Our plans on the coast were curtailed by heavy rain, so we drove back (through it) to Canberra – via the bakery in Braidwood, and the KFC in Tuggeranong! We had one other stop before leaving the ACT (the next day) – Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. I was a bit sceptical about any nature reserve in the ACT, as I thought it was pretty small and wouldn’t have room. I was expecting something like the patches of moorland that you find in cities in the north of England. I suppose I wasn’t really thinking in Australian terms.
As you can see there’s plenty of room in the ACT
Tidbinbilla was actually a pretty short drive out from the suburbs, and has heaps of wildlife living in it. We took a few walks from various points and found Black Swans, Black Ducks, and a Black Snake. Looking a bit closer, we found a Platypus and a Musk Duck – which seems to be the duck equivalent of a Platypus. As with any open, green space in Australia, there were Wallabies hopping around. If you’re in the ACT, I’d recommend a trip out to Tidbinbilla, it’s a pretty good place to visit by any standard, and easy too. And it looks like this:
Although less humid than at lower elevations, Tidbinbilla was plenty hot the day we went – it’s still Australia!
Our visit was pretty brief, as we were aiming to be in Sydney in time for drinks/dinner (which we were). But that just meant we got to do the drive in the light this time, and that meant seeing Australia’s awesome big sky again.
Just a rest stop on the Federal Highway, but it’s this kind of thing that keeps me going back
Heading north out of Sydney, we had a look around Coffs Harbour. We’d been through Coffs Harbour before, accidentally getting lost in the Sapphire Beach housing development (not sure what we were looking for but it wasn’t there, nothing was). There must have been something about the place as we ended up there again after getting confused on a roundabout. These things happen. We managed to escape however, and investigate Sapphire Beach itself, and some of the other beaches – this part of the NSW coast is just beach after beach after beach.
Unfortunately for us it tipped it down with rain, until we got fed up and went to do other things (like buy new jandals). At least we were staying in a building and not a tent that night!
That means means Ducks for England, New Zealand, The Cook Islands, and Australia. Here they are:
(England) A winter Mallard, at Cromford, Staffordshire(New Zealand) Heard Ducks, but haven’t seen many – so here’s some of last years grumpy Paradise Ducks(Cook Islands) Didn’t know if there’d be ducks in Raro – but we found this one(Australia) The Musk Duck! Is it actually a duck? Or a Platypus. I think it’s a duck.
Two years on from our last HelpX adventure (it’s similar to WOOFing but with less rules), I was reading theworldonmynecklace.com‘s account of being enslaved on a dope farm in Canada, and (as I read how they escaped), I had a thought of my own. HelpX experiences must all vary hugely as it’s almost entirely dependent on the relationship and expectations between the helpers and their hosts. If you have very low expectations and everything is average – it’ll probably be positive; if you have high expectations, it probably won’t. If (like us), your expectations vary, then so will your experiences. Keeping it vague (some of these places still do HelpX), we’ve HelpX’d 6 times; sometimes we had access to a vehicle, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we were expected to work pretty much full time (though still less than the host) and sometimes we worked more like half the time. The hosts that asked for 4-6 hours per day, or 8 hours on alternate days, seemed happiest with us. Those that wanted work from dawn to dusk never seemed satisfied. Any negotiation on that always seemed to end with both parties feeling dissatisfied. But here’s what I really learned: BYO.
Only two of the places we HelpX’d were really places you could leave by public transport or by hitchhiking. They were two of our favourites, so it never occurred to us at the time. The others were remote enough that leaving was fairly difficult without help from the hosts. It isn’t as suspicious as it sounds, I think a lot of HelpX places are fairly remote, it’s one of the reasons they’re HelpX places. If we had had a car at any of these though, we would have felt a lot happier at first – as we would have felt we could leave in the event of a breakdown in the relationship, and we’d have been able to explore the area – sometimes we had nothing to do and nowhere to go on our one day off.
A couple of these places also had no internet access, which is crucial when arranging your onward travel or job hunting. In one case, we were lucky, I was able to get some train tickets booked online by climbing up a tree to get reception. On another, I could use the seek website if I was outside.
My overall experience of HelpXing is positive. 5 months, 6 hosts – only the occasional problem. It wouldn’t have been feasible to have had our own car, but perhaps if we had communicated more in depth with the host, we’d have known that we should either get one, or not go to that particular place. Ironically, we felt that we took a chance going to our first host (we didn’t know if we would like it or even be competent), and our second (we weren’t sure it was a good idea to do it again), but when we actually had a problem, we’d gone into it thinking it would be great and we knew what we were doing. Our expectations were high and that probably didn’t help.
So, if you’re reading this and looking at some HelpX possibilities, here’s some suggestions:
If you don’t have your own transport, are you near enough to a road you could hitch hike on? If not, perhaps consider agreeing a provisional end date with the hosts. Open ended arrangements have become awkward for us when either we’ve wanted to leave, or the host has needed the space for family or more HelpXers that were pre arranged.
Agree (at least roughly) the hours and type of work in advance – if you don’t want to do what they ask, don’t go. Bear in mind that the location and the type of work may mean flexibility is more likely than set days off, and that your host may work 60-80 hours a week, and feel that a contribution of a mere 40+ hours from you is small.
If they have internet access, find out if you’ll be able to use it – if not, try to provide yourself with mobile internet – you’ll probably feel you need it when you want to leave or even research your next move.
Don’t think of it as work, think of it as being part of the family and the business for the time that you’re there. If you’re learning to do something new, or enjoying yourself, or have excess energy, use it – it will probably be appreciated and everything will be better for it. If the host is keeping you at arms length and treats you like a worker, it’s probably not a place to stay long anyway.
Some hosts have had bad experiences in the past and struggle with trust and flexibility. We experienced a very clear case of this. The best thing to do with these hosts is to do a good job, show them that there are great people out there willing to work, and leave them wishing you’d stayed longer. One of their reasons for not being trusting is likely to be a vulnerability they have – so don’t exploit that at all!
Hopefully this helps someone – hopefully nobody can recognise themselves in here (unless it’s a good thing) – and hopefully people will continue to have great times working at farms and hostels and looking after children, gardens, boats and pets in the future. Here’s some of my favourite memories from HelpXing that I managed to photograph (and that don’t give away the location!):
Calves are shy, but once they get to know you they can be friendly and fun!A Wild Platypus – we saw these at two different farms!Kids are bottle fed for their first few days, this one wanted to hold it’s own bottle!Two ducks were willing to be picked up and held. For 1 second – then they were outa there!
Once upon a time, I planned a 7 month trip around Asia, and then threw away my completely knackered walking boots. Luckily for me it was still September and a reasonable amount of stock was still on sale at discount prices in the outdoors shops in Sydney. Many of these are neighbours, in a nice, convenient line on Kent Street.
A couple of months wanderings in Tasmania finished off my old boots
I knew from my recent experiences destroying my walking boots, that swapping a pair of shoes between arid and humid climates, grinding them around concrete streets, and squeezing them into the limited leg room on budget shorthaul flights is the fastest, most efficient way to wear them out. With that in mind, I was looking for a pair of shoes that would need to last a year or two in solid condition, and therefore didn’t want to pay much more than about $130 for them. I was hoping to be able to wear them for 7 months in Asia, then for 6 at work on Mt Ruapehu, and then for a few months after that, wherever I happened to be.
Not flip flop territory
After a reasonably diligent search of the row of outdoors shops (I don’t like shopping), I found the Ecolite’s. Specifically, the Ecolite Crossfit Hiking Shoes. They’re still on sale at $100 online.
$100 was well inside my budget, and the Ecolites felt tough and comfortable. They’re quite a large, heavy sort of design, and the lady in the shop explained that Ecolite was a more basic brand, and that for someone with no problems with their feet or their knees or joints, they would be fine. I was having a painful back at the time, but I figured wearing decent shoes like these would be an improvement over anything I currently owned (which was a pair of KMart deck shoes and some KMart dress shoes ), so I coughed up the $100.
One of the final outings for my favourite KMart deck shoes!
I tested them out a bit on a few sections of the Great North Walk (which runs up the NSW coast from the Sydney CBD to Newcastle) and they continued to be OK, so I felt confident about taking them off into the wilderness. Their first trip was South Australia, where they were taken up a couple of mountains in the Flinders Ranges, on arid days when the temperature was in the mid 30s. After a bit of abuse in the cabin of a flight from Adelaide to Perth, they were then ground into the concrete of the Perth CBD for a couple of days, and then taken up Mount Bruce in the Pilbara. This was another desert situation, with the temperature up near 40 degrees, and my shoes being ground into the rocky ground, with the dry sand getting into every available opening and generally draining the suppleness from my new shoes. Then I went swimming in them. I hadn’t planned to go swimming, I was only planning to wade, but I lost my footing and had to tread water until the bag (containing such essentials and car keys and camera) could be taken off me. After that my new shoes didn’t do too much work for a while.
Testing waterproofing. I went next!
To remedy any damage that WA might have done to them, I locked them in a pressured, air conditioned airliner for about ten hours, and then took them on a series of walks in Taiwan, ranging from dry mountain air conditions, to humid cities, to actual rain and mud on the north coast. More of the same type of humid plain/dry mountain type of air was encountered through a trip round Kerala, which didn’t seem to do any harm, so we switched back to the deserts of Rajasthan. A couple of weeks of dry desert passed by without any problems, so we visited a salt pan in Gujurat. We spent a couple of days there, and mixed with the sea air in Goa, I’d expect some salt to have had the chance to attack my shoes, but they showed no real deterioration yet.
A dried out salt pan didn’t seem to harm the Ecolites…
40+ degree days in Hampi, coastal humidity and mountain dryness again in Sri Lanka, sweltering jungles in Borneo and sandy beach towns in the Philippines passed by with no problems. Even on Mount Ruapehu, alternately being bent at the toe joint for hours under my desk and then pushed through gritty filled, icy snow – my Ecolites remained water resistant and intact.
…neither did 6 months in the snow and ice.
Finally, over a year after their initial purchase, I flogged them round Indonesia for a month, before grinding them into the tarmac in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Newcastle. They eventually arrived in Cornwall on New Years Eve 2016, and I noticed some cracks. These (predictably) were at the toe joint, and seemed to have breached the aqua shield, meaning they were no longer waterproof. The soles were still fine, and the uppers still firmly attached, but I decided to retire them and get a new pair for my next adventure. If they had one major flaw, it was their size – if you’re looking for a pair of hiking shoes that won’t take up too much space in your bag, you probably won’t want these ones. Otherwise, I recommend them!
Might have been the air travel that finally killed them – they went on an average of 1 flight each month during the time I owned them!
This article is a minor allegory for a small decision making process that is going on at the moment. I’m in one of the nicest parts of Britain (check my instagram feed!), but on my way here, I passed through London…
Many people maintain Australia is an expensive country to travel around. Coming from Britain, but not having stayed in hostels there, and arriving when the exchange rate was very poor from my point of view (August 2012, the Australian dollar was worth almost £0.70), I found the hostels in Darwin and Sydney to be expensive. The cheapest regular prices I found were in off-season Queensland, at $22/night. Darwin high season prices start at $31 and while Sydney has a big range, $25/night isn’t usually a lovely establishment, and the big chain hostels charge nearer to $40/night. Five years later in London, our plans changed at short notice and we found ourselves booking a London hostel, the morning before, between Christmas and new year. The going rate was between $40 and $60 for a dorm bed in a lot of the hostels, and the ones that were cheaper had approval ratings below 50% or were in out of the way places. Saving £3 on the hostel and spending it on the train twice is pointless. We payed £18 in the end.
Paying £18 (so $35-40) in Australia would get you a secure dorm room with a locker, access to clean toilets and showers, and a common area. They do tend to charge extra for internet access at that end of the scale, but at least its fast, reliable internet access. In London, it gets you an 18 bed dorm attached to a pub. No kitchen, up-and-down WiFi, and sharing the one bathroom with the punters. This is no criticism of the hostel we stayed at, it was in a reasonable location and was very cheap within its own market. They may have crammed a few more bunks into the dorm room than is really appropriate for its size, and there weren’t quite enough lockers, but if I’d pay $25 to stay there, I wouldn’t be filling TripAdvisor with my moanings. Having travelled around Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Denmark, all supposedly expensive countries – I’ve found my hometown to be the most expensive for hostel beds. £18 is the bottom of the market in London, it’s the top everywhere else!
Malaysia: Borneo may be a biodiversity hotspot, but we didn’t encounter any wild ducks there. Apparently this Whistling Duck visits Borneo, but we didn’t see them.
(Philippines) Found these two at Intramuros, Manila
Thailand: Plenty of ducks here, but none that I’ve seen fit for reproduction on ducksoftheworld.
(New Zealand) Paradise Ducks, Ohakune. Clearly she isn’t impressed by whatever he’s trying to tell her.(Australia) Wood Duck, David Fleay National Park, Gold Coast, Queensland(Indonesia) Rice Field Ducklings, Ubud, Bali(Denmark) Mallard, Copenhagen. Must be a northern Mallard. He looks a bit cold.(Netherlands) More Mallards, Amsterdam
Car hire in Western Australia seems cheap at first, but if you look closer, the cheapest hires don’t allow you to stray further north than Exmouth and some stop you at Geraldton. This is a bit of a pain, as I had worked out (at the time of research) that it would be cheaper for two people to drive a car back to Perth from Broome to return it, incurring a few days extra hire and petrol costs, and avoiding the charges for differential dropoff and flights + baggage and transfers. I eventually found FireFly, who were hiring out cars in the second tier of the market, before passing them down to Ace rentals, who we usually use. FireFly had none of the distance restrictions and still came in at an attractive price, still worth driving back for. With that booked, we headed over to Perth and picked up a few other essentials.
Petrol – it’s one of the essentials. Get it at authentic outback roadhouses.
The good thing about driving from Perth to Broome and back, is that you only have to repeat the stretch along 80 Mile Beach, as the Great Northern Highway, and the coastal route, join at Port Hedland. This means you need to drive a 1600km through pretty sparsely populated country, including the Pilbara. We only made a few stops on that route, with three days travelling around 700km per day. Out in the desert, you really need to be prepared for a breakdown or some similar mishap, and remember that both the heat and the cold could be a problem. We had our tent (purchased at Kmart the year before – $35), and decent sleeping bags (it was October/November), as well as the ability to boil water, put on more clothes, and enough food for a few days. In the ever reliable K-Mart, we picked up a tarp, to construct shelter from the sun if necessary, and a couple of 10L tanks of water – its BYO out there! We were hoping to free camp, and even some of the not-so-free camp sites don’t have drinkable water, so we tried to keep our tanks full all the time.
Not much water to be found around here
To preserve your mental health, you need to recognise the reality of the isolation and long distances involved – sometimes we didn’t see another vehicle, person or animal for hours at a time (except in the Pilbara), so remember to bring music, audiobooks and whatever else you can think of to keep you amused and awake. Much of the landscape is simply mile after mile of dusty red scrub, or wheatfields in the south – you can lose track of time, and your speed – so use cruise control if you have it! It’s a lot easier with two people, even if you don’t share the driving.
The road stretches off into the distance – watch the speed, and try to stay awake!
Although Firefly are hiring out well used hire cars, we happened to get given a brand new one, it had about 20km on its clock. We resturned it covered in red dust with well over 6000km on it. They don’t mind too much about the outside, but it can be a struggle to return it looking OK on the inside. If you haven’t been taking care the whole time, then start trying to clean up and keep dirty things in bags, etc, a few days before the car is due to be returned. The return will probably take place at the airport, so bear in mind you’ll potentially need to take all your baggage out there (and pay for the transfer – Perth is a nice $4 bus) and get away from there at the end. If you have no intention of seeing Perth or Fremantle, or don’t mind doing so with a car to look after, consider picking up the car straight from your flight (you can go shopping and drive a bit out of the city to camp before the jet lag kills you) and returning it before you fly again.
Those dirt roads’ll ruin your shiny white rental car
Some of the things you will likely find you’re advised to watch out for on a long distance drive in rural Australia are the road trains and the wildlife. We encountered lots of road trains in WA; the full sized ones with a prime mover and three trailers – they don’t take up the entire road, you can still pass them without having to drive in the gutter, although being stuck in convoy between them is a bit irritating and ebst avoided – their stopping and starting distances are quite long. If you go through the Pilbara or along route 1 south of Port Hedland, you’ll definitely meet them. On narrower, or dirt roads, be more wary, as they are likely to have even longer stopping distances, throw up debris, and generally take up more of the road. They also have much more fuel on board than you do – I saw one drive off into the wilderness in the Northern Territory once, past a sign warning of no fuel for 500km – hopefully he knew where he was going. The wildlife is a different proposition and mainly comes out at dusk to sit on the road, as its warm when the evening starts to cool. I’ve heard of people driving for hours below 40km/h when necessary, and I’ve seen the amount of roadkill in Tasmania, where the wildlife is smaller and therefore less likely to cause serious damage. Insurance often doesn’t cover Kangaroos, and you may do your car and yourself some serious damage if you hit one, and you may need to get out and finish the job if you hit a big one, just like deer in North America. We tried to get a decent start in the morning and put in 7-8 hours driving before dusk, the sun comes up quite early in WA, so it worked pretty well. Another thing that car rentals companies can be a bit iffy about is significant amounts of off-road driving – on gravel, or dirt. Obviously driving up your cousins gravel drive will not be a problem, but driving hundreds of kilometres through the outback on a dirt road, only to burst your spare tyre, run out of petrol of overheat the engine, may not be taken well. Our route only included stretches of dirt road at Karijini and on the road to the campsite at 80 Mile Beach. We did that one in the dark too, so it was just a tiny bit sketchy. I’ve done a decent amount of dirt road driving, but if you haven’t this may not be the time to start, one more reason to get early starts and leave enough time to reach your preferred destination, or tackle dirt roads in the daylight without worrying that you’ll miss checkin!
Watch out for the wildlife……don’t follow the road trains into the wilderness……and have a great time! Obviously not by drinking and driving; that would be wrong.
Arriving at Hawks Nest early enough to spend the afternoon on the beach was the best way to do it – after picking our tent pitch at Myall Lakes. We formed and abandoned most of our plans to climb and hike and snorkel and just played in the waves and soaked up some sun – good beach for body surfing and with a nice little barbecue gazebo, so we picked up beer and burgers and came back for dinner after a wander along the shoreline. This is another of those corners of the accessible southeast of Australia where you only have to look in the right direction to feel like your on a tropical island in the middle of nowhere. We had a few more beers in the tent and it was here that we discovered the decline in the breathability of K-Marts tents.
What a dump
An attempt at some energy and activity saw us plod up the Gribber track, disturbing the large numbers of local monitor lizards before arriving at a tiny beach on the lake – some of us swam in the warm, calm water. It could barely get any more relaxed than this – only accessible by foot or by boat for the family that was already there. We ate a bit of lunch and hiked out the way we’d come and drove to Mungo Beach where the surf was up and wild and nobody could even get into the sea without immediately being chucked back out again! We retreated to Bennetts Beach (Hawks Nest) and had to haul out the noodles for dinner.
Disturbing the local monitors
Another burst of activity for day 3 had some of us embark on a 200m swim out to Seal Rocks. I should have gone too, they saw sharks and turtles and octupus – although they were gone 2 hours! The beach was beautiful and even on my short swim, I’d seen a few fish, I just wish I’d persisted out to Seal Rocks myself. On our way back to Newcastle, we dropped into Nelson Bay (a mile or two across the bay from where we’d started but a decent drive on the PCH!) where they have a neck like the one on Bruny Island. There are actually a few necks here, one of which is all sand and probably only passable at low tide. There’s probably enough to explore in this relatively small area to last a week or two, but we had a flight booked to Indonesia the next day, so we had to say goodbye to Australia once again.
Just another standard Australian beachBarely explored – I’ll be back
No trip to the east coast would be complete without a trip to Byron Bay. After the quiet and space of Springbrook however, we arrived in Byron Bay (after a beautiful drive down) on a hot, Saturday afternoon. Evidently it was market day and very crowded and noisy, so we decided to go and check out the lighthouse. After cruising past a bunch of small, full, $8 car parks, we got to the top, where there was also no space to park, so we went slowly round the turning circle, tried to take in the views and the lighthouse itself, and then drove back down. We thought about parking further away and walking up, but first we drove down to our camp site at Broken Head. It was nice enough there that we never left!
Why leave?
Broken Head campsite (where they don’t like the idea of any misunderstandings and all times – opening, closing, checkout, etc are quoted in full, eg 5PM New South Wales time) sits behind the dues of a long, picture postcard beach. With comfy dunes, a long stretch of sand, a lagoon, and a few walks over the headland – plus swimming and body surfing, we never really felt the need to leave Broken Head. Because we never left though, we got very jealous of the other campers and their barbecues, so we made sure to drop into Port Macquarie on our way past.
After a few hours drive south, we stopped at Urunga for lunch and a bit of a break. Urunga seemed unremarkable except for its long board walk out into the sea. We walked all the way to the end (where the wind was blowing furiously) and back, and along the way I had to jump off into the marsh to retrieve a lot pair of sunglasses (not mine). There’s a few different little ecosystems long the board walk (marsh, dune, sea, etc) and it’s a nice rest stop because of this.
Only for those who make it to the end of the board walk
Crowdy Bay is another National Parks run campsite, on the NSW coast between Port Macquarie and Port Stephens, with several separate campgrounds and beaches, it’s easy to find your own space and have your own time. It also has barbecues, so we had a few burgers and a nice cold six pack (rushed from Port Macquarie) when we got there. We also found the office had closed, and it took a few attempts to book one of the spaces online, but it did ork eventually. Optus cover the area, so you can get online to make a reservation – in theory, nobody stays without a reservation. In practise, I think people were managing it in November without serving any jail time.
You get bored of these beautiful places eventually, about this time, I was really starting to yearn for concrete and old cigarette butts in an oily gutter…
As well as being a lovely spot to camp and hang out, we also found a few interesting things here. One was a lot of tall, thin plant stigmas, growing straight up out of a meadow, and attended to energetically by lots of small green birds.
Small green birds not included
Another was proper boxing Kangaroos, who sit on their tails and kick each other with their back feet while scrabbling at each other with their front feet like children. Then they go back to more normal positions and look around as if pretending they aren’t do anything for a minute before resuming their fight. Nothing seemed to be resolved and the Kangaroos eventually got bored. They hop around the campsite pretty freely, often bouncing at full stretch like the one on the Qantas logo. This is one of the best places I’ve been for seeing Kangaroos graze and bounce around – they’re obviously used to people, but they don’t approach them for food.
Boxing Kangaroos
We mucked about on the beaches and the walks for a while day before we again packed up and headed south, this time to Port Stephens.
We usually get our rental cars from Ace Rentals,as their prices are in the range of $19 per day like the one we hired from Coolangatta (Gold Coast airport) to Sydney. Our lightened backpacks (thanks to Auspost) disappeared into the cavernous boot and we drove up to Springbrook National Park, which only took about an hour. We stopped on the way to buy a tent, sleeping bags and camp mats at K-mart. $73 comes in cheaper than a few nights in hostels, and campsites typically cost less than half the price of two beds. If you already knew this and have been making a habit of it – some bad news: K-Mart seemed to have changed their tents a bit, they are now sweatier, which combined with the predictably sweaty K-Mart sleeping bags can be a bit uncomfortable. It’s still perfectly doable for budget backpacking in November in south east Australia, but when three of us were in the tent drinking one night, the humdity was a bit intense! We tried erecting the tent a bit later in the day but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
Only an hours drive
We went to Springbrook for two reasons. One of them was a 21km loop walk near the campsite that looked like one of the best walks easily accessible in the Gold Coast area. This is the Warrie circuit and goes past a few lookouts with views all the way to the coast. We saw a few pademelons and heard lots of strange noises, but mostly it was a pretty walk through real Australian bush that was the best feature really.
Nothing going on here
In the evening, we drove round to Natural Bridge and cooked our dinner in a shelter, guarded by a curious brush turkey. While we were doing this, lots of other tourists arrived and it got dark – allowing us to descend into a valley and into a cave and see the other main attraction – glowworms! They covered the walls and roof of the cave which was at times only a few feet above our heads, making them look like the stars in the sky. Nobody seemed bothered to shout about the noise of the cascading water into the cave and everybody refrained from using their torches or flashes (to the extent that we couldn’t see and crashed into each other a bit) so the assembled crowd wasn’t much of a distraction from the show that nature was putting on. Seeing as I’m no expert on glowworms and hadn’t really thought about it, I was even more impressed when we went out of the cave into the now completely dark night and were surrounded by fireflies – I didn’t even know they had them in Australia! Thanks to these, I’d recommend anyone tripping down the east coast to make the detour here – it’s a natural show that won’t disappoint.
ducksoftheworld 