Advertisement
Published: February 18th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Hello folks!!
We've had such a blast in Oz, we haven't managed to write a blog for a while - so here it is - finally...................
well.......we've been travelling Australia for the past month or so and it has been an awesome adventure! We left Sydney just after the New Year and headed down to Melbourne. Melbourne is a great city, full of trams to take you almost anywhere you want to go! (even to the Neighbours street which was somewhere Kaz wanted to see). From Melbourne we hired a camper van and spent a week travelling along the Great Ocean Road - amazing! (missing some photos as our cd became corrupted). We headed along the coast and up into the Grampians - the scenery was spectacular with the Mckenzie Falls being one of the highlights, and we even squeezed in a surfing lesson in Port Fairy. We said goodbye to Kenny the Camper in Adelaide - spent a few days checking out the city (more of a country town really) and headed to the Barossa Valley (home of Jacobs Creek) for a day of wine tasting and barbequed kangaroo - delicious! Also came across the largest rocking horse
in the world (check out the Guiness Book of Records) - climbing to the top of it was fun!
From Adelaide we decided to check out what outback Australia had to offer us, so we travelled inland towards the red centre. Jumped on a small tour bus with about 12 people going from Adelaide to Alice Springs (about 1500 kms) stopping for a night at the underground town of Coober Pedy. This was a very strange town - famous for its opal mines, most of the locals live underground to shelter from the scorching heat (sometimes up to 60 degrees celcius - yes 60 degrees c!!). We even stayed underground for the night in our bunkhouse hostel. Drinking in the underground bar was a laugh - the local copper even joined in on the party! If anybody wants to become an opal miner in Coober Pedy and search for their fortune, just buy yourself a plot of land (100 metres by 100 metres - costs about 200 pounds) an explosives licence (costs about 100 pounds) and start blowing giant holes in your land - good luck!
We arrived in a very hot Alice Springs - about 45 degrees
c, after crossing the border from South Australia into the Nortern Territory. This place is in the middle of nowhere! Full of shops, restaurants, pubs and lots of Aboriginals and surrounded by nothing but desert! The Reptile Centre was cool - we got to meet Terry the croc and held lots of lizards and a big Python - cool. They still managed to sneak an irish bar in!
Uluru (Ayers Rock) was our next stop. We spent 3 days and 2 nights on the trip (the rock is still a good 300 miles away from Alice Springs). After travelling all day from Alice we camped for the night and woke up at 4am to watch the sunrise over the rock. As the Aboriginals don't like you climbing the rock (it's a very sacred place for them), we decided to do the base walk which is about 10kms long and takes you right around the rock - it's huge!! What was surprising was how rugged the rock looked close up - from a distance it looks fairly smooth and rounded but it's full of cracks and giant holes. It rises up 350 metres above the ground, but experts believe that
strike a pose
Mikey with his new best friend about 6 kms of it lies underground! One giant sandstone pebble! It truly was a magnificent sight and a great experience. During the trip we hiked around Kings Canyon which took about 4 hours - Mikey took a swim in a waterhole while we were there and we camped for another night before heading back through miles and miles of nothing but red sand, large salt lakes and bushes, to Alice Springs.
After our outback adventure, Western Australia was calling us. We jumped on a plane at Alice Springs airport (probably the quietest airport we have ever experienced - we had been there 20 minutes before they decided to turn on the lights and information screens!) and before we knew it, we found ourselves in Perth. Compared to Sydney, Perth is a very small city but there's still lots going on and the nearby beaches are great! Did a bit of night swimming in the Indian Ocean at Scarborough beach. We met up with Mikeys brother David and toured the city for a few days, we visited Kings Park with David and Trish, then it was off on another tour of the south-west. There were loads of highlights on
outside Harold Bishops
Neighbours street in Melbourne our tour. The beaches around Esperance are some of the best we have seen on our trip so far - crystal clear waters and white sand - beautiful. Wave Rock was an amazing natural formation which was pretty stunning. Climbing Frenchmans Peak was hard going but well worth it and we also climbed a 70 metre (220 ft) fire tree with no safety net! The fire tree is used as a lookout for spotting bush fires and the steps to climb it were just poles sticking out of the trunk up to different platforms - it was pretty scary to say the least and our legs turned to jelly! Spending the night in forest cabins was a great experience, stargazing around the campfire and generally chilling out. Rottnest Island is a small island off the west coast and we spent the day cycling around (no cars allowed) and bumping into the local wildlife - Quokkas - they are small marsupials only found on the island - very cute.
After all our exploring, we're back in Sydney. Mikey wanted to climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge so we did it with Jackie (Mikeys sister) and it was fantastic! What an experience!
outside the Kennedys
as you can see, Mikey loved seeing the Neighbours street ;-) The sun was shining, which it hasn't done a lot of in Sydney since we've been here :-( and we had the perfect 360 degree view of the city - we could see for almost 50 kms around!
Australia is such a massive country and it's not until you do a road trip or flight across it that you actually realise - it just goes on forever! But as great as it has been, our Aussie adventure is coming to an end now - next stop New Zealand!
Hope everybody is not too cold back in England! ;-)
Mikey and Kaz.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.178s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 56; dbt: 0.0474s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb