had one of these in Tel Aviv.

Now, Israeli's have a reputation for being business minded and entrepreneurial. Many of the world's security systems and technology platforms come from the little country. But I think one of the finest examples of pure entrepreneurialism comes in the form of a cockroach.

I found out about it from a friend one night in Tel Aviv as a cockroach scampered across his living room floor. The girls we were with started screaming and standing on the lounge, petrified. One girl, a lot braver and more composed than the others started yelling "Chik Chak Juk". My mate proceeded to tell me about Chik Chak Juk and I thought it was hilarious, one of those cultural phenomenons that you never find out about unless you really live with the locals or are tipped into it by a friend.

Chik Chak Juk means 'Fast Cockroach' and it's an 'emergency' service that comes to your house and takes care of that rogue cockroach that has you standing on a chair in the middle of the loungeroom screaming your lungs out.

Like a cross between Ghostbusters and an ambulance it has a custom fitted car complete with a singing cockroach band, a theme song and a whole heap of willing customers. And like Australia's Mr Whippy, kids and adults the country over burst out in song whenever the Juk car drives past. I had to wait for days to get a shot of this elusive mobile cockroach hunter. Then one day, as if I were waiting to photograph a lioness in the plains of Africa, I had a fleeting chance.

In a hot and humid city like Tel Aviv, the shrieks of frightened Israeli girls and guys are only drowned out by the inexplicably catchy Chik Chak Juk tune. Like the Pied Piper of the bug world, kids run from their homes, adults put down their hommous and everyone comes out to watch Chik Chak Juk drive past on his way to kil another flying roach and collect his 30 shekel ($10) fee.

Unbelievable.

If you'd like, here's a video of Chik Chak Juk to laugh at.