Four days ago, three travel bloggers have started a journey from Lisbon in Portugal to Saigon in Vietnam. This trip will be a bit special as Michael (@mobilelawyer), Jeannie (@nomadicchick) and Nora (@hobonora) are only allowed to take trains to make their way to the final destination. And the challenge will be won by the contestants with the most miles accumulated along the road. You see all the details on the official website.
If you go on the tracker section of the website, you will see that it features a map that allows you to track their current (and past) position. You might have noticed if you follow them on Twitter that they regularly tweet their position to @hejomap, a twitter bot that converts that into gps coordinates and log them to build the map. This system was developed by us this summer as part of a bigger project to map the moves inside the travel community. It's still under development and we are very happy that the UTC participants are using it as it's for us the perfect opportunity to debug and improve with real-time data.
We will be soon publicly releasing the main page of the project with more details. But feel free to contact us if you'd be interested in joining the project and use the system for your own blog. Send us an email at map@hejorama.com. We'd like to have feedback on this.
Alex
PS: you can also follow Adrien from our team who just started a road trip on the US West Coast here.
(bientôt)
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