G'day

G’day everyone! We’re now officially “down under” and have just finished travelling down the east coast of Australia from Cairns to Melbourne.

We started in Cairns on the northern side of the east coast back on 10 December. Our flight from Singapore arrived at about 8am local time and after collecting our luggage, we were both surprised to be stepping out of the airport into temperatures of 32oc!

We had arranged a local hostel to pick us up from the airport so the transfer was relatively painless and only took 15 minutes door to door. Unfortunately, when we checked in to the room, we discovered it was infested with cockroaches! As they are my biggest phobia, we asked to change rooms to the first floor. The owner’s response to my concern was that I should expect to see roaches as we had now reached the tropics! Neither of us were keen to stay there after her rather blasé attitude so we decided to walk further down the road to see what else we could find.

Long story short, we managed to find another hostel which, upon our initial inspection, seemed to have no cockroaches!!

Cairns was a brief stay but we still managed to stroll around the town and see the new “lagoon” area which is a big, open swimming pool area for communal use rolling out on to the sea.

We also took a day trip out to the barrier reef during which Deep was able to dive whilst I snorkelled. We saw some great coral and tropical fish during the day and spent most of the time swimming around the various different coral reefs the boat took us to.

We left Cairns after a few days to start our journey south towards Sydney. It was at this point that Deep told me that in actual fact, the room we’d been staying in hadn’t been completely roach free and on the last night, he’d had to “remove” at least 5 big daddy roaches! Urghh! I had seen one of them but thank goodness I didn’t see the others!

There are a few ways to work down the east coast but we opted for the Greyhound bus which has a network of buses running up and down the coast line and across other parts of Oz. To break up the journey, we decided to stop half way between Cairns and Brisbane in a place called Rockhampton (or Rocky as the locals call it). This journey alone was 17 hours so we were glad to break it up even by 24 hours.

We had heard that Rockhampton wouldn’t have much to offer tourists so we decided to check out a place called Emu Park, about 30 mins drive from Rockhampton. We were picked up by the hostel we’d booked in to and arrived early to beautiful sunshine. The hostel was lovely and the best yet. They had only opened in October so the room was brand new and cockroach free!!

We decided to take a day trip out on a yacht which took us over to the bays around Great Keppel Island. We had a great day just relaxing on the boat and taking the opportunity again to snorkel around the coral and see some more beautiful fish!

After Emu park, we headed south again on another long (17 hour) bus journey to Byron Bay. Anyone who has travelled down the east coast will know that Byron Bay offers great waves for keen surfers - and of course, at the time we visited, beautiful weather.

We had booked in to a backpackers hostel where we stayed for one night. We had our own room but were due to move out to dorms the following day. Unfortunately, the place was filthy and guess what, had more roaches! Luckily, Deep found us another hostel just down the road which was much cleaner and offered better quality accommodation.

Due to the time of our travels, we were lucky to find somewhere else to stay in such a popular place. We took a while to get used to the “young and free” atmosphere of Byron Bay and although we managed to have our own room, we had to share the bathroom with 8 other people in the dorm outside our room. It was fine but as you can imagine, it got quite dirty by the end of the day!!

We really enjoyed Byron Bay and spent our time there either on the beach watching the keen surfers or doing some walks. During one trip we took a walk to Cape Byron, a lighthouse about 5km out of the centre which offered us fantastic views of the area and some well needed exercise after the Christmas day excesses!!.

Following Byron Bay, we took another bus down the coast to Sydney. Driving over the Sydney Harbour Bridge as we entered the city was an amazing experience in itself as it offered fantastic views of the city. We stayed with some friends over the Christmas break and had a great time eating, drinking and generally relaxing! We did the usual touristy stuff and visited the Opera House and walked across the Harbour Bridge. We also met up with some other friends who we'd not seen for a while which was great fun.

New Year's Eve was inevitably an amazing experience and watching the fireworks over the harbour bridge at 12am was exhilarating to say the least. The lights and sounds were amazing as we all stood watching the display from our friend's front window, champagne in hand. We will never forget the buzz of NYE in Sydney!

We are now in Melbourne and staying with Smallie, Deep's cousin. Smallie has a lovely apartment on the edge of the city which has given us great access to the main sights. Our favourite experience in Melbourne has been the beautiful "Great Ocean Road" which we drove down over 2 days and 1 night. It was beautiful to see the rolling green landscape against the blue of the ocean which offered such a contrast to other places we have been so far. We even saw a few wild Koalas which of course was a higlight for us!

We are due to fly out to New Zealand today so this is officially the first and last blog entry for Oz. We have thoroughly enjoyed the Oz experience and have met some wonderful people along the way. I will be sad to leave this amazing country but we are both excited about moving on to New Zealand.

Until next time...G'day for now!

---

---