The End of the Line

by Nathan

end of a train line in Nikko, Japan

Well that's it. The Awesome Australian Adventure, spanning tens of thousands of kilometers, several continents, languages, and types of beer, has come to an end.

A summary would be cliche; we recommend talking to the adventurers themselves for both the philosophical and decidedly un-philosophical ramifications of the trip. Hopefully, as is the idea with internet dating, we're as interesting in person as we are online. I can't make any promises . Thus,

All we have to say is:

1. Thanks for listening! And following, and commenting, and caring about us for the last several months.

2. Go have an adventure for yourself*

3. Good night

4. and

5. Good luck!

*Trust us, it's worth the time. In fact, it may be the only thing that's worth the time. We'll let you decide.

Nepal!!!

by Nathan

Hello blog readers!

If you're reading this, it means that Matt and myself have indeed made it to Nepal and are on something like day 4 of the Jomsom trek around the Annapurna range. We need this kind of confirmation because sometimes it's hard to believe we're really here. The other three (Ben, Marvin, and DC,  are hopefully home safely.

Nepal is amazing! The cities are hectic, the food is good, and the mountains are on a scale that makes me look at everything I've seen before as mere hills. We had a view yesterday where we could see several of the top 10 or the world's tallest mountains. That was in fact this view:

This is not our photo. I can't upload mine at the moment...but it looked something like this at sunrise

Anyways, internet here costs five rupees per minute as every keystroke is sent by fast runner to India, where they have such things as fiber optics. There will be much posting when a cheaper source of internet is found. Also, when the time is ripe, there will also be pictures!

Until then....good night, and good luck.

-nathan

In retrospect

by Marvin!

Since arriving in Thailand two weeks ago, we haven't sufficiently described the madness that is Bangkok, so here we go.

First, the food is amazing. Stalls filled with pad thai and random assortments of meat crowd every major street. We've been getting delicious meals for 30 baht (one dollar) and picking up snacks at all times of the day. At one point late at night, we accidentally picked up skewered chicken hearts. They tasted like chewy meat beans...mm... We've found that the best way to find good food is to follow the Thai people. Most streets are crawling with tourists, but if you find a stand or restaurant filled with Thai, it's going to be amazing.

Everything else is also extremely cheap. There are street stalls selling random knick knacks. Most stores have a repetitive collection of tourist products. It looks like there's a giant factory that pumps out little figurines that look somewhat Thai: silk ties, t-shirts, bags, wallets, etc... It distributes stuff across the city to all the salespeople so a lot of the stalls sell exactly the same thing. Still there are a lot of nice things to be had if you find the right locations. There's a lot of Thai silk for sale and some designers put up their own art or original shirts. A lot of craftsmen sell their own creations and clothing, which is generally well made. At one point, we wandered into a random, very crowded alley filled with electronic components. Ben immediately went searching for current sensors without much success. Anyway, there were guys with soldering irons working on boards on the side of the street and boxes full of motors. Twas a crazy street.

On weekends, Bangkok has the Chatuchak market where lots and lots of people gather north of the city to sell their wares. So we wander into this market and immediately become lost. Every direction we turn just has more stalls selling whatever you could imagine. If you were for some reason looking for a particular stall, it would be impossible to find, but wandering around, you see the strangest things in addition to the standard products. There were humongous buddha statues, teak dildoes, an entire section devoted to pets, and a variety of offensive tshirts ("Ipood," "Nobody cares about your tweets, Matt," "Cock [coke font], quality you can taste" among the few I remember). After a couple of hours wandering through the maze of stalls picking random directions to turn in, we managed to find our way out of the market having bought a couple of shirts and bags and spending under five dollars.

one of the numerous passageways of the bangkok market

Transportation around Bangkok varies from backseat motorcycle rides to trains elevated above the city. Starting from the smallest form of transportation, the motorcycle, none of us have found occasion to take a motorcycle taxi, but we've seen at most three passengers and the driver piled on to a single bike. Most passengers sit sidesaddle, which makes it even more extreme. Next up is the tuktuk. These are little three wheeled vehicles resembling motorized tricycles with a carriage for passengers. The drivers of these vehicles are among the most obnoxious people in Thailand, persistently offering rides on their tuktuks to any tourist they can find. They then give you a ridiculous price for the ride unless you accompany them on a few stops to suit shops to take a look. Apparently, the suit shops pay them for bringing customers. We've generally avoided tuktuks and taken taxis instead. Taxis in Bangkok are similar to American taxis, except they're bright neon pink! Amazing!! There's also a skytrain and a subway, but those aren't very exciting.

Finally, Bangkok has lots and lots and lots of temples. Tons of shiny golden temples. More temples than your body can handle!!!!

wat wat wat wat wat

While we were taking a break from wandering Bangkok, we've been staying at this crazy hostel called Phiman Water View. It's run by a guy originally from California who went to Thailand to start this hostel. He is extremely gay. Very touchy feely and according to Matt, hugs with his hips. I think he's taken a liking to me... Anyway, he offered to guide Nathan and I around the redlight districts and pick out women, among other things. He allows his guests, who are usually artists, to paint anywhere on the hostel so there's cool art covering some of the walls. Its a very interesting place right next to the river, so if you're planning on visiting Bangkok, consider stopping by.

Other than doing standard touristy things, we decided we'd try to party one night and once again confirmed that we're not very good at partying. After showing up at the wrong place and having to walk a few miles to find the party street, we were greeted by booming music and what looked like a couple of great clubs. But once again, most of our group was wearing flip flops, which are not allowed inside the club. Sigh... Someday we'll do this right. Someday...

In conclusion, GIANT CHRISTMAS TREE!!

quite a large, shiny tree

Welcome to the Jungle

by dcposch

We're in Chiang Mai now, the center of northern Thailand and gateway to the madness that is the Golden Triangle jungle. We trundled in a few hours ago on a sleeper train. It smelled strongly of grease and chunked its way relatively slowly over a rough track. Nevertheless, I slept well after walking around Bangkok all of yesterday.

Tomorrow morning, we're going on a three-day jungle trek. Of all the places we've been on this trip, this is the least beaten path. According to those storytelling history bubbles in Lonely Planet, Northern Thailand only became reasonably stable in the 1980s. Before that, it was torn between Burmese, Chinese, and, during the Vietnam War, even CIA influence. It was home to a vicious drug trade, a lot of the world's opium production, and to some colorful personalities like this guy.

then...

That's Khun Sa, the Burmese warlord who got his start with the Kuomintang, amassed a personal army big enough to have territorial feuds with the governments of Thailand and Burma, and trafficked more than 1000 tons of heroin to America. The party, it seems, has since moved to Afghanistan, and the indigenous people now cultivate rice paddies where the poppy fields used to be.

...and now

The plan is to ride some elephants, go bamboo rafting, and hang out with some hill tribes. Peace!

airborne again

by dcposch

...so we spent two relaxing days in the lovely town of Wellington, and are now sitting in the international terminal of its airport. On Saturday night, the All Whites beat Bahrain at "football" and the city filled with load people in white jumpsuits and live music and generally turned into a giant seaside party. The atmosphere of revelry continued well into Sunday, which saw some major streets cordoned off and lined with flag-waving kids for the Santa Day Parade. I said goodbye to Wellington's palatial Burger King, complete with an extravagant neo-Baroque ceiling and an espresso machine, by getting a giant pancake breakfast. Yes, even the fast food here is pretty extreme.

...almost like this

In a few hours, we'll be Down Under again. Next stop: Thailand. I spent this morning reading a bit about that country's history--an elaborate fugue of warlords, farmers, clashing ethnic groups and abortive attempts at democracy. The country has 17 different constitutions since they first tried that sort of thing in 1932. Their most recent PM was kicked out after the Royal Thai Army walked into Bangkok with lots of guns and accused him of having a "conflict of interest" because he was also a host on a TV cooking show. Apparently this sort of thing happens every few years. Thailand is a very peaceful country in spite of everything--it's mostly Buddhist and hasn't had a real war or particularly violent coup since WWII.

Political ridiculosity aside, Thailand sounds like a promised land of teak temples and spicy street food, where a dollar will get you 33 Baht and a couple Baht will get you really good tea. Updates forthcoming!

Musings on Race, Great Ocean Road

by matt

The race has now been over for a while, but I wanted to do a follow-up post on the experience and some of the cool things we learned.

As you know, we were able to cross a continent on solar power.  Sure, you say, you guys have already done that.  However, we crossed the continent in a solar car that in my opinion is as safe as a normal car and much more practical than most solar cars.  In terms of durability, the only thing that broke on the mechanical side was one hard point tab.  We only even had one flat tire, which was caused by driving fast over bumpy gravel at a control stop that really should have been set up differently.  Not only did our solar car have an upright seating position, it also had a parking brake, really good mechanical brakes, conventional controls (steering wheel, brake and gas pedals).  Apogee is by no means a BoCruiser, but it is surprisingly similar to the Aptera 2e, which has been in the news a bit recently, and is deemed a car!

Likewise, we really came together as a team.  Sure, we made fun of Sam a bit, picked on the girls, and didn't always understand everything Sasha said about electrical stuff, but we seemed to work together well, and our radio communication was surprisingly professional, even including warnings about fictional animals that may or may not have threatened our solar car such as drop bears, eagles, hoopsnakes, and jellysheep.  By the end of the race, everyone was finding ways to contribute to the team, and things went very smoothly after our rocky first days.  We even managed to get along with our observer by the end of the race!  After the race, we have had lots of ideation, including musings about changing the aero body, suspension, array, motor controller, and lasers on our next car.  Hopefully we can continue this momentum and build an even better solar car next time.

At the conclusion of the race, we were the last team to cross the finish line, literally.  However, only 10 of the 38 teams who started the challenge crossed the continent.  The initial results were a bit inaccurate, but after we urged the organizers to examine observer logs, we ended up in 10th place, between the two Bochum cars and just ahead of the Nanyang Venture.  This places us in 4th place of 32 silicon array, challenge class teams.  This is really quite good for a car that made much less solar power than we expected.  Not to dwell on our MPPT problems, but we also learned a bit about completely finishing a car and getting test miles (and solar rays) on it before the start of the race.

There was a great awards ceremony after the end of the race, and each of the eco challenge cars got awards like "best front-engine petrol V8 ute".  The solar car awards were fewer and further between, and Tokai definitely deserved first place, although we were all in awe of their array.  It would seem that many of the team members didn't realize that their car had what would appear to be 35.8% efficient Sharp research triple junction cells on it, and it is really hard to compete with that much power.  Although none of us managed to score a Tokai driver's jumpsuit, we did trade shirts with most of the teams, even Kormilda College and Michigan, teams with which we didn't always get along with.  Speaking of Michigan, we had a chance to talk to them about how in hindsight, they probably shouldn't have pushed their car up the hill.  Our favorite teams from this race include Cambridge, who we shared a hostel in Darwin with, Aurora, who we camped with one night, Sunswift and MIT, who we spent a lot of time with at Hidden Valley Speedway, and Umicore (The Belgians), who made an amazing car, interviewed us at the Coober Pedy control stop, repeatedly promised to party with us, and had the coolest exhibit at Victoria Square.

Fortunately, we don't have that problem.  Also, we don't have cells so fragile that you can break them by pointing at them.  In fact, as we were packing up our shipping container on Wednesday, Nathan discovered that you can in fact sit on parts of our array and it will remain intact.  Speaking of shipping, we packed up our car with the help of a very excited logistics guy from a shipping company who had never seen a solar car before.  In fact, we packed up the van, drove it into the container, and secured it down.  However, we were unable to find an IHOP, and it wasn't 7am when we finished, so we concluded that we had packed much more efficiently this time.  Also, we wer6 e amazed by the talent of the driver who delivered our container, who managed to drift a 270 degree turn in a large side-loader container truck.  Apparently, they neglected to inform him that he was not driving a rally car, and he was able to miss our stack of tires by a mere 6 inches.

Nathan Sitting on Apogee to Show the Strength of our Panels

Speaking of large vehicles that should not be driven at high speeds with precious cargo on windy roads, we drove back to Melbourne from Adelaide with our three large vehicles, and decided to take the scenic route.  Because of a logistics problem, we stayed in Port Fairy rather than Portland.  The views along the road were spectacular, and we stopped to see some of the rock formations along the cliffs.  We saw a neat arch and the "twelve apostles", 8 or so freestanding sandstone pillars rising hundreds of feet above the crashing waves of the Tasman Sea.  Nathan' (Nathan Prime) drove the chase van for part of the distance, and Sasha's inner ear was unable to take in both Zelda and the supple suspension of a Ford E-350 van.  He was transferred to another seat where he could better avoid motion sickness and focus on rescuing a princess.  Lucas skillfully piloted the trailer truck, and managed to pass an M3.  To be fair, the entire caravan was passed on a hairpin turn by a Kamakazi motorcylist.

Twelve Apostles: Freestanding Sandstone Columns Along the Great Ocean Road

The Real Awesome Australian Adventure. Part 1: The End

by Nathan

We're done!*

Most of the team comes over to fill up the solar car after a very long drive without gasoline. If you look really closely, you can see joy on the faces of the regularly emotionless engineers!

Today, we rolled into Port Augusta after 2,722 km of solar power!!!!! We didn't end up in Adelaide because of a police-enforced regulation preventing the driving of solar cars from Port Augusta to Adelaide on the weekend. We have gone as far as we're allowed to travel on solar power. It's been slow - we've been having issues with the solar array, resulting in a low-placing finish. In a traditional race, we're in last place: we will be the last solar car to roll into Darwin. Nevertheless, more than half of the cars broke down or crashed, placing us fourth or fifth in our class (silicon solar arrays). So you might call it great success. Even though the car didn't perform as well as we would have liked, I can't get over the

HOLY SH*T WE CROSSED A CONTINENT IN A SOLAR POWERED CAR!!!!!!!!

factor. It's pretty awesome. Maybe I didn't add enough exclamation points. I did use caps again. Regular readers will recall that this means that something important has happened. Anyways, just for good measure,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This will be a somewhat short post, as we're not technically done with the race. We have to trailer the car into Adelaide tomorrow morning. Eager log readers should expect more posts describing in gruesome detail how we singlehandedly battled MPPTs, kangaroos, flies, and Sasha on our trip across the outback.

Now for a smattering of photos of the solar car traveling at breakneck* speeds across the Australia. For lots more, check out the gallery.

*man it looks fast. It's traveling at around 40 mph. Apogee is still really really pretty.

all alone....all alone...all alone. There isn't much in the outback. Actually, the only interesting things there are solar cars. Which is why all our pictures are of solar cars. Because they're interesting.

Anyways, there will be many more posts; some humorous, others serious (ha). If you find anything that we write takes itself too seriously, send email complaints to lightenup@awesomeaustralianadventure.com.

*The race ends tomorrow. Also, for those who are old/wise enough to know this, the race never ends.

Stay tuned for the next enthralling part of the Awesome Australian Adventure!

WSC, day 5

by Ben

So we're currently driving south between the South Australia border and Coober Pedy. We've had a few problems with the array... it's theoretical maximum is 1360 watts at noon, we expected around 1200, and for the first three days we couldn't get more than 600. Now it's closer to 900, but that's still much less than we were hoping for. Our break even speed is about 56kph.

So currently we're in fourth place of the Silicon class. We're also in last place, in terms of cars that have made the checkpoints on time without trailering their cars. Some of the Gallium-Arsenide (GaAs) cars have already finished.

Photos:

Solarcar!

Rock

More in the gallery

The race is on!

by Ben

After a long night of awesome Belgian techno and rebuilding the entire array with Sasha, we finally have a solar powered solarcar.

This is good.

All the teams met up in a square in Darwin, conveniently located about four meters from our hostel, for the start of the race. All the cars had come together really well, although Cambridge were frantically seating a tire. It was pretty cool to see all the solarcars together.

Very official looking parking lot

We're now cruising down Stuart Highway at around 40mph, half way between Darwin and Katherine. We're behind a couple teams, and our array isn't generating as much power as it should, but in general things are going pretty well. More updates soon!

Solar Car Is Solar!

by Marvin!

At the moment, our caravan is cruising down Stuart Highway somewhere between Adelaide and Darwin getting some more mileage on the solar car. The scenery has not changed for the past couple hours. It is very, very empty. Not even drop bears live out here. There are no trees. We've seen a few roadkill kangaroos now and then, but I'm not sure if they exist in a non-roadkill state on the outback. We have yet to see a live one.

In other news, the solar car works! Great success!

After arriving in Adelaide a few days ago, Sasha, with his magical telephone powers, found us a place to work on the car at Tafe, a college with its own solar car team. Unfortunately, they didn't complete their car in time, but they were kind enough to lend us some workspace.

Work went smoothly for the mech team. We made a few minor repairs and strengthened SARS. Electrical work did not go so smoothly. Smoking boards and zapping noises were the theme of the day, which kept Ben and Sasha busy soldering and coding.  After working into the night, we packed the car the next day and headed back to the road.

This did not go as smoothly as you might imagine. After many nights of following GPS directions into dark sketchy alleys while looking for a club, you'd think we would have learned not to trust its directions, but no. First, the gas station found by the GPS was under construction, and our caravan lost one of its members. After finding a different gas station, truck headed off while chase headed to Jaycar to pick up some electronics, and so the entire caravan separated. Then the Stanford van, following more GPS directions, turned on to the wrong highway and lost half an hour. Basically, everyone was out of radio range, confused about who was where, and driving extremely fast down the highway.

Only after two hours of furious overtaking did thrifty van start hearing radio babble and noise from truck, at which point Matt and I started speaking Russian and Chinese to each other, respectively. This failed to lessen the confusion, Nevertheless, the two vehicles met up, waited for the solar car van to catch up, and at last became complete. Insert solar car driving by Matt!

not yet solar powered

After much more driving and my disappointing discovery that thrifty van's max speed is 160 kph, we arrived in the little town of Woomera. We parked at a caravan park and prepared for the first of many nights of camping. With most of the team working on the tent, achieved a record tent erection time of only two hours. The rest of the night was filled with much productivity. Electrical team continued to fix the exploding bits of the car while everyone else helped make dinner. We had no meat. Erica cooked some fake meat people call tofu, and although delicious, it could not compare with the amazingness of dead animal. After dinner, electrical worked late into the night and NHS slept on the roof of the van. In the morning, he commented on how easily it caved in. It was a fine night.

Finally, we arrive at today. After more struggling to find a gas station, we departed from Woomera with the solar car out and drove and drove and drove. According to Nathan, we doubled the mileage of the solar car in one day. After the battery pack finally bottomed out, we stopped in the middle of nowhere and electrical team decided to fix the car on a rest stop by the side of the road.

Middle of nowhere

Since we had nothing to do, NHS and I walked out into the outback to do some exploring. There were scattered trees and shrubs about, but by the time we walked a mile out from the road, we confirmed that there was absolutely nothing out there except for birds making weird noises. There weren't even any poisonous things snapping at us. I was honestly disappointed. Every direction looked exactly the same. After sitting in the dirt for a while, we decided to head back and missed the stop by about half a mile. We almost died.

Meanwhile, the electrical team was making the solar array work! A bit after we got back, we got power running from the array and the solar car officially became a solar car. Great success. We drove the car for a while on solar power, packed it up, and headed towards our next stop. Here we come Darwin!

Sasha and his hat fixing the car

All of australia is one giant bathroom - sasha`