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.

How to Hack Secret Hotels

Here’s a revelation – I like staying in 5 star hotels! But, unfortunately, I don’t like paying for them. Not with cash or bodily organs, something which many of them seem to charge (an arm here, a leg there).

So, what a cool thing it is to have most hotel booking sites offering discounted stays at 5 star hotels. The only drawback being...... you don’t find out the name of the hotel or it’s location until after you have parted with your hard earned.

It’s a pretty sweet deal but many people still baulk at the unknown aspect of it – what if it is far away from where I want to be? What if I’m somehow being ripped off? Well, I reckon there are 4 easy to spot clues that can help you narrow down the guesswork so you can be relatively sure you know which hotel you’re getting before you pay.

NOTE: I’m not saying this is foolproof. It may be a bit like Sex Panther (works 60% of the time, every time for those of you who appreciate the Anchorman reference) but for I reckon I get it pretty spot on.

So the way I do it is firstly I have a look at the description page for the relevant Secret Hotel. I’m going to go over the page and find any characteristics that may make this unidentified hotel stand out from the crowd.

Clue 1: It’s self rated – So my line of thinking says that I can eliminate any hotel that is not 5 star self rated. Easy!

Clue 2: ‘Centre of the Shops and more’– ok so it’s in the middle of the shopping area of the city from which I ever so smartly deduce that it not on the outskirts. Its closest attraction is the shopping district which rules out plenty of others.

Clue 3: Check Out times - In by 2pm, out by 11am. Easy. We can use this to eliminate hotels with different check in / out times.

Clue 4: Hotel Facilities – I try to find the aspect that is most unusual. For the example shown it is an outdoor heated pool. Not too many hotels have these so searching specifically for hotels with this feature really narrows possibilities down.

After collecting all these clues the task becomes easy. We use the search function and enter in all our clues. From this we take the number of possibilities down from 165 (all rated hotels in Sydney) to 35 (5 star rated) to 8 (swimming pool, sauna, day spa, 24 hour reception). From these only 5 are self rated not including the Secret Hotel. But!! Only 1 of the 5 self rated hotels have an outdoor heated swimming pool. Voila!!

This means our secret hotel advertised as ‘5 Star CBD Sydney, centre of the shops and more’ for $245 a night on the 22nd of March 2012 is, in my opinion, is the Swissotel Sydney, located in Market St above the Pitt St mall. Now their regular price

The Clique - Press Release

Sydney, Australia, 25 January, 2011.

Former Australian sports star Todd Byrne creates iphone app to solve the problem of lack of trust in online travel reviews.

‘The Clique’ lets users provide their exclusive social network with trusted, reliable and immediate travel advice via posts and integration with Facebook. This puts to an end to the annoyance of relying on travel reviews written anonymously or by strangers when searching for trustworthy online travel information.

"I had the idea coming home from playing in England. My girlfriend and I were looking for a hotel in Bangkok and we ended up in a dump after following advice from various travel websites. Upon returning home, I discovered a mate had been traveling Bangkok two months before. I thought, 'usually my friends are the first people I ask when I travel local or overseas... Imagine if I could immediately access their recommendations?’

The application offers an easy-to-use and immediately accessible platform, taking design inspiration from the former creator of NexGen Gaming, one of the USA's biggest gaming companies, Dave Lewis.

"I'd had this same idea floating around my head. I hate having to rely on reviews by people that are just so off the mark or clearly rubbish. This way I know exactly what people I trust think, and even more importantly, it gives me perspective: if I know one of my friends doesn't like action movies and I do, I'll probably take his review with a pinch of salt. So when I spoke with Todd, I was keen to help him create this specifically for our social circle."

Australian Internet Guru Ed Dale says a shift to sharing between only those in your social circle is emerging. "Today people are bombarded by information. Online, tv, radio, print, it just keeps coming and we just can't keep up with it all. We're so time poor that we have to be choosey about what we consume. This is leading to consumers who don't want or need to know what everyone on the planet thinks or does. We are moving away from that big busy, global market and going back to the village community where you rely on only those that you know."

The Clique is free in the app store. For further information visit: http://www.thecliqueapp.com.

The Clique features:

*Integration with Facebook and Google Places
*Ability to review in hindsight
*Elegant User Interface
*Slider to easily move from friend to friend

"The Clique" App Video Guide

Making Mistakes

This post is a little bit of a deviation from the app development process but it has impacted me enough (and is also important in itself) to warrant a full post. It details some of the mistakes I've made in developing an iphone app and what I've learnt along the way.

The 8 essentials of application user interfaces

This post takes you to the next level with your app ideas. Once you have the function and icon organised, it's time to think about your user interface, or in other words how users travel through and interact with your app.