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Published: February 26th 2008
Millions of peaches
This one's for you Grandad Hadingham!Hello Everyone!
After our last regalling tale, we spent a few more days with David at his Murrnong Permaculture house/farm. We picked a huge amount of peaches (250 kilos approx.) and then took them to a local guy's shed where we set about making peach wine. Sarah and I took turns standing in a huge bucket, washing the many peaches, before throwing them in the other huge bucket that David inhabited and stamped around in (being careful not to stamp hard on any stones!). We also took part in the world famous Violet Town market, and sold David's delicious organic peaches and apples, attempting our best cockney market man personas. Then it was a 700km drive for yours truly, through some very crappy weather that had me regretting my decision not to put windscreen wipers on that actually worked (as opposed to smearing half the windscreen and leaving the other half untouched as ours did). But we got there, and are now staying with David's ladyfriend Michelle who lives in the inner west suburb of Newtown/Enmore/Marrickville. We chip in with gardening work (when we'd arrived the pumpkins had completely swamped the whole garden) and household chores, wwoofing style, and get
Peach Stamping
David was worried the acidity (ph 3.something) might leave him with no feet! lots of time to explore Sydney and the surrounding area, as well as having made a good friend. Her daughter Natasha is an enthusiastic and great cook and her son Darcy is a budding guitar hero.
Sydney
We've done all the touristy stuff Sydney has to offer the shallow pocketed traveller. We've wandered aimlessly around the city, encountering parks, cafes, shops, chinatown, all that kind of stuff, as well as the harbour bridge and the opera house, that are well viewed from Mrs Macquaries Chair - a seat cut into a big lump of rock - in the pretty Botanic Gardens. There are kazillions of bats in the gardens making for quite a sight. The other sight in the gardens was a tourist handfeeding cockatoos perched on a large 'do not feed the birds!' sign, but alas our camera had no battery juice left.
Bondi beach was an attractive and long beach, but doesn't really rank up there with the others we've seen on our trip, although of course a huge amount of people go there to be beached whales. We did a walk here that led along the coast past lots of other beaches and coves
Rain? Welcome to New South Wales!
We were greeted by some very nasty weather. I was wishing i'd replaced the wiper blades, but I thought it never rained! that showed off a really pretty stretch of jagged coastline.
We took a ferry to the suburb of Manly one day, it sits on a peninsula jutting out across the entrance to the harbour from the Pacific Ocean. On one side is the long ocean beach with big waves and lots of lobster coloured bodies, and on the other sits the harbour beach which is very sheltered and calm. Somewhere in a cove on the outer side sits Shelley Beach which was beautiful, and very popular. A nearby walk here had huge cobwebs crossing the path continuously, housing what must have been hundreds of spiders waiting for a tall person to walk along and give them a new home. The ferry was an excellent scenic cruise, passing through the larger than you think bay, past suburbs and national parks.
One evening, Sarah, Michelle and I went to an evening of entertainment at the local community centre to benefit an aboriginal lady from Alice Springs who was fighting a 20 year battle for justice after her husband died in police custody, and now has cancer and needs to get back to her family in Alice Springs. Here we participated
in a traditional Emu dance, listened to various musical performers (an Argentine and Aboriginal Australian rap duo, a huge man singing Elvis songs, lots of didgeridoos, an old guy doing some very funny freestyling and more), poetry recitings, a spirit calling (very intense) and the most half-assed raffle i've ever witnessed. It was a really good night and the lady in question was very emotional and grateful for the event and everyone there.
The Car
The car has been sold. For $400, a $260 loss if you want to look at it that way, but we don't as it took us huge distances with no problems (except for the Nullarbor episode, which i blame the Perth mechanic for), until we reach Sydney, where it seemed to breath a huge sigh of relied, before collapsing and falling apart at our feet. We'd had a couple of mechanics look at it and tell us of the millions needed spending on it, struggled with all the different opinions on how to sell and register an out of state car, and then one day on a journey we never completed to Royal National Park, the brake pad started crying in pain. So we
arranged for it to be scrapped, and fortunately the scrap company (who were going to give us $200ish) were rubbish and missed their appointed time, in which time an ex-Englishman (moved to Sydney from London in 1969) who looks after birds came onto the scene, knocked me down from $700 to $400 far to easily, and took the car of our hand, via his mate Ken, an interesting chap with two bad legs. And now we are again car-less, it's great.
Spiders
We've seen bloody loads of spiders here, from the big huntsman who inhabited our tent at Murrnong (that we didn't know was a harmless huntsman and very carefully and nervously removed), to the various name-unknown but apparently harmless ones here in the garden, to the masses of unknown eight leggers in Manly, and the big hairy freak, that turned out to be a Huntsman again, in our tent at the Blue Mountains. It is spider central here, compared to the relatively spiderless rest-of-the-country-we've-seen-so-far. They have mostly been huge, very individual looking and menacing in appearance. Although none have so far jumped onto our gawping faces and started gouging out our eyes, or rearing up on their back
Beasties in the Garden
A fat hairy spider that lives on it's huge web spun from a palm to a pumpkin plant legs and chasing us screaming down the street.
...Now i pass you over to Sarah to tell a tale of waterfalls, big rocks, trees as far as the eye can see, and the aforementioned Harry the Huntsman... The Blue Mountains
On Saturday we loaded up our backpacks for the first time since July and made our way, true backpacker style, to the Blue Mountains National Park, 100 or so kms east of Sydney. Due to the lack of car, we made our way there by (gasp) public transport and spent an hour or so wandering round our destination town of Katoomba getting grumpy figuring out where to stay. Now I always say cars are bad and evil but one time they are useful is when you are camping and finding campsites involves lots of walking up and down big hills!!! Our chosen place to camp had been filled up by a Scout group but we ended up finding a really nice hostel and pitching our tent in the back garden. Problem solved, we went out for a little look around which turned into a rather long (but nice) walk! We first went to Echo Point and looked
over at the Three Sisters (3 big rocks, or 3 sisters frozen into rock, waiting for their Dad to find his magical stick and unfreeze them, depending on who you ask - I prefer the 2nd option, much more exciting!!), and at the incredible views over the Blue Mountains. We are pretty amazed by the crowds of people here, they were arriving by the coach load! Our previous experience of National Parks have been very crowdless, but I guess this is what you get when you are so close to a big capital city. We were very lucky with the weather and had perfect views, this area is normally notorious for lots of cloud, and lack of views! We then had a walk around the top of the cliffs to a waterfall and went down into the valley a bit. We then headed back to Katoomba and treated ourselves to dinner at a vegetarian restaurant - I even had a goat cheese flan - yum! The ingredients must have been expensive or they thought I wouldn't eat much being skinny as the portion size was a bit teeny!! Nice to pretend to be posh once in a while though!
The Three Sisters
at Echo Point, Katoomba, The Blue Mountains Canyoning Day
Our first night was the coldest and windiest yet - and we didn't have the luxury of our blow up mattresses! So needless to say not much sleep was had, not that it mattered because the next day was fun filled extreme excitement day and we were running on adrenaline - wooh! We started off doing some abseiling, starting off with a small 4 metre drop and building up to a 25 metre rock with overhangs and all sorts of crazy stuff! Then we stuffed ourselves for lunch (for energy) and headed to Empress Canyon. We got into our wetsuits and put on our "getting wet shoes" (I got a pair of $4 trainers from an op shop to do the job!) and headed into the canyon.
We all had big bags on our back carrying our clothes inside special dry bags, and these came in useful for our first waterjump! The water was only a metre or so deep, the canyon only a couple of metres wide, and we needed to jump into it from a height or 3 metres soooo of course, we jumped into it backwards!!! The bags acted as buoyancy and stopped us
hitting the bottom, and made a massive splash! We had a few more jumps as we ventured further into the canyon, including a forward one where you had to jump a metre out to avoid hitting rocks - so we jumped as far out as possible!! There were also some slides down rocks into pools and quite a few very very cold swims - the water was maybe 10degrees C if we were lucky, thank god for the wetsuits (and I also got a thermal vest because I was skinny, thus more likely to get cold!) But it was great great fun, a bit like the walk we did in Karijini in Western Australia, except we were told what we could do without severly disabling ourselves - so less danger but we attempted more!
Then, just as we were started to get proper chilly, we came to the climax - an abseil down a 30m waterfall!! It was brilliant!! I went first and Ben followed 3 people later, so I managed to get some photos on our disposable waterproof camera, but don't hold your breath on how they will come out!! About 7 metres from the bottom we had
The Huntsman we had to remove from our tent
We didn't know it was a huntsman at the time of course a choice on whether to carry on abseiling into the pool at the bottom, or letting go of the rope and jumping backwards - we both jumped, the crazy adrenaline junkies that we now are!! It was certainly all a good test of our abeiling skills, getting down a slippery almost vertical surface whilst being pounded by freezing cold water from above!
We then dragged our rather soggy bodies back up to the top of the canyon and back to Katoomba, where we had a beer and paid the canyoning people the rest of their money - yet again they had forgotten to charge us (the same happened when we swam with sealions - if we hadn't been so honest we would have got away with it!!)I think we just must look so honest they just forget to take our money? We then went to the pub with our instructors and an American guy from the group, who we introduced to the delights of James Squire beer. He worked for Google and was given a posh apartment overlooking the harbour in Sydney and $70 a day spending money for his troubles - not bad! Then he bought us dinner
at a pizza place in return for us buying him his beer, and was happy to share vegetarian pizza even though he had previously said he couldn't live in Ireland because they have no food (he once had a bad hamburger over there). What a nice chap!
Next day, after a great sleep (the hostel lent us blankets and roll mats, nice people!!) (Ben - although we did get woken and kept up in the middle of the night by a nearby house of loud lairy oldish men shouting and playing Kylie Minogue's greatest hits at incredible volumes in their garden) we did another walk along the cliff top through some pretty rainforest with great views and waterfalls. We then proceeded to get lost in the town of Leura, which is very small and almost impossible to get lost in. But at last we found the shops and staggered into a cafe to feed ourselves - I had started to go a bit loopy with hunger and sore legs!! Then we collected our bags and headed back to the big lights of Sydney and a proper bed - we're too spoilt now!
Now we have until the 7th
March in Sydney, when we fly to New Zealand! Exciting stuff!
-By the way, we put some photos on the last blog so have a gander
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anonymous
non-member comment
that's better. more pics!