Back in Noosa

This is the only place in Australia I'd been before. I was sent here with work back in 2005 and it was the reason ever since that I'd wanted to come back to the country. I had wondered, after seeing so many other amazing things along the way, would it still seem as good - fortunately the place still held its own. The town has a national park right on its doorstep, there's several world class beaches, great weather, a lovely town ... and so on. We camped here in the campsite for a few nights and just enjoyed view.

From Australia, Qu...

From Australia, Qu...

The Ron of Argyll

From Airlie beach we set sail for the Whitsundays Islands on the Ron of Argyle. It was a lovely, small, 2 masted Ketch and only had 12 guests on board. It was really special to travel around purely by the power of the wind (although we did have a motor for whenever the wind was too light). The boat is 80 years old next year and hosted famous guests such as King George V and Marylin Monroe. Our crew were really sound too - real stereotype surfer dudes.

From Australia, Qu...

From Australia, Qu...

Whitehaven Beach

One of our stops around the Whitsundays was here at Whitehaven beach. From the lookout its one of the nicest beaches I've ever seen. The sand here is so pure and fine that it was used for making the lens on the Hubble Space telescope and this is still the sand that is used to clean its lens - Amazing!

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The Wet Season that Never Ended

The weather in the planet seems a little topsy turby this year. In Saigon the wet season came 2 months early and here, in tropical queensland, it hasn't stopped raining yet - well in to June. Some of the weather we've had around Cairns and Magnetic Island was cat! Things look like they'll clear up for Noosa and Brisbane though.

Magnetic Island

We were unlucky with the weather here. Magnetic Island normally gets sunshine for 310 days of the year or something ridiculous like that. Didn't like the hostel place we stayed in either - unusually, the fact that we were camping in their campgrounds made it better not worse!

We left after a couple of nights - you really couldn't do anything here with the weather wet!

Cairns

Cairns was an okay place, but it was really all the things that you could go see near Cairns that made the place. I really didn't like the hostel we stayed in there - really big, lots of rules, deposits for everything, staff hated their jobs ... Seems to be the way things are run here on the east coast, and I don't really like it ... no more really cosy, small hostels, lack of atmosphere, companies begin treating you like a child along with the other, younger, 18-20 year old backpackers. Hope things improve as we head down towards Brisbane.

Aherton Tableland

A little bit inland from Cairns you have the Aherton Tablelands - A huge area of tropical rain forest. The weather was really, really wet so it was just how you'd imagine a real rain forest being. We went to see a curtain waterfall there called Millaa Millaa - It was where some Timotei shampoo commercial was filmed as well as the video for Peter Andre's song 'mysterious girl' video. Very nice, and got to swim in around it and even do an imitation of the Timotei ad.

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Great Barrier Reef

We headed out on a small boat to the Great Barrier reef for the day. It was a lot of fun. Despite the cloudy weather the water was still quite warm for snorkeling. The boat parked just off Green Island where we got to hang out for a couple of hours too. All very nice, but the snorkeling was no better than the reefs we saw in Ningaloo or in Thailand. The only difference, of course, was that you were on the largest reef system in the world, but it's very hard to get a sense of scope for this. I didn't get a marine camera this time, so no cool underwater photos. I was hoping to see really brightly coloured corals on the reef, but I didn't and was told why later. It turns out that red colours don't travel that well under water, so everything turns up as shades of blue and green and it isn't until you bring really strong lights down underwater that you get to bring up the colours - in other words the reef will only ever look colourful in photographs ... what a disappointment!

Computer Humour

I spotted this boat in Cairns before we went out to the Great Barrier Reef ... clever!

Cairns to Brisbane 15th June - 4th July

After a few days hanging around Sydney we flew up to Cairns. We'd catch the reef and Aherton Tablelands up here and then gradually make our way down the coast with stops at Magnetic Island, The Whitsundays, Noosa and Brisbane. Looking forward to it.

Bondi Beach

Probably one of the most famous beaches on the planet, so I had to go see what all the fuss was about. To be honest the whole thing looked pretty ordinary - A little bit like Kilkee except in the middle of a big city. Surfing began here almost a hundred years ago.

The Sydney Opera House

I think when you imagine Sydney you think of the opera house. A pretty impressive building ... but that's all :-)

Sydney Harbour Bridge

$160 to climb the bridge - so I didn't do it. Still pretty good to see though. You can see the people climbing the bridge when you zoom right in - they're like little dots. It gives you an idea of how big it is!

Onto Sydney 11th June - 15th June 2007

After dropping our car back in Melbourne we got a bus onto Sydney for a few days. This would be a short stop as we had a flight to catch to Cairns on Friday. We wouldn't get out to the blue mountains, but we'd manage to see the other famous things like the opera house and the harbour bridge.

The Grampians

On the way back to Melbourne we passed through the Grampians mountain range for a look. They were a real surprise - amazing views, great walks and just generally nice.

The Great Ocean Road

We rented a car again for the weekend and hit The Great Ocean Road out of Melbourne. The road was built by the returning soldiers from WWI and has been a beaten tourist track ever since. The road hugs the southern coast for most of the journey and the views are very impressive. For once you're not travelling to see something - the travelling is the something. About two thirds of the way along is the 'Twelve Apolstles' - Great big pillars sticking out of the ocean ... very impressive.




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Also, if you've ever seen the film 'Point Break' the bit at the end was filmed here at Bells Beach. It's also where the surfing championships are each year. We even saw a few surfers the day we were there and they were actually good.



And look who we picked up in Melbourne for the trip ...

Melbourne

A ten hour bus trip from Adelaide brought us to Melbourne. We found a really nice backpackers in the city center. Melbourne is by far the biggest city I've seen in Aus so far. I really like it - it's got a bit of a european feel to it ... lots of cafes, a city center filled with sky scrapers, trams, old architecture, Irish pubs, cool China town - it's probably the only city in Australia so far I think I'd really like to live in. We also knew a couple of people here so we'd plenty to do.

Wildlife on Kangaroo Island

The variety of wildlife we got to see on Kangaroo Island was spectacular. Kangaroos everywhere, possums, echidnas, Koalas, Sea Lions, Seals, Wedge Tail eagles.

Heres the cute little Koala we spotted up a tree just outside our cottege. We were lucky to catch him awake - Koalas sleep for 20 hours of the day sometimes! ...



This spiky thing is an Echidna. Those spikes are really sharp! He's the only animal that can dig straight down and the second we gathered around him that's exactly what he did. A couple of minutes later he had completely buried himself. Not exactly a lightning getaway, but very clever nonetheless.




Literally hundreds of Kangaroos passed through the field in front of the cottege, here's just some of them ...





Then a little further down the coast of the island there was lot of sea lions and seals - pretty cool!

The Remarakable Rocks

These were a strange sight in the National Park on the island - The remarkable rocks. Some of them look like some sort of Dali painting, which looks a little surreal.

Little Sahara and Sandboarding

Right in the middle of Kangaroo Island is a huge strange region called "Little Sahara" which looks like a big sandy desert in the middle of the island. Strange, but the perfect place for sand boarding! It's a bit like surfing except on sand. Great craic! I must have gone up and down about ten times in the space of half an hour!

One Step Ahead of the Carnage

I've been keeping track of some of the events in towns we've passed through. The day after we left Coral Bay a woman was attacked by a shark in knee deep water and Cable Beach in Broome was completely shut down recently by the appearance of a 2 meter saltwater crocodile. Meanwhile, gang warfare has left 4 shot in a nightclub in Adelaide, just a couple of blocks from where we stayed. Most recently, when we were moving on from Adelaide to Melbourne we were trying to decide whether to get the train again or go for the bus. There was a special offer on the bus so we took that - and lucky we did as the train we would have gotten that day crashed killing 11 people.

Kangaroo Island

About three hours out of Adelaide you arrive at Kangaroo island. Up until about three weeks ago the whole region had had an average rainfall compared to the Sahara for the past couple of years, but suddenly the drought broke as the rains came. The island apparantly has gotten beautiful again very quickly as all the former vegitation spouts back to life.

Winter down here is the low season, so out of a group of 8 on the tour we had 1 tour guide, 2 other trainee tour guides, an Argentinian, a Belgian and amazingly 3 of us were Irish.

We toured the island for two days and stayed in their wilderness cottege that night. It was in a really nice spot, teaming with wildlife. I managed to try Kangaroo ('roo') steak for the first time - A really lean meat, and very tasty ... but not as nice as beef. The roo burgers were lovely too. Another Australia institution is Vegemite - A vegitable version of Marmite - it was invented and sent to the Australian POWs during WW2 to supplement their lack of vegetables in the camps and sent over to them. I didn't think it was very nice - a bit like putting lots of soya sauce on your toast.

The weather was a little bit cold on the island. Some of the group were dying to sleep outside in the wilderness for an authentic bush camp. I couldn't bring myself to it in this weather, so I bunked in the cottege. They slept out in 'swags' - Big, thick, matress like, sleeping bags and are in fact very warm ... unfortunately the ones they had were not so waterproof and it deluged through the whole night ... not good.

Adelaide

Adelaide in the winter seemed a little quiet and downbeat. "people just move here to retire" one person told us. We looked around, it had a nice market, chinatown, etc. I imagine it might be a fun city to live in, but we were ready to move on from here fairly quickly.

Cook - Population: 4

The train stopped in the eerie ghost town of Cook, in the Nullarbour plain. The town only had a population of 4! Apparently the town was a busy train stop many years ago, but its heyday was long gone. It was strange walking around the remnants of old schools and abandoned houses and closed roads.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder

It's funny how things tend to work themselves out. Earlier in our trip we had decided to skip a trip to Kalgoorlie-Boulder due to lack of time. It turned out that on the train to Adelaide we got to stop there for a few hours and get a quick bus tour around there. The star attraction is the "Superpit" - the largest opencut gold mine in the world. The pictures I got were at night, so they didn't come out that well, but even from looking at it, it's difficult to appreciate the size of the thing. The trucks used in the pit are the size of a 4 storey building so looking at it from a distance your entire sense of scale messed up. The pit was 4X1.5ish kms and half a km deep and is set to double in size before 2017 when its life comes to an end. Wow!