I’m off to Australia.
I’ll arrive in Broome carrying only my backback, and I’ll leave from Sydney a month later. I have just a generic idea of the route I’ll follow, and haven’t made any specific plan. It’s a sort of adventure.

Anyway, since I’m a nerd and a programmer I’ve made a website to track my journery: australia.pavese.info (as of this writing I’m testing it in Milan. I’ll reset the DB before leaving).

I’ve prepared a simple iPhone app that I’ll use to log entries with my current location (GPS coordinates), a twitter-like short message, a timestamp and an optional photo. These entries will then be uploaded to the website, which will display them on an interactive map (Google Maps), draw my travel path, and show each entry’s details as they are selected.

The tricky bit is that most of the Australian territory is not covered by any mobile network, thus I can’t count on a constant internet connection.

Indeed, internet coverage in central Australia is quite bleak. Here are the coverage maps of VirginMobile, Vodafone and Telstra.

My workaround consists in having the app save the entries locally on the iPhone. Later, when I’ll have access to an internet connection, a separate app function will upload pending entries.

It will be a funny month.