Me, enjoying the ferry like a local in Sydney Harbour.

A lot of my travels to date have been quick whirlwind trips without staying place in one city for longer than a week, always on the go wanting to see as much as possible. I haven’t done the big RTW (round the world) trip, the longest I have ever been away on one trip is just over 5 weeks. I started traveling when I had a few weeks off here and there between my freelance jobs in film and TV and it always made sense for me to get away when I could instead of saving up for a longer trip and because of this I don’t think I’ve ever really “felt like a local” when traveling.

However on my last trip to Australia, I house sat at a friends place in Sydney while they were away in the US and I feel like I finally got to experience the feeling of a local outside of my own hometown. Even though Sydney is a big city, I enjoyed seeing familiar people every day for a few weeks on end whether it was the same people catching the train, or the guy who was always going in and out of the apartment the same time as me or the local shop owners and construction workers. Also knowing the directions to the grocery store or where to find cheap sushi. Just seeing people like that each day and knowing those things gives you a sense of familiarity and can really make a place feel like home.

Another thing that made me feel like a local while in Sydney was meeting up with friends who were locals and knowing more about the city than them. Granted I’ve been exploring the city and taking every tour possible, however some of my friends have been living there their whole life and I knew of great restaurants to eat at that they hadn’t heard of or knew about the free bus that runs in the city to get you around quick and free that was a surprise to them.

Cheap sushi and a friendly neighbourhood butcher are both fun things to know that make you feel like a local.

When I travel one my favourite experiences is when I know I’ve been able to blend in and people come up to me asking for directions. It’s happened to me many times in Australia, it happened surprisingly a lot of times while in Iceland, in Germany, Paris, Copenhagen and more.

I enjoyed becoming a “local” in Sydney and am now excited to share my Sydney Travel Tips with friends thinking of visiting there soon. If you want to know the best way to get to the zoo, where the best Greek butcher is, which pub has the largest amount of beers on tap and more I now feel confident that I can tell you the answers to these questions in Sydney like a true local.

Do you like slow or quick travel? Do you enjoy feeling like a local when you travel?

Kakadu National Park occupies 20,000 sq kms which most Australia travel guides will tell you is just a small chunk of an additional 100,000 sq kms of land in the Northern Territory known as Arnhem Land which is an Aboriginal reserve which you actually need a permit just to visit. Kakadu however is open to the public with purchase of a park pass and is home to gorgeous landscapes, original rock drawings, large crocodiles fresh water and salt water, countless types of gorgeous birds, fish like the Barramundi and a whole lot more.

I’ll be writing a lot more about Kakdu National Park and the Northern Territory soon, but first I hope you enjoy my photo essay.

The beginning of the winding road that takes you through Kakadu National Park. Up until a few years ago this road didn’t have a speed limit but recently 130 kms per hour signs have been posted. This is still extremely fast if you ask me. It’s almost like Australia’s version of the autobahn.

This photo hasn’t been edited in any way. Taken near the Nourlangie Rock Art site I think this photo encompasses the way the park makes you feel. Breathtaking, spiritual, or whatever it may be it’s hard to visit this place without it leaving its mark on you.

Life grows everywhere in the park even on rocks.

The rock drawings throughout the park are made from 4 main colours white (from clay) , red (from core and often blood), yellow (from limestone) and black (from charcoal).

Self portrait ruining the beautiful view. In the distance to the right you can see where Arnhem land begins. Not that I have seen the plains of Africa but this landscape definitely made me think of them.

Crocodile safety signs were posted everywhere. Fresh water crocodile however are a lot more timid than their salt water cousins however for me it was hard to tell between the two when we saw them. I was told to jump in the water and if it swam away it was most likely a fresh water croc but if it came at me I would know it was a salt water croc…. great piece of advice.

Sunrise over the South Aligator River. No Aligators are found here however, when the area was first discovered it was named inappropriately of course what they saw instead were Crocodiles.

If you look closely you can see two Jabiru birds (a type of stork) and sitting on the sign on the far right is a “Flying Kite” which is a raptor. In Kakadu there are so many birds flying around everywhere it wasn’t hard to get different birds like this in one shot. The two Jabiru’s are actually walking in a parking lot that was still flooded from the wet season.

“Happy Hour” when the sun is just right as the sunrises over the South Aligator River.

Crocodile! I had been on a tour the previous day on the East Alligator river and had only seen a small fresh water crocodile so I was excited to see this large salt water crocodile in the South Alligator river, as was the rest of the boat, good thing they are made to not tip over easily.

I have a lot of great photos from my few days spent in Kakadu National Park, so stay tuned for more photo essays from my trip and a video or two coming up soon.

Have you ever visited Kakadu National Park? What did you think of it?

Special thanks to Northern Territory Tourism for arranging my tour through the Northern Territory.

I have written about the famous La Tomatina, tomato food fight festival more than once and I am now happy to share my video experience of La Tomatina with all of you. Following the release of my Barcelona and Valencia, Spain video last week I bring you “La Tomatina, Tomato Food Fight in Bunol, Spain – Who? What? When? Where?” .

This is my newest video made in co-operation with Ocean Entertainment (read more about that here) and I couldn’t be more excited about it. Click play to watch me get covered in Tomato juice and cross another awesome item off the big bucket list that is life. Whether you decide to visit La Tomatina while backpacking Europe with your guide book or joining in on a group tour I think my video will definitely help you plan and show you just how awesome it is.

I hope you enjoy it, stay tuned for more and enter your email below to sign up for the **new** Travel Yourself monthly newsletter while you are at it.

A video made by the @irishpolyglot Benny Lewis of www.FluentIn3Months.com, Benny who I met briefly at a conference in Vancouver last June is (as nice as someone can possibly say this statement) a freak of nature. He fluently speaks 8 languages!!! 8!!!

In this video he is on a train in China on a journey taking him over 2,000kms and he surprises the people sitting with him on the train with his skills speaking Mandarin to them. It’s pretty to cool to see how people react to an Irish guy speaking fluent in their native tongue. Have a watch and learn more about Benny.

After riding on the train called The Ghan through the Australian Outback from Adelaide to Darwin I arrived at my hotel called “the Vibe” and received my itinerary for the next couple of days that the Northern Territory tourism board had put together for me. First item on the schedule was having dinner with them that night at an awesome Thai restaurant called “Hanuman” and the second starting early the next day, “Have breakfast then grab a taxi to Thrifty Car Rental to pick up your rental vehicle“.

My jaw dropped.

Rental vehicle?

Then the memory came flashing back, they had asked me before my trip if I could drive and if I had my license and without thinking about it I ticked the box yes. Not once did I think about how Australians drive on the opposite side of the road from Canadians and now the next 4 days of my trip was dependant on me driving myself from point A to point B.

I like to think that I am always up for a challenge, but this would be a difficult one that could be dangerous. I like to think I am a good driver, I can even drive a standard (stick shift) and this was an automatic, this couldn’t be too hard right?

My fancy ride

My learning curve for driving on the “wrong side” of the road was a quick one. I showed up at the rental place, they handed me the keys and I jumped in the car. 

My first manoeuvre was to get out of a tight parking lot and of course then make a right hand turn across traffic on one of the city’s busiest streets. I took a few deep breaths and turned on my blinker.

“Woosh, woosh” go the wipers instead of the “tink tink, tink tink” of the blinker. 

Lesson number 1:

On many models of cars with the driving wheel on the right side of the car the blinker is on the right and the windshield wipers are on the left, the exact opposite to a North American car. I may or may not of then turned my wipers on a billion more times during the rest of my journey. Only twice did I remember and get it right, for some reason my brain had just learned that the blinker was on the left without even thinking about it, so it was hard to re-teach it the opposite.

Lesson number 2:

The seat belt is over your right shoulder, not your left. This one was weird to me, every time I sit in the passenger seat of a car or on the right side in the back, the seatbelt is over my right shoulder, so why did I constantly reach for it on the left? My brain saw the steering wheel in front of me and automatically went “seatbelt on the left, seatbelt on the left” and there I was every time I got in the car grasping air over my left shoulder with my left hand looking for the seatbelt.

Lesson 3:

Pay attention when turning corners. Darwin was full of boulevards and medians and it was my worst nightmare to turn a corner and end up on the wrong side of one going the wrong way. Thankfully that did not happen. Remember to keep the middle of the road on the right of the car and if all else fails follow the car in front of you.

Also note that there may be different driving rules in countries outside your own. In Darwin you can’t actually turn left on a red light (the equivalent of turning right on red in North America) unless there was a sign saying you could do so.

Lesson 4:

Get in the “right” side of the car. Obvious right? This one wasn’t to hard to remember, however… there was one time that I opened the left side door and almost sat down before I realized what I was doing.

Lesson 5:

Get familiar with your blind spots and mirrors as everything is different and opposite. I almost repeatedly smashed my head into the window looking over my left shoulder first instead of my right.

I am proud to say that I survived my few days of driving on the wrong side of the road from Darwin to Kakadu National Park and back and not once did I drive on the wrong side of the road while driving on the wrong side of the road. Now if only I had had an Australian travel guide on me I might not of made a couple of wrong turns when my un-locked iPhone’s GPS was spinning in circles. Honestly how did anyone travel before this new fan-dangled technology?

Have you ever driven on the opposite of the road from what you are use to? Do you have any other tips to share?

Thanks to Tourism NT for helping me with my trip through the Top End of Australia. Don’t forget to sign up for our monthly newsletter!

Photo by julemaletveale.com

Today I bring you the biggest and best news that I have ever been able to share with you here on Travel Yourself. Not only am I finally sharing with you my first Spain video from my trip with a camera man to film the first episode of my own travel TV show all the way back in August 2009, but I am also excited to share with you that Travel Yourself is officially joining forces with Ocean Entertainment.

“Travel host and well-received vlogger, Cailin O’Neil, has teamed up with award-winning production company, Ocean Entertainment, to bring an exciting new series to life.” 

(Read the Press Release here! Travel Yourself Press Release )

I started Travel Yourself in July 2009 after deciding that I was going to film an episode of my own travel show in Spain in hopes to some day fulfill a dream that many of us have and actually have my own travel show on TV. I paid out of my own pocket for two round trip flights to Spain for myself and my camera man and friend Cam Erais and it was one of the craziest, busiest weeks of our lives. We literally hit the ground running, recording something crazy, like 22 hours of footage within 7 days.

Since then I have been building a following for Travel Yourself on Facebook and Twitter, blogging, vlogging, all along with continuing to travel and creating more and more videos. I have also waited until the right time to share my Spain videos with the world and now that I have the help of Ocean Entertainment I bring you the first video

” Travel Yourself in Spain – Barcelona and Valencia“.

Now who is Ocean Entertainment  you ask? They are an award winning television Production Company from my home town of Halifax, Nova Scotia and together we are making Travel Yourself better than ever. If you haven’t already noticed in the past month the Travel Yourself website has gotten a major facelift and a brand spanking new logo. Visit the Home Page to get the full effect of its awesomeness. We are also working together on making higher quality travel videos, developing partnerships and sponsorships with various companies like Hartmann Luggage, Nikon Canada and various tourism boards.

(If you are interested in working together please be in touch partnership@travelyourself.ca ) Once again I suggest you check out the Press Release. Travel Yourself Press Release .

I am so thrilled that I can finally share this exciting news with all of you. I would love to hear your thoughts on the Spain video and I highly suggest that you sign up for our **NEW** monthly newsletter to stay up to date with even more exciting news from Travel Yourself.

Me holding a stuffed Platypus at Taronga Zoo.

A Platypus and a Cormorant bird attack each other, now is that a good headline for a post or what?

Often when I film my travel videos I capture things and moments that are unplanned, and are often sometimes happy accidents or case of me being in the right place at the right time. While on the Nura Diya aboriginal tour at Taronga Zoo in Sydney last week I had one of those moments.

Our tour guide Sonny brought us to one of the few areas where you can see Platypus in the zoo and mentioned that they are rare to see where we were and at that time of day but we would be lucky if we did. We hung around for a while hoping to see one and then all of a sudden we saw this crazy interaction between a Platypus and Cormorant bird.

At first it appeared the Cormorant was attacking and being mean to the Platypus but then the Platypus got the upper hand. It was pretty funny to watch and the Platypus in general was just cool to see because they are so unique.

Watch the video and tell me what you think! Do you have any “right place at the right time” stories to share?

Don’t forget to sign up for the new monthly newsletter!

Platypus Facts:

• Both male and female are born with ankle spurs however only the males contain venom. The venom is enough to kill a small animal like a dog and cause immense pain in humans.
• When Europeans first came across the Platypus that was furry, lived on land and in the water, laid eggs, had flippers and a duck bill they thought it was a joke and that someone had just sewn bits of different animals together.
• Milk for baby Platypus is secreted through the mothers skin as they don’t possess teats.
• They are the only non-extinct mammal that lays eggs

Finding Portland's water fountains with my friends Chris and Tawny.

It’s Thursday night here in Australia and as I was going through my stumbles on stumble upon I came across a video called “Finding Portland“. As some of you may know I visited Portland for the first time this past January when I surprised my friends with a secret visit for the Nomading Film Festival’s Winter Recess screening and I also ate too many doughnuts including one with bacon on it.

I’m not sure what I thought of Portland exactly. It didn’t seem like a city built for tourists it came across more as a city where you live. It felt very local and unique. There weren’t many big chain stores, the streets and public transport systems were clogged one night where it appeared every single person in the city was going together to cheer on one of their sports teams, there was a sense of community I suppose. The YHA Hawthorne hostel I stayed at had a very homey feeling, an example of this was my “Lion King” bed sheets, and it was probably the most eco-friendly place I’ve ever stayed in, they even recycled the rain water. Portland was different.

Lion King bedsheets FTW!

I made a video about their famous VooDoo Doughtnuts and my friends Tawny and Chris of www.CaptainandClark.com made a video about the city being slightly weird? I left the city somewhat thinking “Well I’ve been there done, that.” and not really imagining myself rushing to visit again until tonight when I came across this weeks Favourite Film Friday video. Finding Portland.

Produced by UncageTheSoul.com for TravelPortland.com who say this film is “Comprised of 308, 829 photographs taken from over 50 unique locations, it took an average of 3.8 hours to make each second of this film.” Wow.

If you have a video you would like to see featured on Favorite Film Friday send me a message. Also don’t forget to sign up for Travel Yourself’s new monthly newsletter, sign up in the sidebar

Today I’m bringing you a simple kind of video. While traveling through the Australian Outback on the train called the Ghan (which yes I have been talking about a lot lately) I was surprised at how different and lively the Australian Outback was.

In my head when you say “Australian Outback” I originally imagined the desert, and a lot of low lying shrubs and bushes that are very deadly looking, but what I actually saw as I traveled through the middle of this vast country was a lot different. Yes there was everything I thought there might be but there was also a whole lot more and as soon as you could blink the landscape changed from desert to grasses, low lying bushes, to large shrubs to full out forests, filled with ivy or dotted with termite mounds. The Outback wasn’t just flat either, there were mountainous regions like the Flinders Ranges and more it was really quite surprising.

Each night there were breath taking sunsets and each morning there were beautiful sunrises. I saw wild dingos, others saw kangaroos and even though we were traveling on the same train together for 3 days and 2 nights most of us came away with different experiences however each one of us on this journey enjoyed it and had not a bad word to say about it.

The following video simply brings you all of the landscapes I saw in the Australian Outback while traveling on the train and I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned for a new video coming soon with a more detailed over view of my journey on the Ghan. Keep on traveling.

~Cailin

After watching the video make sure you sign up for my NEW monthly newsletter, where you will get updates, exciting news, and whole lot more! The sign up box is in the side bar to the right

This weeks Favorite Film Friday film was shared with me on twitter by Alistar Humprephy’s when he asked me to share it, I watched it and it was pretty awesome so of course I agreed to share it.

Documenting a 45 day trip across the atlantic ocean by rowboat “Rowing the Atlantic Ocean” is beautifully shot. Whether its just hearing the narration or watching the different weather that these four men had to go through while constantly rowing in shifts of two switching every two hours for the 45 days or enjoying in the simple delights of catching a big fish there are many ways for everyone to connect with this video and their epic experience.

Watch the video and then go to this LINK and give him a vote to help him win in the XPrize Foundations contest on ‘Why do We Explore?‘ This video is definitely a winner to me.