Saturday started with another amazing sunrise over cloudy sky in Williams Creek. Today we drove less than 200 km (but still on dirt roads) to the miners town Coober Pedy. I had big expectations from this visit - I heard it’s an underground town, built underground because of the very high temperatures in summer. So there are underground house (in fact the name means in Aboriginal “white man burrow”…), but there’s a lot of ugliness above ground. It looks like a Bedouin town in the Negev - all dusty, no sidewalks, no green. But we did have a good pizza for [View Full Entry]

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On Wednesday I started my big outback adventure - 8 days in the Australian desert with Wayward bus and the guide-driver crazy Glen. In the morning the group met and we started doing wine tasting in Clare Valley - not really outback, just a good way to start breaking the ice. Getting alcohol was a major motive in the trip also afterwards - with an Aussie guide, 5 English, 5 Irish and other beer-drinking people, it was always fun in the bus. In the first day we drove 500 km to the Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges. That night I [View Full Entry]

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Traveling in a foreign country for a long times means also learning something about its past and its people. So I went to the migration museum of South Australia here in Adelaide. I saw there a tiny exhibition that is not really relevant to migration, but felt very relevant for me. They "celebrated" here ANZAC day 2 weeks ago, on 25/4. I didn't know that 25/4 was the day the invaded to Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) 90 years ago in World War 1, with British and French forces. This was a horrible battle, lasting many months, with heavy losses on [View Full Entry]

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Sunday morning was again leisurely spent in Adelaide. There's not a lot to do here but I like the city. I went to the South Australia museum. It's the same type like Australian museum in Sydney - combination of nature and Aboriginal art. I was shocked by the human skeleton of Max - see the pictures - even if the guy donated his body to science it means you go and put him in a museum?? However they had one magnificent exhibition of nature & wildlife photographs from some photography contest. They had some amazing photos. I wish I could put [View Full Entry]

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After the great ocean road we approach the last part of our trip - crossing the border to the state of South Australia and driving to Adelaide. We still have over 500km to go. The biggest attraction on Thursday was right next to Warrnambool. Korhan spotted that really by chance in one of my tours brochures - Tower Hill state game reserve. I don't really understand what a game reserve is (especially that they had a big sign prohibiting hunting) but it was full of Australian wildlife. We woke up at 6AM to arrive early when the animals are still active. [View Full Entry]

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The last 2 days were really awesome! According to our new terms, they were not "best general" - they were spectacular! We started late due on Tuesday to errand duties in Geelong but when you get to this coastal road you immediately get to those lovely surfing beaches - huge waves (probably those were not so huge for the locals because it was a really fine day, but compared to our Mediterranean sea, they were!). We drove along the coast. stopping at every possible lookout for pictures, especially the beautiful Teddy's lookout where I managed to photograph a magpie bird for [View Full Entry]

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Sunday was again a relatively boring day. Australia is so big that you cannot expect big attractions every day. The problem was that we were optimistic and instead of driving directly to the next attraction we stopped in places on the way, hoping to see nice things. For example we went to 90 miles beach (not to be confused with NZ's beach by the same name), because the map showed that the road is on the beach and we imagined a spectacular drive... in reality we were close to the beach but didn't see it, and when we walked 5 minutes [View Full Entry]

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On Friday we got up too late for a change and therefore had to alter our original plans for a long hike that day. We went to the Info center in Cooma and they told us it was going to rain in the afternoon and snow at night and we might not be able to hike also the next day :-( So we started with alternative plans for that day and we made a driving tour in the national park of the Snow Mountains. Of course, there was no snow at that season and in fact the entire tour was pretty [View Full Entry]

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The last two days I visited the 2 big attractions in the area - the blue mountains and Jenolan caves. Early on Wednesday morning I rented a car with Korhan - a Turkish-American guy, and we made our way to the mountains. Due to a stupid accident (really a small one) it took us quiet a long time and we became hungry. He stopped next to a fish and chips takeaway. It was only 10:30 in the morning... I didn't know then that it wasn't just a coincidence, but this guy is strange about food :-) The Blue Mountains got their [View Full Entry]

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I booked a bus to go to Melbourne on Thursday, so I was supposed to still have here a few days. So I continued to take things really slowly. But the last night I found a partner to go to Melbourne by car, traveling to some nice places on the way. The only thing was, he wanted to go today! So we settled for tomorrow… and I really hope he’s going to be a good partner, and we’re going to have nice time on the way (which is planned to take like 3-4 days, because we have lots of things to [View Full Entry]

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