Test Run for The Australia Trip

Posted on February 26, 2020March 10, 2020 by Timothy Hausler

A brief introduction; After many years of working hard together, we found ourselves in receivership of long service leave. Originally we had planned to travel internationally. However, our work provides us with plenty of that opportunity and the AUD is weak. Instead, we figured we’d head around Australia. I guess Australia isn’t cheap to travel either, but some of that cost depends on how to travel.

So – driving around seemed like a sensible idea given we’re residents. Camping for 6 months seemed like a stretch, we’ve done that for a month but 6 would be tough (for us), hotelling/motelling is an option but that’s great for keeping close to towns and cities but leaves little room to explore beyond that. Thus really for us pulling something better than a tent was the plan.

Our younger selves after a month of camping, we were still smiling but I think after 6 months we might not be smiling

We decided against a big caravan almost immediately without much thought, I guess we just figured that we don’t have lots of people to sleep, and we want to access rugged areas. There are exceptions to that rule but we also don’t have the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to buy something that fits both purposes. We also would need to buy something which could pull it… Yes, that brings us to our car. We have an old land cruiser BJ42, now I (Tim) had thought we could think about changing this over for something more comfortable, but Lena was of the mind that as I’d spent so much of my spare time toying around with the stupid thing that we would get some use out of it for a change… and fair enough!

Turns out I was lying, we don’t have just one but two – well it’s a long story as the one on the right was my brothers…

But it’s a Landcruiser? Right, yes they’re those huge cars pulling semi-trailer length caravans along the road, wrong. The small 40 series diesel land cruisers are/ were basically the worlds most powerless cars. The original 3B motor generates a huge 25bhp at the rear wheels (this is less than a reasonable 250cc motorbike makes). However, we did have a leg up on the 3B which has trouble pulling you in the driver’s seat, we found after much searching a 13BT turbo. A little tuning later the car was yielded a whopping 78bhp at the rear wheels. This means we were in the market for a lightweight camper van or trailer that we might be able to tow up gentle hills.

When I was younger my parents toured Australia in a Jayco Lark, I have many fond memories of that caravan. We looked into it and while excellent there was an overwhelming concern that while great on the road, off-road was hard on it resulting in breakage. Do I know for sure? Would it have been a better buy than what we have, who knows? This left us in the world of camper trailers. Our first discovery is that while you get plenty less in a camper trailer it would seem that you don’t pay any less… We thought something in the 10-20k mark would be easy to find. But that’s just not the case, most camper trailers exceed that. Another surprise was that off-road camper trailers are heavy. As that had completely stuffed up our budget, we figured that, bugger it lets just get something that’s good. In the end, we settled on an Ultimate Xplor, and yes, you’re right, it’s more than 20k, more like three times that.

We would put this choice largely down to a few things:

Something that had everything we wanted and was comfortable and we were confident that we wouldn’t need to test run it multiple times before we departed
Internal Kitchen
Very light, 850kg
Looks good and has a double bed and hot water if you want it

We were going to skip on a test run, but given the weather was nice we thought we’d head up to our family property on the darling downs to see whether the Landcruiser could really pull the van up a steep hill (the Toowoomba range) and that there were no unexpected surprises.

It turns out that some of the things which we ordered like ‘hot water’ in the
Ultimate while seeming gimmicky make for a totally different experience. That being that you don’t have to go to bed in your own personal dirt covering, or psyche yourself up for a cold shower under a bucket to return to human.

So, did we gain anything from the test run and did we miss anything?

Some spares for the land cruiser.. well that is a never-ending requirement; fan belts, heater hoses, radiator hoses, tin snips to name a few – maybe later I’ll add a full list of tools and spares for anyone foolish enough to take something like this on a trip… and no doubt it’ll never be what’s required
Surprisingly simple cooking utensils like spatulas and cooking spoons. Normally this would be part of the bbq stuff when camping but we missed it
Ground matt for the entrance, either that or have dirty feet
Small broom and some spare rags

Otherwise, all that was left before the trip could commence was some minor car modifications (resonator to cut down on the drone at 100kph, UHF radio and interior console, radiator overflow capture bottle) and packing.

Western Australian Wildflowers

Posted on October 24, 2016October 24, 2016 by Timothy Hausler

West Australian wildflowers are not something that we’d heard of before, okay apparently Lena knew about them but I didn’t. I guess this is another strong indication of our, probably my, naivety, but what, they have flowers in WA? Yes, everywhere has flowers, but it’s not something that I’ve considered Australia to have many of, especially not the dusty west. So watching the news and talking to friends here we discovered that we were quite wrong. Western Australia has a beautiful spring season where outback is drenched with cool winter rain and when it begins to warm up the flora erupts in a truly Australian style flower season. When we say truly Australian style flower season we’re referring to small but delicate flowers and orchids hidden in hardened outback scrub. Somewhat un-easterly there are also hundreds of kilometres of what would normally be dusty undergrowth converted into lush white low-lying clouds.

We had planned to go with my parents but due to an altercation with an inconsiderate river bank which resulted in more ankle adjust-ability than mum was interested in, the long-planned caravanning trip around Western Australia during the wildflower season did not come to pass. This was quite a disappointment for my parents, but on the upside good for my work. It also meant that a leisurely trip with our parents was changed into a long haul journey with friends over a weekend. But, beggars can’t be choosers (except for well beggars….).

So our trip made its beginning on a surprisingly clear afternoon from Perth, cold yes but clear. This year is apparently the coldest on record for the last 20 something years in Perth which has been put on just for us apparently. It would’ve been much more preferable that the weather was nice and cold when we were in Japan earlier in the year for skiing, maybe since this is bad luck we’ve got a bucket load of good luck coming, it has to average out surely… This trip was also another one of Lena’s major driving practise runs, in fact, she’d, I guess you could say, nominated herself as designated driver for the weekend. This would come in handy when we were trying to keep up drinks with sheep shearers in Morawa, which is impossible.

So driving out we headed straight for the Jurian Bay tourist park which is about 300km north of Perth and on the shore. We didn’t have high expectations for the caravan park beyond it just being a momentary stop in our movements toward our main flowery objective. As it turned out the holiday villas at Jurian Bay tourist park are actually quite good while a little pricey. Unfortunately the evening and the morning presented some pretty cold conditions so relaxing on the small deck or having beer on the beach was out of the question.

Our rough path of flower finding is below:

Lesueur National Park – the park was full of very small and ornate Australian wildflowers as well as a number of native outback orchids. The park has a ~10km loop which brings you to the Lesueur mountain walking track and a roughly 2km loop which takes you through the area of WA scrub wild flowers. This was a good chance for our little possie to walk around and take some photos. The variety of ornate small delicate flowers is spectacular, also many people seem to be intrigued by the flowers as well, and there seems to be general competition for people whether including other or not of finding as many types of flowers and orchids as they can. After walking the loop we headed for Coalseam national park, but named so because of the coal seam which runs through the side of the riverbank. This is also a stop off on what’s known as the everlastings trail which for us, while some of the everlastings were still about, was probably a little late.

Coalseam national park has a couple of areas to stop and do some short walks to a viewing point as well as down into the Irwin river. The eroded river banks are quite pretty and picturing this with the yellow undergrowth of the everlastings would be very pleasant. We ventured down into the Irwin river to have a look at what might be alive, or maybe it was just general curiosity. However we were lucky to spot two mulga parrots which were looking for some clean water to muddy up, or was it for them to get clean. Then walking back from the river to the car to my absolute delight we spotted a blue splendid fairy wren. This was highlight for me as I’d been keen to see one of these pretty blue wrens for a long time and they’d been rather elusive. Not only this but it had decided to do a little posing in a wattle which was in full bloom. We had however almost exhausted our time just getting from Jurian bay to Lesueur and then to Coalseam in a single day. Certainly if you wanted to climb Lesueur mountain then I don’t think attempting this in a single day would be wise. For us however this meant driving on the back roads to Morawa for a night with Mike, the British pub attendants and Ben who seemed to have quite the capacity to make flavoured vodka which went down well late at night.

Waking up the next day to the sound of a fire alarm in one of the Morawa pub rooms at the back of the pub was not entirely welcome, but served as a reason to get moving. The next job was to get some coffee which, according to the local newsagent was best at the service station. This was rather remarkable given that I would never pick the town service station to be good for anything but petrol. However the owner was very passionate about his coffee and it was quite surreal being prompted for whether I’d like a flat white or a latte in a small service station next to automotive supplies. True to their word the coffee was quite good and kept the male contingent awake while Lena navigated her way to the next flower destination.

Driving from Morowa to Perenjori is a pretty short stint compared to driving between Jurian Bay and Coalseam so this went swiftly and gave us a little bit of time to dry out. The community centre at Perenjori was excellent and the lady that directed us to the wreath flowers was full of enthusiasm and information. I can hardly believe that someone could be so enthusiastic after describing the same sets of instructions, fauna and flora descriptions to visitors all morning. Certainly if you’re looking for where to find flowers or wildlife I’d drop in an have a talk to them, also it’s basically the only place open in town on a Sunday so you’ll probably have few other choices if you’d like to have a chat to someone..

For us the wreath flowers were only a few minutes out from Perenjori (see the map above). They were also in the middle of a complete dusty dry what looked like dry mud car park. What on earth would’ve driving such strange flowers to make a choice to set roots into an inhospitable location like that is beyond our collective understandings. The soft delicate bush and it’s ring of pink flowers look like they were recently tossed (albeit carefully) from a flower truck.

After the wreath flowers we headed for the camel soak which was recommended by the lady at Perenjori as well as to monger’s lookout over the lakes. Both locations had much more of the same flowery undergrowth, in particular for us camel soak was a picturesk with a large exposed granite mound and surrounding areas of lush scrub and cool wetland providing lots more hidden spots for orchids, lizards and a pair of mulga parrots.

From there we drove to Bunden rock for a quick stop. Interestingly the brochure we had mentioned that you can stand on the rock and view the developed countryside along with the original native bush land. The contrast was evident and this proved another nice stop off. This largely rolled up our day and we returned to Perth.

Setting up GIT on Bluehost

Posted on February 14, 2016February 17, 2016 by Timothy Hausler

So, decided that since you’ve gone and bought VPS hosting services through Bluehost and you now have root access and an isolated virtual server you can do some interesting thing? Well I firgured at this point GIT would be handy and probably a straight forward installation process but due to a couple of minor hiccups it took me way longer than I expected.

Thus here are a few pointers which, had I have known beforehand would’ve made this a quick process.

Check whether you’ve actually verified your account on Bluehost. If you haven’t verified your account (which you might not have noticed if you had a standard hosting account) like I had things work merrily except that SSH access doesn’t. To check go to your cpanel -> server/performance ->accessmanagement as per below:
Verification was a bit of an annoying process. We emailed Bluehost as per their instructions given here. Sending the pictures of cards in is easy but they didn’t respond quickly. As this received no response after a day of waiting we called them and were verified in about 10 minutes. I’d say just give them a call and get it sorted out quickly (or verify your account when you signup even if it’s not of interest to you initially). That choice wasted a day of my time.
When the site was verified I had enabled ssh access from the cpanel (same location as above), while it said it was enabled it didn’t seem to be working. After stuffing around for quite some time as the ssh login connects, prompts for a user and password then reports ‘access denied’ which simply means Bluehost has not allowed you ssh access. There is nothing much you can do remotely to correct this beyond contacting Bluehost who after chatting to their tech support corrected the issue somehow (maybe something magical in the background). They didn’t give much explanation, so again my advice is just contact them via the chat as soon as that occurs and don’t waste time.
GIT installation. Don’t follow any guides telling you to download make files etc, I did and had to bugger with CURL and other packages which didn’t have their expected dependencies. Why oh why did no one just say install it using Yum, maybe the guides were out of date or maybe it’s because Bluehost’s guide just doesn’t come up high enough in the search results. Either way its simplest to install GIT using YUM from the command line i.e.
1. SSH into your site
2. Enable sudo access from the cpanel
3. Type in sudo yum install git (full guide see here)
4. Create your repository directory (mkdir ./yourrepo.git)
5. Change to the directory you just created (cd ./yourrepo.git)
6. Setup the repository by typing ‘git –bare init’ when you’re in the directory and you’re done
Install GIT on your PC/ MAC/ Whatever, there are many instruction guides but the most important thing is that once everything is installed create public and private keys using the GIT bash. To do this:
1. Open the GIT BASH
2. Use the ssh-keygen -t rsa command, enter your new key’s file name. If you leave the password blank then you won’t need to enter a password with GIT when it tries to contact the GIT repository.
3. The rest of the key copying and setup process is below
Following most online guides people are using the primary domain user from Bluehost as the GIT login. This user has unlimited SSH power over your server and giving this to all of the programming members is a bit insane. However I hadn’t realised that the Bluehost cpanel doesn’t give you any ability to create new users or public keys for separate users. Instead I (and you should too) just did this via SSH using the adduser and passwd commands. This was straight forward until it progressed to the ‘how to generate the public and private keys’.
You’ll have to make the keys and setup the config manually yourself. This is quite straight forward once I read the following article here. This is based on DigitalOceans servers but the guys gives you the manual commands you need. One thing to note is that you are best to create the public and private keys using GITs command line, ssh-keygen will run on the server and would work but at least you’ll be confident that GIT will work as there are many confusing moments. I followed this all carefully and made sure it was all ok, but somehow in the end I had the incorrect permissions on the files and the private keys did not work. Make sure your files look like those below, if they don’t, it won’t work:
[git@server .ssh]$ ls -la
total 20
drwx—— 2 git git 4096 Feb 14 07:59 .
drwx—— 5 git git 4096 Feb 14 07:24 ..
-rwx—— 1 git git 405 Feb 14 07:59 authorized_keys
-rwx—— 1 git git 1679 Feb 14 07:57 id_rsa_git
-rwx—— 1 git git 405 Feb 14 07:57 id_rsa_git.pub
[git@server .ssh]$
1. If you need multiple private keys and want to make things a little easier you can add a config file to your ‘c:\users\yourname\.ssh’ directory as per below
2. and put the following text in it
  ———————-
  Host yoursite.com
  HostName yoursite.com
  Port 22 (or different port if SSH is on a different port)
  User git (or whatever you GIT username is)
  IdentityFile C:\Users\yourusername\.ssh\id_rsa_git
  —————–
At this point you will have GIT setup, a new user and some private keys installed in the right directories and all you need to do is understand what GIT is, which is pretty obvious when you:
1. Right click, select ‘create new repository’ in your programming directory
2. Copy your source code into the folder and sub-folders (however you want to set it up)
3. Stage commit all your new files
4. Add a signature
5. Click commit
6. Click push
7. You now have a project which is ready to be pushed onto the Bluehost server and all your friends
Ok, now the part which combines everything and hopefully works for you – add a remote. This is poorly explained but see below:
1. It needs to work like ‘username@yourserver.com:yourprojectfolder.git’ (I believer you don’t need the ‘.git’ in the folder name but I guess it just lines everything up). When you press ‘add’ it will either work or give you an error. If it works the dialogue will disappear and it will not be visible in any dialogue anymore except in the ‘Push’/ ‘Fetch’ commands.
2. If you want to remove the a ‘remote’ then you’ll have to do it through the GIT bash. See this guide for more details.
Push your changes toward the server and hopefully if all of your setup is complete you should have your code synchronised. When you’re ready to unleash this on you friends/ colleagues, send them the private key and they can the work and synchronise they jobs as well.

And that’s about it, I had struggled to find all this information in one place as the tasks cover Bluehost, Centos and GIT all of which are a bit disparate.

Tim

Japan – Day 7 – The exchange of sight seeing for skiing

Posted on December 21, 2015October 22, 2016 by Timothy Hausler

This was our last day of sight seeing the main aim for the day was to catch the 1:16pm shinkansen from Shin-Osaka to Iiyama which goes via Kanazawa. Kanazawa is on the western shore of Japan and the rail trip from Osaka to Kanazawa is apparently a lovely rail trip in winter, although since we were in the worst snow season in years we mightn’t see much snow but at least we’d see some of the Japanese alps.

The rest of the plan for the day was to make our way through Osaka castle. We had low expectations for this and had not budgeted a lot of time, only two hours, which included breakfast. Sadly however it turned out that Osaka castle was actually very impressive. Our understanding of what a castle is is something big, strong, fortified with a mote. This matches Osaka castle which is a mammoth structure built to keep everything out. This is unlike unlike the imperial palace which appeared to have no great defensive structures aside from a wall. The castle included some huge wooden gates planked with impossibly large sections of trees and enormous stones hauled across the bay. The stones were not consistently enormous like you might see in a castle built with square stones cut from a quarry but huge slabs and small slabs stacked together exquisitely to form a flat impressive mosaic.

We sourced a couple of octopus balls for a walking breakfast and also to complete our Osaka food tasting requirements. In total it all took us about 2.5 hours instead of our planned two which was fine until we realised we had to really make a run for it and catch all necessary subway connections to get to Shin-Osaka. This was good fun, running for platforms in stations and lines which we’d only know for a whole one day. It included at one point having to open a closed gate at an unattended set of gates which we couldn’t pass through with the JR-Rail passes (maybe you’re not aware but the JR-Rail pass while giving you unlimited travel on the JR lines only allows so if you go through an attended counter so someone can wave you through). However with only three minutes to spare we made our train, this was lucky as had we missed it, it would’ve meant waiting an extra two hours at Iiyama station waiting for a bus and missing the connection with our friends.

The train journey itself was quite lovely and while the train does have power points on the bulkhead seats ours didn’t. This was a little concerning as one of the great things about the Japanese fast trains is you can plan while sitting in relative comfort. However the view out the window was rewarding and even if you really felt inclined to use the internet on your phone, you go through so many tunnels that the internet only intermittently works.

We made a brief stop in Kanazawa where we waited for a little over an hour for the next shinkansen to Iiyama. Tim opted to eat a large bowl of soba noodles as in Kyoto/ Tokyo meal sizes of large in fast food places was reasonable, however large in Kanazawa apparently large meant 3-4 people according to the cheff, so we resized to two mediums. We believe he however left the large as a test to see wether outsiders are as mad as they say. Challenge accepted and punished, but the late night suggestion by our friends for more soba noodles was so well recieved.

From Kanazawa to Iiyama was on the faster and quieter Hakutaka shinkansen, this was quick and we met our friends beforing bus-ing it to Nozawa-Onsen. The Iiyama shikansen station was very new and when we finished skiing (one week from now) quite a lot of people were bus-ing it to Nagano instead of Iiyama to catch a train. This might’ve been because they booked things prior or didn’t know. However you can definitely use the JR-Rail pass to get to Iiyama station from either Tokyo or Kanazawa. Bus timetable is here.

That placed us in our most expensive but definitely best accomodation for the trip at Address Nozawa. I couldn’t recommend a place more as they have lovely roomy suites for couples and provide breakfast.

Time for Soba noodles again and some skiing tomorrow……

P.S. – For the carpenters out there check out the impossible dovetail and sawtooth joint used in the castle supports. We can’t understand how you put that together.