Time Period: November 23rd - December 16th
Route: Sydney (+Manly) – Bulahdelah – Sea Rocks – South West Rocks – Evans Head – Lennox Head – Byron Bay – Tweed Heads/Coolangatta – Currumbin – Paradise Point – Mt. Tamborine – Caloundra – Noosa – Hervey Bay – Gin Gin – Emu Park – Rosslyn Bay – Yeppoon - Great Keppel Island – lay-by near Yamba – Bucasia (north of Mackay) – Airlie – Horsehoe Bay, Bowen – Charters Towers – Ravenshoe – Millaa Millaa - Yungaburra – Port Douglas - Cairns
KM driven: Approximately 4000.
The Group:
Robbie - our GPS.
Eva - the main food chopper.
Anita – Eva's sister, the one who cooked the most.
Wolfgang - Anita's boyfriend, the group therapist and the one who most frequently checked whether the gas had been turned off before we drove.
Myself – who was first to drive the motor home (out of Sydney) and who battled with trying to teach the group, obsessed with “Yarnef”, new card games in the evenings.
Mode of transport: A monster of a motor home (7m long, over 3m high) who we named “Ruby” prompted by the “RU” in the number plate. This had the consequence of us bursting out into the Kaiser Chiefs' “Ruby" song on occasion.
Weather: Shockingly cool in Sydney (my jeans got dug out from the bottom of my rucksack for the first time since July!) but as we headed north, the average daily temperature was 30 degrees or more. Our top temperature was around 38 degrees.
The good stuff
- Waking up next to one stunning beach after another, day after day.
- We watched the final of Australian “Pop Idol” being rehearsed in front of Sydney Opera House (not actually very cool but interesting). It was our first day in Australia and we were so tired from our flight from Singapore that we fell asleep, sprawled along the steps.
- Early morning runs along deserted beaches followed by a huge breakfast of fruit, yoghurt, muesli, cheese, salami and toast with nutella, usually on a picnic table overlooking the coast.
- Having the freedom to go anywhere we wanted.
- Snorkelling off The Great Keppel Island, Great Barrier Reef.
- Swimming under Millaa Millaa waterfalls.
- Swimming in Lake Echam (crater lake) and then watching the sun go down over it with a beer.
- An unexpected wine/liqueur tasting evening in Yungaburra. We drank about 4 different wines, 8 or 9 liqueurs and were asked on more than one occasion to just help ourselves to a glass of our favourite drink. Huge prawns marinated in a chilly sauce came out around midnight. The owner was extremely generous. We were extremely grateful. We were offered a great tour of the Northern Territories "when" we return to Australia, as if it was just down the road. I'm now wondering whether I should set up an import business named “Lockwood's Liqueurs” to get the guy's stuff into Europe. :-)
- Having a drink and sharing a fantastic bowl of nachos whilst listening to live music at a bar patio on a Sunday afternoon in Port Douglas.
- Watching the sun go down over Port Douglas' beautiful “Four Mile Beach” (flat, white sand, hills in the background, palm trees along the entire beach, red, yellow and blue sky).
- Running along Port Douglas' beach first thing in the morning during a thunderstorm.
- An upgraded day trip from Cairns to Michaelmas Cay (coral reef) on a catamaran with snorkeling, diving and ride on semi-submersible boat over beautiful coral where, amongst other aquatic life, we spotted a small shark and a turtle. Tick, tick.
- Robbie and mine's excitement about finding an Asian food court in Cairns. Withdrawal symptoms addressed.
- Night lagoon swimming under the stars both in Airlie and Cairns.
- Robbie, in his strongest Irish accent, telling some youngsters banging on the wall of our van in the early hours of the morning to “fech off!”. Very amusing.
- Tropical Days youth hostel, Cairns. Beautifully decorated, chilled place with a swimming pool and free lifts into town and back (which was brilliant as I couldn't walk at the time due to hurting my ankle).
The greatest things about Australia:
- Public services and amenities (free barbecues alongside the beaches, public toilets with toilet paper in them and showers, free outdoor gyms.)
- Beautiful beaches with hardly anyone on them.
- Warm swimming water.
- The nature. You can breakfast with beautifully coloured lorikeets looking down on you, spot turtles in the sea, find frogs in the toilet, be sat writing your journal and have two kookaburras come and perch on a branch next to your head and fill your time on long drives looking out for kangaroos and koala bears.
Just some cool and curious things
- Flying Foxes (bats) hang from the trees in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney and then, in the style of the Red Arrows, parade across the city at night.
- There's a type of ant in Australia called “Yellow Crazy Ant.”
- The sand on the beaches here squeaks when you walk on it (have I just not tuned into this elsewhere in the world?).
- Australia has rain forests! (ignorant me just thought it was one big dry land mass).
- The locals are often drinking in the surf clubs (we did wonder why some towns were really quiet until we found this out).
- We got to see the “Smiley” (star formation where Jupiter and Venus, the two brightest planets, come "close" together over a Crescent Moon producing what looks like a smiley face). This couldn't be seen in Africa or Europe and in America the effect was inverted so it looked like a frown. A reflection of the turbulent times one wonders!
- We had a group photo taken with Santa at the Charters Towers' Christmas Fair when it was about 28 degrees. In a country fashion, everyone seemed to be related to each other. There were rodeos, bouncy castles, raffles, terrible singers, candy floss, ice cream and a Princess Beauty Competition. It would have provided Peter Kay with ample of material for a new sketch.
- Road trains are monstrous in Australia. They can be up to 55m long with 3-4 trailers. When you meet these coming at you on a single road on the inland highway, there is only one place for your vehicle and that's the dirt track next to the tarmac. And we throught the animals were the most dangerous thing about Australia.
- The tourist offices are pretty cool. They are like little museums and hand out an abundance of info, most of which get you excited about but you don't have time to do.
- The Curtain Fig Tree near to Yungarburra is pretty amazing. Where there's a will, there's a way!
The not-so-good stuff:- Chilli Blue Hostel, Sydney (we arrived at 7am after a night flight from Singapore to find drunk people sprawled over the kitchen and a notice up saying “breakfast is postponed due to the disgusting state of the kitchen”. We couldn't get into our dorms - we were all in separate rooms - until midday and when we did we couldn't see which were our beds for all the clothes and bags everywhere).
- Feeling like a tramp when showering in public places and doing the dishes on the pavement alongside people going for romantic evening strolls.
- The so-called Stingies (stinging jelly fish which can kill) which make entering the water along the Barrier Reef less attractive.
- You can scare yourself by thinking that every spider you see is deadly poisonous.
- Five people in one motor home for 3 weeks can be quite intense. One evening Eva asked when she should set the alarm in the morning. As far as I was concerned, there was never any real need to set the alarm as we usually woke up with the light and noise anyway and failing that, I would always wake when Robbie got up as the van shook. On this occasion, Wolfgang fought our “no alarm clock protest” by replying, “Wenn die Sonne unsere Auge kuesst”(“when the sun kisses our eyes”) which I thought was a lovely answer. Nevertheless, Eva woke me at 5.30am to ask me if I wanted to shower by running through the sprinklers which had just been turned on in the park next to our van. We had only had about 4 hours sleep the night before as we had gotten up early to go to a viewing point over the coast to watch the sun rise. I grunted “no thanks” to Eva but then couldn't help but smile when I heard her and Anita laughing as they ran across the park. The things we do for a free shower! Am I turning into an old grump or is 5 months of little sleep just taking its toll?
- One night I dreamt I was a drug smuggler and was being chased. Think I had gotten too much into reading Mark Howard's autobiography Mr Nice that day.
- Toad racing in bars. Not my idea of entertainment.
- Ruby when you're sitting in the back where the air conditioning doesn't reach to and there's still a couple of hundred kilometres to the next stop.
Most depressing thought: the money Robbie and I have saved from penny pinching in Asia (with antics like walking around Singapore airport for an hour to find a place with cheap coffee, taking rooms with shared bathrooms instead of en suites, choosing cold water showers over hot, fan rooms instead of air conditioning and getting the local buses instead of the tourist buses), probably accumulates to less than the amount we have had to pay the Australian government in tax for our motorhome.
What we could have done without but didn”t: Weisswurstl and Jaergermesiter (we are travelling with Austrians after all).
What I have done more in Australia than elsewhere on this trip: Eaten fast food and lived so “publically".
Would have been nice to have had: more cds.
