The ExplorOz story began after a 2 year stint travelling around Australia before we had our 2 kids. We did the "big lap" in the 1990s when we were in our 20's with a 75 series "troopy" and custom-built O'Briens off road butterfly trailer. In those days, only retired people seemed to be on the road and we were the "blond nomads" raising a lot of eyebrows. We were out there because we needed a change from a city rat race work life that was killing us. In fact, David vowed to not stop travelling until he could find a way to make a living without computers..... (
well, that didn't work out clearly!).
We had both been born & raised in
Sydney, and had developed our own careers and living experiences but we were seeking a change after David was diagnosed and treated with lymphatic cancer. We both had spent time living/working in rural areas as
well as
well as the city and had enjoyed many sports and adventurous pursuits. David had earlier successfully completed a solo unassisted 28 day hiking adventure from Kathmandu to Everest Base
Camp and whilst he didn't wish to climb Mt Everest, he did climb Gokyo Ri, and Kala Patthar which are the top view points in the region. We both scuba dived extensively and achieved 8 certifications (Open Water, Advanced, Deep, Navigation, Rescue, Dive Supervisor, Master Diver, Assistant Instructor) as
well as doing many deep wreck dives including the President Coolidge in Santo, Vanuatu before our around Australia trip and our trailer was packed with dive tanks and gear to ensure we could take advantage of any opportunities. We also had windsurfing gear on top of the trailer.
Whilst some of the highlights of our trip included a week on the Rum Runner liveaboard dive boat out of
Cairns where we went to the Coral Sea and dived with a 5m giant hammerhead, and diving in the incredible freshwater abyss of Ewens Ponds in Mt Gambier, we actually found an affinity with the desert regions of Australia and changed our setup after the first 9 months to take the water sports gear off the trailer. We always preferred to sleep on the ground in swags and keep it all simple and the deserts offered us the ability to extend our trip by another year as most of our overnight stays were free.
It was during our desert exploration phase that we connected with outback communities in the Diamantina Shire and discovered that there was a disparity between the needs of the outback communities and their small tourism businesses and the expectation of the travellers planning their trips. By engaging with the local businesses we learned that they wanted to see information reach the travellers to help them plan their trips better and to help them gain trust in using local
services when they arrived to restock their food supplies etc. It was through their encouragement that we started ExplorOz as the bridge of communication between outback business service providers and locals and the travellers.
In our formative years, no one even had mobile internet or smartphones/tablets - Google didn't even exist. However, it wasn't hard to speculate the potential for technological change and how we could utilise that to realise our vision for ExplorOz. So in March of 2000 - when the internet giants such as the likes of Google and Facebook didn't even exist and when you had to use a dial up connection to get an internet service, we launched our online business.
It's been a long journey that has seen us work from
home for 22 years - raise our family of 2 kids, change a few vehicles, trailers, boats etc and evolve our business through the challenges of many technology evolutions, and economic impacts such as the GFC, and COVID-19.
Throughout the first 13 years of the 2000's the ExplorOz website was the largest online digital map
shop in Australia selling all the popular products of the time, including Magellan, Garmin, OziExplorer, TrackRanger, Hema, Westprint, SPOT, InReach, GeoScience and also digital maps from smaller publishers such as Gold & Ghosts, Meridian, and others. Our relationships and connections in the industry have been vast over a very long term.
At the same time, we started creating our own map product and published it online in a free online viewing tool called iMapPlot. We also designed a tracking service for Members, and a trip planning tool, POI database,
Treks database, and file sharing
services.
Eventually, due to customer demand our maps became available for download as raster maps with the first edition of
EOTopo in 2013. These maps were very popular with OziExplorer, Track
Ranger, MudMap and Memory-Map users but could not be used on Apple devices. In 2016, we produced
ExplorOz Traveller our own GPS Navigation app to support our
EOTopo map products with compatibility for all platforms - Apple, Android & Window 10. The
EOTopo project was designed to be an ongoing work in progress so new editions featuring major improvements and mapping updates have been released. The 2021 Edition of
EOTopo is a vector mapset and is proprietary to our Traveller app.
Our
ExplorOz Traveller app is now the leading premium Navigation & Mapping app in the Australian app stores.