He who learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but does not learn is in danger.

I've been in Australia for a 6 weeks now. The majority of that time has been spent bitching about how cold it was, and coding like beast to help get mChat ready for its next big release.

As a result I haven't really done any sightseeing, or at least I hadn't.

As a preparation exercise for when I go to South America I decided to take a bus from Sydney to Melbourne via Canberra. Total journey time came in at seat warming 15 hours.

I love having time to think, and I love to learn so the Confucius quote I used for the title of this post seemed perfect.

So what have I learnt?
Australia is huge and almost infinitely vast. At the moment I'm a hour and half into the Canberra, Melbourne leg. And all I've seen is grasslands. They extend for as far as the eye can see.

Having spent so much time in relatively small countries, buried in a mountain of technology you begin to think that the world is a small place. But in fact the "small" part is the series of interconnected hubs that form the major population centres. Outside of these you can find the "real world". One devoid of fibre, hi-speed rail, politics, and all the other assorted junk that we consider "modern civilisation".

So what do I think?
A good friend of mine what's to change the planet. Not in a "when I grow up" kind of way either. We often discuss how one would go about such a task. Perhaps to change the world what we need to happen is the reversal of the migration of people across the world to urban centres, in such of relatively low paid jobs.

Perhaps we need to allow people to return to the ways of the past, to build a better future.

In recent years anyone reading this would have seen slow destruction of society. As we have moved into the future we are slowly abandoning parts of our past that actually worked.

That's really insightful, so what can I do?
I haven't got a clue. If you'll excuse me I have another 8 hours on this bus. You never know, as I bridge the gap between these two centres of commerce and industry I might just discover the answer ...