On this road I’m walkin’, on this trail I’m turnin’
Whao, it's been almost a year since I wrote anything here! Not good, but I've got my reasons. 2009 was one busy year. It was a year in which I met quite a few new nice people, I rediscovered sketching, I listened to 1000's of hours of Bloc Party, Polisiekar, Heuwels Fantasties, The Knife and Crystal Castles, I tried my hand at wood working, I cycled 0km, I swam at least 100km, I took some Holga shots, I hiked the Olifants River Backpack Trail (where I slept in a very thin tent metres away from hippo's) and I entertained myself with more than the recommended annual allowance of mind bending emotional excercises! Despite all this, the reason I didn't write anything since last January is because U2 once again released an album filled to the brim with mediocrity. No, seriously, the main reason was because me and my good friend David were too busy working on a little plan we hatched in March for a website we wanted to build. As we both have day jobs it took us a few months longer than we expected to launch a basic beta version of our idea, but at 4:34 AM on 31 December 2009 we managed to reach our goal and at least launched before 2010 arrived.
Our idea was simple really, we love going hiking around South Africa and we wanted to make a website where we could find all the available hiking trails in Souther Africa in an up-to-date and consistent manner. It seems quite simple and straight forward just saying it like that, but we soon realised that there's a reason why no site has managed to do this yet… hiking trails are complicated things and every trail owner has his or her own way of defining, describing and “quantifying” what their hiking trail is, making it difficult to compare apples with apples, or trails with trails!
So, after many evenings and weekends listening to Bob Dylan, WildAtlas.com, in it's most basic and pure form is alive on the Internet with 102 trails and counting. We haven't quite reached our goal of listing all the trails in Southern Africa yet, but we're well on our way and hope that outdoor enthusiasts will start using the site and find that it is already useful as it is today. Without writing anything more, I think the website should do the talking, go and have a look at WildAtlas.com and please feel free to fill in our suggetion box with any advice or feedback, and if you really want to make me an David happy then write a trail review on one of the hiking trails you've hiked.