Cycle Tour Travelogue and photos on Google Map
 

In the past 4 years I have toured in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand,
Laos, Europe and India, finally I got around to putting some of my
photos and travelogues on the net. I have used google maps to give a
very visual and interactive way of viewing the tours.

Click here to have a look:

http://rumi.studio2pi.com.au/wp-gall...outh+East+Asia

You can select the tour you are interested in from the drop-down menu
at the top.

Cycle Tour Travelogue and photos on Google Map
 

Rumi wrote:
I have used google maps to give a
very visual and interactive way of viewing the tours.

Nicely done... just wish the performance was better. I find the
interactive google maps slow to navigate around, but I give you bonus
points for being on the edge. Your New Zealand section will be useful
for a future trip of mine.

Steve
www.steephill.tv bike travelogue

Cycle Tour Travelogue and photos on Google Map
 

Hi Steve,

I agree, the performance could be better but I find once it is loaded
up it is fine to play with although this will depend on your
connection.

The people writing the Google Map API have performance as one of their
top poriorities and the last couple of releases have improved things
dramatically so I think we will see better performance in the future.

Personally I have tried to increase performance as much as possible by
using map tiles which are supposed to get cached on the google server
so they wont be recalculated everytime, and also I have started to make
the routes very simple. The first track that I did (Sydney to
Melbourne) was very detailed and it made everything very slow. After
that I started making more simplified tracks where the routes only
joined up the campsites instead of describing the exact route taken.


All the best on your NZ trip, actually I am off to the North Island in
a week so I will probably put up a Google Map for that once I get back.

Regards,
Rumi

steephill wrote:
Rumi wrote:
I have used google maps to give a
very visual and interactive way of viewing the tours.

Nicely done... just wish the performance was better. I find the
interactive google maps slow to navigate around, but I give you bonus
points for being on the edge. Your New Zealand section will be useful
for a future trip of mine.

Steve
www.steephill.tv bike travelogue

Cycle Tour Travelogue and photos on Google Map
 

I agree, the performance could be better but I find once it is loaded
up it is fine to play with although this will depend on your
connection.

I have a fast Macintosh computer and connection so I tried a different
browser, Firefox, and the performance was much better than Safari.

Mapping photos adds an interesting perspective to viewing photos.

I noticed some dirt roads in your New Zealand pictures. It would be
cool if you color coded the markers depending on whether a photo was
taken from a paved or dirt road. Probably hard to do but a useful
(obscure) request for roadies like me.

cheers,
Steve
www.steephill.tv bike travelogue

Cycle Tour Travelogue and photos on Google Map
 

Of course when I say hard to do, I mean hard to remember the condition
of the road associated with many photos.

Cycle Tour Travelogue and photos on Google Map
 

The biggest section of dirt road that I remember in New Zealand was the
Rainbow Track which was a 2 day ride in the middle of someones
property, maybe passing 2-3 cars and some parts it was hard getting
traction on the gravel while climbing and there were a number of fords
to cross which made it tough but it was a memorable ride. The guest
book at the hut was full of stories from other cycle tourists who had
enjoyed the journey. Apparently every year they have some sort of a
mountain bike race or something along this track but it was deserted
when I went along it.

Would be nice feature to have the state of the route sections shown,
but I just found out that the maps I have done are not showing
correctly on Internet Explorer, bit of a pain, spent a fair bit of time
today looking for a solution without much luck, it's something to do
with the custom tile overlays that freaks out IE, unfortunately alot of
people use IE so I am going to try to find a solution for that first.

Have a nice trip,
Rumi