Posts about Australia
Whitehaven heaven!!
It’s becoming something that I am saying a lot, and I know there is only a limited amount of times that I can say it. I have just been to the most beautiful place on the planet (I wonder what the next one might be…)
Whitsundays is a collection of islands of Airlie Beach. They have been classed as a ‘National Heritage Site’ which means that no building can be built on them, and the waters are policed heavily. The islands are surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef which only adds to the beauty of this place.
From Airlie Beach, visitors jump on any number of boats for a variety of days and head over to the islands to take in the scenery. We ended up on The Hammer.
Luckily the weather was holding out (which we were told was not the case for the past couple of weeks) and we got clear blue skies the whole way round.
Our first stop was Whitehaven Beach. Which looks as if it has been brought in from a movie set. It does not look as though it should be real, but when you feel the sand under your feet (which is the softest sand I have even stood on) all you can do is look around and laugh. How the hell did I end up here??
It was on this day, that back at home, all my friends in the drama department at Exeter were donning their gowns and mortar boards for graduation. I had a very different picture, using my cowboy hat from Kroombit as my mortar board and an Australian towel as my gown with the traditional blue screen background being replaced by a view over the Whitsundays islands. Perfect.
Right now, we are out of the jelly fish season, so there is no serious danger, but the crew on the boats are still obligated to giving you stinger suits to wear before you go in the water. Standing on the most perfect beach in the world, looking at the clearest water in the world, with not a cloud in the sky, there is NO WAY that was going to be putting on what can only be described as a thin wet suit to go swimming. Besides, the crew weren’t even doing it either. Which is how I got my first ever jelly fish sting. Don’t jump ahead though, it felt as if someone had starched me pretty hard, and the sting that comes with it wouldn’t go away. James, one of the crew members, said that we would know if it was serious in 20 minutes was I might start feeling funny, I hope he was joking.
Like with Fraser Island, there is no light pollution around these islands. In fact it is even less so. Again, we were very lucky. There was not a cloud in the sky, which meant that for the first time in my life I got to see the edge of the Milky Way. Awesome stuff!
Whitsundays is one of the places that I wish I didn’t have to leave. I could sit on Whitehaven beach for my entire life and never get tired of the view both during the day and at night. But of course, we have to move on.
It’s getting even hotter now, and the scenery is getting more and more beautiful. 2 more days of Oz fun times ahead!
Matt M
STA UK WTI 2010
‘ride ‘em cowboy…’
The Oz experience is a pretty good way to get you up (or down) the East Coast of Australia. It’s a hop-on-hop-off service, meaning that you can get off wherever you want and stay there for however long you want, calling them up the day before you want to leave to get on the next bus out (of course do this sooner in high season or you might be trapped for a while.
All of the people on the bus are like minded travellers, and the drivers try and make this as enjoyable as they can. Included in the price of the bus ticket (which varies depending on the kind of package that you buy) are several activities you can do as you go like surfing, lawn bowels (!) and the Kroombit Cattle Station.
If anyone has watched any kind of cowboy film, then you will know what I am talking about. Kroombit is in the middle of nowhere (so remote in fact that in 1995 they found a downed WW2 plane that had been ‘missing’ since 1946 - it was apparently not in any way hidden, it was just that no one walked past it in almost 50 years) and the people who work on this farm (made up of both locals and backpackers working for accommodation… as a cowboy!) spend their days moving goats around the enormous expanse of land they own and cracking whips.
When you come here, you get to share in that experience. I can now say that I can ride a horse!
There are so many different things you can do at this place. Quad biking, Horse riding, Goat Mustering, Shooting and there is something called a goat rodeo, that everyone gets involved in at the end of the day, which constitutes of dragging a goat out of its pen, lifting and turning it over and simulating the branding on their arses (of course we were only using a rod painted red at the end). It’s a lot of fun!
Then the winners of the goat rodeo (depending on the time it took you to brand your goat) choose either ‘the circle of love’ or ‘the ring of fire’. For us it was ‘the ring of fire’, which turned out to be all twenty of us standing in a circle holding hands while our guide stuck a cattle prod into someone on the other side of the circle, sending 11,000 volts (apparently) through us all. I find myself wanting to know what ‘the circle of love’ may have included. He then asked for volunteers to have the rod put directly on them. Being who I am, I stepped up and he promptly stuck the rod on my bare stomach. Poor cows.
In the evening, there’s a buffet dinner (there’s a lot of these up the East Coast), whip cracking lessons and a Bucking Bronco. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago I was in the concrete jungle of Sydney.
It’s starting to get hotter as well, and yet this is still winter over here. I can’t imagine what summer is like.
Matt M
Duuuuude…
I went surfing for the first time back in Newquay in Cornwal about 8 years ago. Here, I was lucky enough to get a private lesson (friend of a friend type thing) which meant that I was able to stand up by the end of the lesson. I remembered how much fun it had been back then, and was so eager to get back out on the board in Spot X, one of the places that the Oz Experience will take you to on the way up the East Coast.
It will cost you AU$50 to stay here, but that includes a buffet style dinner, buffet style breakfast, your four hour surf lesson the next day, and an incredible lunch after you get back to the camp (which is optional and if you do not want to have it you can knock AU$5 off the price of the stay, but believe me, you will WANT to have this lunch!).
The night before you get your lesson, after dinner, there’s a chance for you to get to know your fellow surfers and your instructors over a camp fire, a guitar, and a box of goon. Cue some slightly inebriated camp fire sing alongs. I love my job.
The next morning it’s straight out onto the water. And I am proud to say that I got standing on my first try. It then took me a further 45 minutes to do it again. Beginners luck indeed. Once you have the hang of it though, it gets addictive, and I can see why these guys do it for a living. I can also see why they are so fit, after four hours of this I was exhausted and all my muscles were aching. The most exercise I’ve done in a long while.
Nearer the end of the lesson, myself and Charlie, a guy I met on the bus, were getting up the board most of the times we caught a wave. And as they started to call everyone back into the beach, we went out to catch our last couple of bigger waves.
On the penultimate surf, we both started paddling under a wave about 2 metres high (this might be inaccurate, but to me, this wave was 2 metres high) and after a bit of a wobble both got up and standing. Realising how close we were standing to each other, we high-fived, and promptly fell off. How many times can you say you have done that?
Again, I love my job.
Matt M
5 days in Sydney…
It’s been 7 months since I was last in Sydney, and back then it was in the height of their summer. The picture that I had in my head before I set off two weeks before christmas, was of sitting on the beach on Christmas Day, nursing a barbecue and watch Santa’s surf down Bondi Beach. I was horribly disappointed. Apparently it is the worst Christmas (weather wise) they have had in years, so it was annoying that this was the year that I decided to head over there. It rained a lot and wasn’t even that hot at the best of times.
On my return, in the height of their winter, I was in for a nice surprise. We pulled into the Woodduck Inn, a hostel just off Kings Cross, and headed up to their top deck which over looks the observation tower and Hyde Park. And there was not a cloud in the sky. Not only that, I was stripping off the four layers I had donned in preparation for the cold. The fist guy we met was actually sitting in the sun in shorts and not much else “catching a tan”… in the middle of winter… go figure.
The Woodduck is a fantastic place. The people working there were brilliant, and it was also full of backpackers working for accommodation, some of whom had been there for a good long while (it seems that the inspiration to actually find a job is quite hard when you are living in this place for free and are surrounded by people wanting to have a good time) so we already had a head start in finding the best places to go.
There are obviously the standard things that one goes to see when in Sydney; the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the Botanical Gardens (pronounced Booww-taaaanicaal by the Welsh Paul who had been working in the Woodduck for just a week but had settled in straight away) and The Rocks (it has to be said that The Rocks is an entire area of shops, houses and bars, all with a very rustic feel, and all very cosy. There is a pub crawl that you can do which takes you to all the bars in the area, and will take about three days, but it is a little more pricey here that other places you might go. Here, is more of a place to go and get some food. And what food it is!), but for the more backpacker cheep deals, we found The Gaff.
It’s a small bar/restaurant/club/general place all backpackers go after a bag of ‘goon’, and some of the deals you can find in here are amazing. It’s no Ivy, and certainly isn’t Fabric (a restaurant and club in London respectively for those who have no idea what I’m referring to) but the food that comes out is some of the best that I have had on this trip. The Woodduck has a long-standing relationship with them (as with the sister hostel, Boomerang) which means that you get even more money off with them than usual. I had an incredible steak and a drink for AU$6, and on nights out, the amount of free drinks vouchers that fly around is brilliant!
If you find yourself in Sydney for a few days, and are looking for a good night on the town, there is something called the Oz Party Bus, and is exactly what it sounds like. The guys who own the company bought an old bus and gutted it, filling it with speakers and disco lights. They pick you up from certain points around the town and then take you to five bars and clubs around Sydney (ending in The Gaff) and it can get pretty hectic. If you think about what it is like on the underground in rush hour when a train comes to an abrupt stop, add 3 bars with a free drink at each and dancing people. You get the idea.
It is in Sydney that you can get the chance to go and see the Blue Mountains, given their name because from a distance they look ever so slightly blue thanks to the millions of Eucalyptus trees growing on them. Now while these mountains are fairly spectacular, and the ‘Three Sisters’ formation is 
pretty nice, I have to say that it is not the most amazing thing I have seen on the trip so far. The tour itself was perfectly nice, but if you have been all over Australia before this, then you might not be so blown away by these mountains. By all means, go and see them if you want to, but don’t expect anything really special.
Heading up the East Coast now… all the way to Cairns in 13 days… wish us luck!!
Matt M
Am I really in Australia?
You know that image you have in your head of Australia? Yeah, you know, the one with a blazing sun, vast open spaces covered in scorched red earth and filled with kangaroos? Yeah, well it’s not like that everywhere (the country is SO vast!) and it’s certainly NOT like that in winter.
It was 1pm and we were on our second flight of the day. As we approached our final descent into Melbourne flight attendant cheerily announced that it was a freezing 9 degrees outside. It was the middle of the day and an ungodly 9 degrees! Matt and I starred at each other in shock. We’d just come from a frazzling, flip flop wearing, sun cream lathering, sweaty 49 degrees in Hong Kong, and now we’d arrived to this. Now, I’m no medical expert but I was almost positive that a sudden drop in temperature like that could be fatal. Well, I say sudden; it had been 14 hours since we’d last experienced that kind of temperature but had since then been cocooned in a 20 something degree recycled aeroplane air and blankets. This was going to be a pretty nasty shock. As soon as we collected our bags then, we rushed immediately to the airport toilets to change… into literally EVERYTHING that we had. I was now wearing pretty much ALL my clothes, and I still felt a chill.
It must be stressed, therefore, that when travelling from Northern-Southern hemisphere from our summer, to their winter that two drastically different wardrobes are required. In Vietnam we had moaned ceaselessly about the unrelenting heat and humidity and how much we longed to go to somewhere cooler, and now, barely five minutes after accomplishing such an ambition, we were already regretting it! ‘Where’s that genie… bring him back! I’ve changed my mind!’…
Melbourne, it has to be said, did not strike me as Australian. In fact, I had considerable trouble remembering where I was for the first few days. To me, it seemed more like America or Canada than Oz. At least the Oz I had had in mind. The streets were arranged in blocks and lined with trees, the yellow taxis were reminiscent of the NY style cabs, there were wide expanses of parkland and super tall buildings everywhere and the whole place had a kind of Manhattan in a movie set kind of feel. As we walked the streets it looked like autumn but felt, thanks to a particularly nippy wind, like winter.
Aside from the cold, however, I was loving being in Oz; loving being in an english speaking environment again. Whilst miscommunication in other languages can be entertaining, and learning a new language rewarding it is always nice to able to converse with utter ease in your own language, and to understand and be understood be everyone.
After a few days spent video editing, chatting with locals and banishing our jet lag, we wandered out onto the streets to get a feel for the place. To me, Melbourne seemed like the kind of place where you didn’t need to actually do much to have a good time. Or maybe I should rephrase that. You didn’t need to SPEND much.
We first hopped on the free tram service which forms a handy frame around the centre of the city and hopped off wherever took our fancy. Our first stop was to sample the delights of Victoria Market – a market that’s been around since 1878. (Market open every day apart from Mondays and Wednesdays) It was here you could peruse through aisles and aisles of the most bizarre and interesting arranged stuff. Amongst the delights the market had to offer were the following gems: gigantic furry caterpillars, the kind normally seen in IKEA-esque places, Oz inspired beer coolers,didgeridoos, crocodile Dundee style hats (as modelled in one of the pics!), magnetic wine racks, socks with Che Guevara on them and some truly hideous jumpers. Nothing in the end took our fancy (although I was quite tempted by the novelty of having a South American revolutionary on my socks!) so we moved on to kick leaves in the park and make our way to the Melbourne Museum, which was showing an exhibition of artefacts found from the wreck of the Titanic. The exhibition wasn’t free but the museum itself was for those with valid student cards. (Remember to bring them though. No amount of persuasion works!)
After that we wandered through colourfully graffitied streets to get to Brunswick Street, where we’d be told by the lovely people at STA Australia, was the place to go. At first it didn’t start out as the world’s most promising street but further up it turned into an ecliptic mix of funky boutiques, trendy cafes and bars, vintage shops and restaurants selling international cuisine. Melbourne has the highest Greek population outside Greece and Cyprus so it was unsurprising to find so many Greek style places, what was more startling, however, was the number of Vietnamese restaurants. Here we were having left the country barely a week ago and having travelled thousands of miles away and we were met with dozens of places selling Vietnamese food. We’d been recommended Brunswick Street, especially for a place called Bimbos- a place famous for its AU$4 pizzas. Look out for the giant baby we’d been told. As in turned out, the baby wasn’t as gigantic or as prominent as had been made out. Still, inside the place looked good, and the pizzas we even better.
After hopping back on the tram, we checked out Federation Square – the place to be to watch the world cup apparently. There wasn’t a match on when we went, and as such the place failed to impress, although I can imagine that were we there for a game, it would be pretty awesome.
On from Federation Square we took the tram, past a sculpture of a cow in a tree, to Melbourne Jail – the place where the notorious criminal Ned Kelly finally met his maker. It was closing as we arrived, so we didn’t unfortunately get the chance to go in, but the ghost tour looked interesting and the whole place serves as a good reminder of the country’s unorthodox beginnings.
In the evening we headed up, courtesy of STA Australia, (normal student price AU$18) to the top of the Eureka tower to see some amazing views of the city. All in all, a good day, and a relatively cheap one.
In my opinion, Melbourne gets the thumbs up. Visit it if you can, just remember to bring lots of layers!
“It’s all about ADVENTURE!!”
Tasmania is about the size of Ireland, yet has a population of 500,000, which gives you an idea of the amount of space around you on this island.
The island is considered so out-of-the-way, that you can only get there via an internal flight from somewhere in Australia, which are quite thin on the ground anyway. This is what constitutes the tiny domestic airport you enter after getting off the plane. The distance between the plane and the car waiting for you outside (be it taxi, bus or otherwise) is about 50 metres, and there is only one tiny baggage reclaim belt, which gives you an idea as to how small and ‘out-of-the-way’ this place is.
Hobart, the capital sits in the shadow of Mount Wellington. A mountain that on most days you can jump on a tour called ‘All downhill from here’ which will drive you up to the top the mountain with bikes on the back, so that once at the top you can bike it all the way down. If you get the chance, do it. While at the top of the mountain, at this time of year, you will find icicles on your nose and you hands may go numb, it is still an incredible view from the top, looking North, East, South and West all over Tasmania. I can imagine that in the summer this tour is even better (especially as it started getting dark as we got to the bottom, which is where you go off road. Adventure tour indeed).
On Saturdays, by the marina, there is a massive market that is set up from 4:30 in the morning and carries on until 6:00 in the afternoon, all with the backdrop of Mt. Wellington. All the way along the street there are restaurants and cafes, one of which is Retro, a great place to go and chill for breakfast, watching the bustle of the market only get more intense.
Here in Hobart we met up with the STA US interns, Casey and Natalie, and have spent the past few days travelling Tasmania with them both and our tour guide, Greg, who is doing for the Tasmanian Tiger what Steve Irwin did for ‘crocs’.
Greg’s middle name is apparently ‘Adventure’. At any opportunity he will convince anyone that the road less taken is the right one to take, that it would be an ‘Adventure’ and just a bit of fun. More often than not, it is the road less taken for a reason. Yesterday we ended up in the middle of nowhere having to dig the bus out of a mixture of manure and mud. What an adventure.
Along the East Coast, there is small town called Bicheno. Now when I say ‘small town’, what I really mean is a couple of houses, a pub and a supermarket. The entire time we were there I think I saw 3 locals, but even they were some of the nicest people I have ever met (something that HAS to be said about Tasmania is that everyone here is amazingly friendly. all they want to do is make sure that everyone around them is happy and in tern, ooze happiness themselves. It makes the entire island and big bundle of happy helpful people. If you ever get lost, get lost in Tasmania!).In the morning, at some point during you stay, set your alarm a little (or a lot depending on who you are) earlier and head down the the beach to watch the sunrise. Tasmania is one of the ‘Greenest’ places in one of the ‘Greenest’ countries on the Earth, which means that there is no pollution in the air, making the sunrises spectacular, rivalling those on the beaches of Tulum in Mexico. At this time of year though, it is around -2ºC at the time of the sunrise, and make sure you get the right time (not an hour earlier like I thought. It is not fun the wait around in the freezing cold for the sun to finally come up), but it’s worth it at any time of year.
Off up another mountain today, this place is full of them.
Matt M
STA UK WTI 2010
Things can only get colder
With yet another England misery, came another amazing day in Hong Kong. Some how we had landed ourselves among the rich and famous of the Ex-Pats, and were chilling out next to a pool and being waited on hand and foot all day. The friends you make while travelling can land you in the strangest of places!
Quickly we had to come back to reality and leave the luxury of Hong Kong for Oz. We gave a fond farewell to our new friends (who offered to put us up for a few weeks next year for the ‘Sevens Tournaments’ which are apparently the best thing since sliced bread, and after experiencing the Hong Kong nightlife, I will be booking my flights back very soon), and set off for Melbourne. Stepping off the plane was a bracing experience. The last time I landed here, I was leaving winter and arriving in summer. Now, I was leaving 42ºC and landing in 9. I should not have been wearing shorts.
I will never under appreciate the joys of living in an English-speaking country again. The fact that we were able to go into a corner shop and ask for what we wanted without being confronted with a blank, dazed expression was heavenly.
It was all about catching up on lost time over the following days. We were back in hostels, back in dorms, and back to the real travelling life, and so there were no luxuries to distract from the job at hand. After hours of editing and uploading, we hit the streets of Melbourne, calling into STA Australia, who handed us free tickets to the 280 metre Eureka tower. Although higher, it was nothing compared to the thrill of the Macau Sky Tower!
If you ever find yourself in Melbourne, I urge you to go to Shanghai Dumplings, located on Tattersalls Lane, just off the main road. I was handed 15 dumplings of fried pork for a mere AU$5.60 (about £3.50), and they were fantastic, but beware that these will come out hotter than the sun. I am still recovering.
Off to Tasmania now, were I’m told it’s even colder than here…. god help me.
Matt M