Hindsight is a beautiful thing. Daily stories of life on the road can be thrilling, but it’s often only when you leave a place that you have time to reflect, which is why it’s worth reading Leaving Oz, Brendan Lawlor’s thoughtful and thought-provoking post on his overall impressions of the great Down Under.

Making the most of our ‘golden age for cheap travel’ by taking a round-the-world trip with his two young daughters, Irishman Brendan has been blogging throughout the past 121 days as he experiences ‘the many faces of Australia - natural, human, historical’, from clocking the culture of Sydney and Melbourne, to communing with nature in Uluru and Fraser Island.

Musing on Australia’s unique identity - a mixture of European heritage and independent spirit, ongoing Aboriginal agony and pioneering innovation, deep tradition and forthright irreverance - Brendan explains that

Australia is a particle collider. It takes elements from many different sources and bangs them together at high speed, each time creating something new. It is too diverse to define but still hangs together in a way that works, defying expectations.

Read the rest of the post here. Brendan and the girls are now well into their New Zealand leg of their trip, so keep an eye on his blog for more wise and witty words from the southern hemisphere.

One of the big problems with keeping your nearest and dearest (and the people you don’t really like but want to make really jealous) up to date with your travels is the sheer number of places where you might be uploading your journey-related content.

For example, today you might post the story of your culture-stuffed stroll through Florence on your blog. If your friends are subscribed to your RSS feed, they might be alerted to the article and read it - great. But what about all those photos of the Uffizi you also added to Flickr? What about the series of pithy hourly comments you texted to Twitter as you discovered the Duomo? What about the video of punting on the Ponte Vecchio you just stuck up on YouTube, or the note about the best pizza you’ve ever tasted you put on your Facebook wall?

To make sure nobody misses a thing, FriendFeed is - well, it’s your friend. When you create a free account, you create a list of all the places you’re chatting, writing and uploading content on the web. Encourage your friends and family to do the same, and every time one of you posts a blog, photo, video or comment across the web, you’ll see it pop up straight away- wherever it has been created. A ‘customised feed’, if you will.

It’s a great way to keep track of what everyone is doing in real time; you can try it here. After all, it would be a crime for your beautiful boss to miss that video of you falling into the Arno.

Today, Nilla Spark is travelling to ‘one of the most important religious centers of the indigenous peoples of the central Andes’ - Pachamcamac, a sacred desert site dating back to 200AD which features pyramidal temples and frescoes dedicated to the native god of earthquakes and fire.

Blogging as she goes at Your Spiritual Journeys, Nilla has already spent 3 days following an ancient Incan trail to the legendary Sun Gate of Machu Picchu, which she describes as ‘an awesome feeling, experience and achievement all rolled into one… where I really understood the power of the universe’. After a day of big contrasts in Lima, touring both the slums and the opulent Gold Museum, her group are heading down the coast of Peru for a 3 hour cruise of the Ballestas Islands, a haven for 150 different species of marine birds.

Nilla’s on a mission to experience the diversity of South America with a dash of spiritual nourishment on the side, so her blog is a great place to visit if you’re looking for some seriously life-changing, spine-tingling stuff. If you’re not, you might want to try some Friday daytime TV.

Mention Kenya nowadays, and most people think of the terrible tribal violence that was sparked by the Kibaki/Odinga election chaos at the start of the year. But serious and sad as Kenya’s problems are, it’s important to see the place behind the press and remember that it is also a place of warmth, beauty and humanity trying to survive and thrive amidst the political unrest.

The blog Sundays in Kenya is a good place to start. After a 4 month placement studying and volunteering in Nairobi, 19 year old Molly (no relation) has had ‘the best days of my life’ and reminds us all that ‘these are people, not statistics’.

Molly gets a unique insight into the country’s struggles as she volunteers at Jamhuri Park (a refuge for those displaced by election violence), visits the Kibera slums, and works as a social worker and teacher for former street kids in Shangilia Mtoto Africa. However, she also sees the glorious, vibrant side of Kenya: learning from her local host Victor, enjoying the fantastic food, and dancing to the music of Eric Wainaina at a festival to promote peace - to give but a few examples.

Molly flew back home on Sunday but she remains convinced that ‘I’m just going to start considering myself a world citizen because now Kenya is my home as well and I am sure that I will always feel at home in Kenya’ - and her blog remains as an incredible record of just how ‘amazing’ the place can be.

Other than providing easy access to endless pictures of cats, possibly the greatest benefit the internet has brought mankind is the wealth of information and expertise that is often only a few clicks away – if you know where to look, that is.

Where would we be, however, if people became lazy and selfish, only suckling on the informational teet of the web and never giving anything back? Not in a happy place.

That’s why STA travelbuzz will be regularly posting a selection of questions being asked by people seeking help in one of the many travel forums across the net in the hope that you will jump in and ’show and tell’. So, if you have some experience to offer, do something nice: spew your knowledgeable brain-juice on these floundering, fellow wayfarers.

East Coast Expedition Seeks Excitement: Wilsherlee will be hitting the East Coast of the US in December, and is looking for advice on places to stay and cool stuff to see – answer Wisherlee’s questions, click here.

Ecuadorian Enquiries In Need Of Enlightenment: MrJack has a few questions relating to Ecuador, ranging from budget flights to things to do. If you’ve been there, done that, let him know what his options are – answer MrJack’s questions, click here.

Quick alert for any of you students and youths out there. STA Travel have just posted up a bunch of exclusive British Airways travel deals for students and young people travelling from the UK - and their website is the only place you can get hold of them, here.

You have to have one of those ISIC or Youth cards to qualify. They cost £9 and get you a host of other discounts from other national and international organisations - definitely worth getting ( you can buy them here). If you’re not a smooth-browed teenage stripling but are still in full-time education, the deals are perfectly valid for any students under 35 with an ISIC card.

The offers are booking until 29th April and destinations include a load of US cities (New York, Boston, Chicago etc) as well as Geneva, Hong Kong, Beijing, Cairo, Johannesburg and, for the trust-fund babies, Dubai.

Si and I still just about qualify as ‘youth’ (damn that encroaching 26th birthday!) but we’re both too busy to book right now, therefore we beg you to blog about it if you go so we can live vicariously through your glorious golden lives.

When going on safari, there’s always the risk that a hungry lioness will mistake you for a wildebeest. That’s why my advice for such trips would be to simply avoid looking like lunch. Other people, however, are more helpful with their tips and a good example of such a person would be Lovemore Ncube, who has made a guest appearance on The Travel Diva blog to share her excellent twenty tips for planning a successful African safari vacation.

I’d be hard-pressed to think of someone I know who wouldn’t be aroused by the idea of a safari tour, and it’s often surprising how accessible such trips are. Just reading Lovemore’s advice made me realise how planning such a holiday needn’t be intimidating. Now all I have to do is convince the girlfriend that’s true….