Peddle Power, Wind Power - and a thirst for adventure

A few months ago I blogged about Benji Rogers-Wilson, a young Aussie adventurer who is biking and sailing around the world; a journey which he reckons could take about five years. At that time Benji was in Darwin, North Australia. Now he's peddling his way through SE Asia on route for China and Japan. He has some fantastic tales to tell.. like his recent precarious road trip from Singapore to Bangkok.

Follow this unique journey on his excellent website.. there are some gripping, footloose yarns. There's an important message behind it too.. His aim is to journey using no fuel (other than calories) & emit no greenhouse gasses & he hopes his example will inspire others to think more seriously about living their lives in more sustainable ways.

And I like this quote from his website which sets the tone for his current trip:

"A few years ago while touring in northern Spain a young woman asked me, ‘How do you do it, pull yourself out of your tent each morning and ride all day?’ A curious but not uncommon question to which I replied, ‘How do you do it, pull yourself out of bed each morning and go and work a 9 to 5 job?’ Of course, she may have been perfectly content in her vocation, but for my part, struggling to accept the mediocrity of the rat race and the tyranny of boredom is reason enough to jump on a bicycle and head off into the unknown."

Indonesian aircrash: a tragic twist of fate for Australians

Now being reported are some tragic explanations of why some of the Australian journalists and officials came to board the ill-fated Garuda 737. The following comes from the news service AFP:
Five Australians were among the 21 believed dead after the Garuda Airlines Boeing 737 crashed at Yogyakarta airport on Wednesday morning as they flew to the town ahead of visiting Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
Some were due to have been on a plane that left the previous evening, but missed that flight when Downer's visit to a school in the capital Jakarta ran over schedule.
The Australian newspaper's Jakarta correspondent Stephen Fitzpatrick has described how, in a further twist, fate decreed he would live but fellow Jakarta-based journalist, the Australian Financial Review's Morgan Mellish, would die.
Both men were booked on a Garuda flight to Yogyakarta on Tuesday evening, but realised while following Downer on the school visit that they would miss the plane.
Discovering that the next morning's doomed Garuda flight was fully booked they reluctantly took seats on an Adam Air service leaving half an hour later "despite its appalling safety record," Fitzpatrick wrote.
But later that night, Mellish was having a drink with other journalists and Australian embassy officials when he was told there was a spare ticket on the Garuda flight in the name of an embassy staffer.
Embassy spokeswoman Liz O'Neill -- who is also missing and believed dead -- offered the ticket to Mellish "and his fate was sealed," Fitzpatrick said.
"I caught the Adam Air flight, which was turned around just minutes from Yogyakarta, after the Garuda flight crashed on landing," he wrote.
The other Australians killed were federal police officers Brice Steele and Mark Scott, and embassy staffer Alison Sudrajat.
Five other Australians, including Sydney Morning Herald foreign affairs correspondent Cynthia Banham, were injured in the crash.
Downer was to have travelled to Yogyakarta on his own official plane.