Bosko & Honey’s Ukulele Safari 2008

 

In 2007 we were invited to play at the New York Uke Fest by the festival director after he saw our Ukulele Love-In videos. We jumped at the chance to travel and meet other ukulele players… which we certainly did!
This experience changed everything for us… and gave us an idea:
What if we travelled for a year meeting other ukulele players who we knew from YouTube?
We could do a video together and upload them as we travelled!
So, in 2008 we set off on Bosko & Honey’s Ukulele Safari.

We travelled the world for 11 months, staying with ukulele players in Japan, the USA, Europe and the UK.
It was a grand and naive project which was self-funded but relied heavily on the generosity of people we had never met… kind of proto-couchsurfing combined with the near-instant sharing of personal experiences with the wider public that facebook and twitter have now normalised.
Here are the video results of our travels…


Ukulele Safari Oz

Following the Ukulele Safari 2008 project we were exhausted and broke, however by 2010 we felt ready for an even more ambitious project: Ukulele Safari Oz.
The idea was to fly 2 of the people we had met in 2008 – Yan Yalego from France and Gensblue from Japan – to Australia for a 3-month road-trip around the country… performing, visiting schools, giving workshops and documenting the journey.
This time we needed more support so we were able to secure substantial sponsorship but also used over $20,000 of our own money, saved and borrowed.
Yes, now we know we were crazy!
We even ran an international ukulele video competition to fly the winner from anywhere in the world to join us for part of the trip.
So, starting in Kuranda, we drove clockwise around the country (sometimes with up to 10 people) until we hit Perth in Western Australia, where our trip ended… having covered over 10,500 kilometres!
You can see where we went in the photo journal on our old website.
It was an incredible adventure but an unfinished one. To this day we have not completed editing the countless hours of video.
We are still in debt from this project and have become less inclined to enter into such gigantic undertakings!
However, the hiatus has enabled us to concentrate on making music instead…
Nevertheless, as soon as we are able, we intend to finish the mammoth task of editing Ukulele Safari Oz!
Here’s a playlist of UKULELE SAFARI OZ so far: