SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

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November 25th 2010

Published: November 25th 2010

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flying kiwis

It's the end of the road for us

this is our last blog - Kiwis in Oz are on their way home after two years on the road

It's a weird thing to do - load your belongings into a large tin container and drag it behind you as you drive around another country.

But when the country is as big as Australia, it’s the best way of seeing it as a traveler rather than a tourist. Over the last two and a half years we’ve tried to avoid being tourists. We wanted to see Australia and meet Australians, rather than be herded around by hyperbolic money-making businesses.

While some of our best experiences have been on tours when that was the only way to get there, e.g. the Bungle Bungles, Undara Lava Tubes and Lake Eyre in flood, we’ve got a greater sense of satisfaction by getting out into the bush ourselves and being more Dora the Explorer than I ever imagined.

Walking the Ormiston Gorge west of Alice, climbing the Porongarup and Stirling ranges in southern WA, crossing the Nullarbor, extracting our own glinting sapphires and zircons from dusty buckets of gravel in outback Queensland – these free or cheap adventures rank with the expensive highlights.

What other things will we bring back as lasting memories of our

Jetty on the Esplanade

Hervey Bay

time as grey nomads?

 Although everywhere is different, things stay the same. People, caravan parks, beaches, shopping malls – separated by thousands of kms and with different names, they share 99.9% of their DNA.

People moan about the same stuff, obsess about the same stuff. Australians are more rabidly patriotic than Kiwis, but for all their Americanisation, still have a deeply entrenched Britishness that shows up in language, food, attitudes and customs.

Because of the way the country was “settled” I’ve noticed a greater sense of class structure and prejudice brought over from Blighty than you get in NZ.

I’m ignoring the huge contribution of other immigrants and their cultures to make this generalization of course. And racism? Just let’s not go there.

Caravan parks have been our home for 26 months. Some are just lovely and you want to stay there for ages, some you can’t wait to get out of. But there are common denominators we won’t miss; the sites so close together you know all the daily habits of fellow travelers, hearing someone ELSE’s husband snoring, strange tasting water, bats/birds/ants in the trees above leaving their mark in myriad ways,

Rockhampton

beautiful colonial buildings in Quay St

signs saying “trees may drop their limbs without warning” after you’ve just settled into a shady spot under the gums, the !@#%ing key for the ablution block, the ablution block ‘closed for cleaning’ when you get there.

Grey nomads gossip about van parks constantly and it’s hard to choose favorites as the one with the best views has the crappiest toilets or the one with the herb garden and lovely loos is between the state highway and the shunting yards, or the sought after absolute beachfront site is where you couldn’t put the awning out for fear of gale force winds turning the van into a paraglider.

Beaches are beaches - Mecca on a sunny holiday, a depressing, grey, soggy and uncomfortable place during inclement weather.

Weather changes everything - cooped up in a caravan by wind and rain, cabin fever sets in to test the harmony of a relationship. Bathurst race day was the worst – too wet for me to escape the metallic meow, meow, meow of Fords and Holdens racing around the TV set in the middle of the van from 9am – 5pm. I survived by being hooked up to

Mount Morgan gold mine

a great big scar in the lovely hills behind Rockhampton, soon to be reopened

the ipod – my life support system on this trip.

 We haven’t found anywhere better to live than NZ. Perth is great but too far away from the rest of the world, Victoria is beautiful but the weather is bipolar. Our bodies and brains would rot in the tropical steaminess of Cairns or Darwin. Noosa is magic but we’re not millionaires.

We really love Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast, which we've used as a base for the start and finish of our odyssey, but realistically, we couldn’t afford to live anywhere here because of the Pacific Peso. NZ’s economy makes it prohibitive for us to live in OZ for 2 reasons, the negative being the NZ exchange rate makes everything a third more expensive, the positive is that we’ll get a pension in NZ but nowhere near as much here because of means testing.

 NZ should become part of Australia. No passports and cheaper air flights. Same currency so we’re not bludgeoned in the wallet every time we spend money here. Australians could eat decent apples, honey, cheese and ice-cream, we could have decent mangoes and watermelons. Wine makers here could stop

Queensland real estate

Would we like to buy the Mount Morgan National Hotel?

being paranoid about our sauvignon blanc, we’d win more medals at the Olympic Games and both could say Crowded House is their band and be right.

 NZ shouldn’t be part of Australia. We couldn’t boast about the soccer or rugby, we’d have to understand their convoluted state and federal politics, it would be compulsory to vote and we’d be treated even worse than Tasmanians.

 There are many many things in Australia that want to kill you; the obvious big things like crocodiles, sharks and road trains, the sneaky snakey things like snakes and spiders, the impossible to see things in water like stone fish – which look like stones and can kill you stone dead, and jelly fish – ditto.

Plants like the giant stinging tree with minute spines that inject you with a neurotoxin, the bunya pine which has cones weighing 10kg falling from 30 meters and the harmless looking Cooktown ironbark tree that will kill a cow hungry enough to eat a handful of leaves, so you don’t put those branches on the bbq. Crazy fire ants, dengue and Ross River fever carrying mosquitoes… no wonder Aussies say they love the

The Singing Ship monument at Yepoon

which is beautiful but doesn’t ‘sing’ any more as the locals have blocked it up to stop the 'noise'

bush but most of them live in cities. With air conditioning.

 Australia can be both unbelievably dry and unbelievably wet – sometimes at the same time.

 Australia is very old – we’re talking mega millions of years old, it’s soils leached of life, rocks so brittle they clink when you kick them. But this extreme weathering has produced great mineral wealth - dig a hole in the ground anywhere in Australia and you’ll find some metal or substance that can make you rich by selling it to China.

As well as countless memories we’ll be bringing back tangible souvenirs. I’ve been buying earrings that'll remind me of where we’ve stayed – a good start to a new collection, and our amazing gemstones from Sapphire. Also paintings representative of both indigenous and European art in most of the states. And the best suntans we’ve ever had.

Unwanted souvenirs are the scars from midge and mosquito bites, but fortunately no snake bites.

And what of our beautiful caravan and car – the Kia and Kia Ora? They are being adopted by our excellent NZ rellies Iona and Murray, who got

Yepoon esplanade

and one of the rain storms that has hovered around the coast for much of this year

so jealous reading this very blog that they’ve decided to become grey nomads too and drink their way around the country, er hem, I mean discover this great country.

Since the last blog we’ve been wending our way down the east of Queensland to where we started – Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast.

Sedate Rockhampton (Beef Capital of Australia) and its seaside sister Yepoon, Gladstone which was probably quite nice (except for the midges) before they turned it into a mineral processing centre, Town of 1770 - named after the date of Captain (then only Lieutenant) James Cook’s first landing in Queensland – which is the last (or first) surf beach on the East Coast as the Great Barrier Reef starts offshore, Bundaberg where we DIDN’T go on the rum distillery tour as they were going to charge us more than the value of a bottle of rum each to watch how they make it so we decided we’d rather enjoy it orally than visually.

We had a slight detour back to NZ for family stuff, then a foray into the hinterland to Kingaroy (Peanut Capital of Australia!) to visit the gorgeous Bunya Mountains National Park

moody sea

Another of those showers at Kinka beach, Yepoon

with real big proper trees related to the kauri - beautifully symmetrical and safe to walk under at this time of year as they don’t have their 10kg bunya nuts ready to fall on you from 30 metres.

Pause for breath…off we go again…then onto Hervey Bay which is a rather strange place with no central city area but a long coastal esplanade good for walking (or driving a mobility scooter in the case of most of the residents), Maryborough which was a pioneer immigration river port in the mid 19th century rivaling Brisbane and has retained many of its wonderful early Queensland architecture, Tin Can Bay and Rainbow Beach which started life as logging settlements and now exist for recreational fishing and the Aussie obsession with Fraser Island.

We didn’t fork out the excessive amounts of dosh needed to cross less than a kilometer of water to Fraser Island. It’s an island covered with rain forest that looks exactly like the rain forest we were walking through - except on the mainland you aren’t being harassed by dingoes.

The rest of it is sand including the roads, which is part of the attraction as

Gladstone lookout

Queensland Alumina Ltd, one of the world's largest bauxite refineries, right in the centre of Gladstone. Lovely.

Aussies love driving on the beach. Rhys doesn’t like sand, beaches or islands. Or paying lots of money to get to them.

Now we are on the exceedingly civilized Sunshine Coast, scrubbing the car and van from top to bottom and working out how to pack our possessions into the Air NZ baggage limit.

So thank you Australia for having us, thanks for all the fabulous weather, views, forests, walks and great little Aussie towns. Thanks to the rellies who’ve shown us wonderful hospitality when we’ve descended on them – we’d love to do the same if you get over the ditch.

Thanks to all the great Aussies we’ve shared happy hour with and who’ve helped us on our travels. Usually people are surprised to find we’re from NZ – apparently we don’t sound like Kiwis – but as long as we get the sheep jokes over and done with first we’ve been welcomed like family. Those who’ve visited Aotearoa always say how beautiful it is and they’d love to go back.

This isn't goodbye as we know we’ll be back to Oz as often as we can – there are plenty

Bats!!!

I can smell them before we see or hear them...yeaaaarrrgh

of bits we missed which we’re already planning how to do on another holiday. (This wasn’t a holiday – it was an extended adventure).

And we’ll need to come and visit the son and soon-to-be daughter in law living in Sydney.

When we fly home next week we’ll be going up to Matarangi where I’ll be hot on the trail of some juicy bargain real estate – we don’t have enough wall space for our beautiful paintings.

Rhys intends to play lots of golf and me?…any offers of a job? We kinda blew the budget on wine…

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