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Published: February 20th 2007
The 2nd half of Australia started in spectacular fashion by celebrating Australia Day in Brisbane. As the saying goes “when in Rome”, so we did as the Aussies did - drink a lot. We all put on the gold and green hats and celebrated Australia Day with every other Aussie. They say it’s bigger than Christmas over here and as far as I could tell all you do on Australia Day is get very drunk and celebrate being Australian (or in our case, not being Australian). I got that pissed I ended up spending most of the night in a club on a podium dancing…so I’m told?? If you know me, you will know I have to be pretty pissed to dance but on a podium takes a lot of drinking. After a few days the hangover passed so I took a look round the city, which was very nice to walk around, especially its lagoon (public pool) which is set along side the river.
Next stop down the coast was Surfers Paradise. The whole place is a lie! It is not paradise (far from it) and the surf was crap! It is just loads of skyscrapers with a nice
big beach, and to make it worse you risked serious injury if you decided to swim. Ad and Rob discovered this when they got stung by a Portuguese Man-of-War Jellyfish! Luckily there was a lifeguard on duty who peed on them to stop the sting…no he didn’t, apparently that only works in Friends, I wish he did though…but he did pray them with something but it wasn’t pee. Anyway they were both lucky not to get permanent scars on their chests. The only good thing about Surfers was the bar crawl we went on with the hostel but even that got ruined because the bouncer wouldn’t let me in for being too drunk. Now, I wasn’t too drunk in English terms but in Australian terms I was and that is because in Australia the bouncers just decide (probably before they even look at you) you are too pissed for no apparent reason. It happened to most of us at some point in Australia and there is nothing you can do about it. When it happened to me my tactic was to calmly walk away and give him a smile that said ‘you think you have power but I didn’t really
want to go in there’ (not to be confused with my ‘I’m absolutely hammered’ smile, which is very similar). I personally prefer Ricks tactic of calling the bouncers names then retreating to a near by bush ready to ambush him when he finishes work.
Surfers was soon forgotten when I arrived in Byron Bay, it was so much nicer as was actually a surfers paradise. The main reason I loved Byron Bay is because it reminded me of Lagos in Portugal (one of my favourite places - thanks Chubb!) a beautiful surfer’s town with great views and cool bars full of surf dudes. While we were in Byron Bay we hired a car and drove out into the countryside to a small town called Nimbin. Nimbin is basically a hippie town (it’s really just a street) with crazy places like the Hemp Embassy, the Weed Museum and, my favourite, Bringabong (written in the style of Billabong - Genius) so from the names you can probably guess there is a lot of weed smoking there. It’s strange because it’s not legal in Australia but the police seem to just allow it Nimbin, like a mini Amsterdam. Everyone just wonders up
and down the street very stoned occasionally stopping at food stalls because they have the munchies - a very funny sight!
I’m not definate but it might have had something to do with my visit to Nimbin that made me strap myself to a stranger and board a small plane the next day. Then when the plane reached 14,000 ft, I went against every human instinct and jumped out! (still strapped to the stranger). I was skydiving!!! We went into freefall for about 70 seconds - doesn’t sound long but it’s long enough to doubt he’s going to pull the parachute but quick enough to remember very little of it - we were falling to the ground at about??? It was fucking fast! Thankfully, the parachute came out and we slowly floated back to earth with amazing views of Byron Bay. I don’t know why or how but me and my jumper bloke spent the whole journey down discussing…golf!?!? I was doing the scariest thing of my life while discussing golf, not women or cars or football but golf! They say fear does strange things but golf?? I will never understand it.
After Byron Bay we hired a
car again and headed back to Brisbane to watch the cricket at the Gabba. It was a one day international between England and New Zealand and Freddie Flintoff and Co. actually won! I’m not going to bore you with how the game went but I will say the beer was good, the banter with the Kiwis was great and the cricket was excellent so an all-round good day. In the morning me and Ad emerged from the hostel looking and feeling very hung-over and as our eyes adjusted to the light we saw a coach in front of us with a few faces we recognised, staring straight back at us. Our minds slowly ticked over trying to work out where we knew them from and by time the penny dropped the coach had gone. We had been staring straight at Freddie Flintoff and Michael Vaugh with the rest of the England team, that we had been watching the day before.
After the excitement of seeing famous people, even if we did realize it at the time, we drove back to Byron Bay and got on a coach for 12 hours to Sydney. On my first day in Sydney I
put my I-pod on and decided to go for a wonder, I ended up walking for 6 hours around one of the most amazing cities I have ever visited. First I went to the Botanic Gardens for a stroll in the sun with great views of Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. It is a view I have seen a thousand times on TV and in pictures but actually seeing it in person is very special and I couldn’t stop smiling about it for the rest of the day. That is one of the best things about Sydney, you get glimpses of the harbour everywhere you go and every time it amazed me as much as the first. Next I went to the NSW Art Gallery which was great and it had the best piece of art I have ever seen - it’s impossible for me to describe it, but it is called Alchemy by Brett Whiteley. Then I headed up to the Opera House which was a disappointment! When you get close you see it isn’t actually as white as it appears but is actually more like a nicotine stained yellow colour and it is all segmented instead of
smooth. But when I walked about 200 meters away I looked back and it looked as good as ever and I soon forgot what I had just seen. After a very expensive coffee over looking the harbour I went to the Museum Of Contemporary Art which had a great Moving Image exhibition. The highlight of which was a small room surrounded by mirrors with a TV screen and hidden camera in the middle, the TV screen was on a five second delay so you watched yourself in the past on the TV and in the present in the mirrors. It messed with my head as I couldn’t reminder picking my nose but there I was on TV, in front of me, picking away! I finished my walk with a wonder round St Mary’s Cathedral and Hyde Park which were both very beautiful. So after an amazing, and unexpected, day of seeing what Sydney has to offer I decided I love the city. The next day we all went down to Bondi Beach for the day and it was as stunning and over crowded as I had expected. A large shark had been spotted close to the shore the previous day
Melon head
Australia fan at the SCG in Sydneyand the water had to be evacuated. Although people were in the water, I decided that 4 limbs was a good number to have and I wanted to keep things symmetrical so I didn’t bother going for a swim.
On my last day in Sydney I got to see something no one has seen since before I was born…England won a cricket series against Australia on Australian soil. I actually got to see England not only win but thrash Australia at the SCG. I also got to see Glen McGrath bowl his last ever over in Australia and all 40,000 spectators stand and cheer as he bowled his last ever ball, which turned out also to be his last ever wicket in Australia - if your not a cricket fan this will mean nothing to you but it was special and I was very lucky to be there! I also discovered in a great way that Australians hate losing, especially at sport and especially against England…it was great! Of course the comments I kept dropping in about how easy it had been to beat the Aussies didn’t help. By the end of the game the Aussie fans were just
"Cow in tree"
Told you it was just a cow in a tree. shouting abuse at the England players that had out classed them and a constant flow were being kicked out by the police. I loved every minute of it! The Pommes wining in Australia, who would have thought it!
My final stop in Australia was Melbourne; everyone says if you like Sydney you will hate Melbourne and visa versa. I discovered that was rubbish because I loved Melbourne as well. Wherever you go in Melbourne you seen to always be able to see three things; a sports stadium (there are cricket, tennis, football and swimming stadiums as well as a F1 GP track), art sculptures (my favourite is called ‘cow in tree’ which is a cow in a tree), and trams (they are everywhere). After the success of my last I-pod induced walk in Sydney, I went for another in Melbourne. On this trip I went to the Docklands, Melbourne Museum - where I got to act like a kid again, St Paul’s Cathedral, Australia’s Centre for Moving Image, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria: International - where I saw three original Rembrandts and my first Andy Warhol, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art - this was
my favourite because it was one big head fuck…it appeared to just be a room with two old doors so I stood there for 5 minutes staring at them thinking I don’t know much about Art but this is crap! Then someone told me I can walk through the doors which just made things worse because it was just one long corridor with lots of rooms coming off it. In each room was some really random stuff, one just had a basketball in and another had an old car and another loads of rusty metal. I thought it was great because the whole time I was in the corridor I was convinced that I wasn’t meant to be there and the bloke had told me to go through the door as a joke (the sort of thing I would do), so I ended up avoiding other people in case I got in trouble! What a way to end 6 weeks in Australia, hiding in a corridor of an Art Gallery that I'm still not sure I was meant to be in!!
After 6 weeks in Australia I covered over 3,000 miles from Darwin to Melbourne and loved every minute
of it. There is so much to do and see in Australia that I hope I can come back when I'm a little older, richer and have more time.
My next stop will be New Zealand for 4 weeks, where I will literally be on the other side of the world from home. I have left the other 4 lads behind because I was meant to go to Fiji for 2 weeks first but I decided not to bother because (you will hate me for saying this!!) I'm bored of beaches. In the last 12 weeks I have only been away from the beach for a total of a week, so I'm bored of salt water, sun lotion and sand getting in places it shouldn't be able to. Instead I'm going to New Zealand the land of mountains, lakes, sheep, hobbits, extreme sports and rain. Bring it on!
Andy
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Nikki
non-member comment
u dirty little nose picker
all sounds very dull to me, all those beaches - not remotely surprised that your bored. I myself would hate it, especially all the sun ... ANDY! What are you like?! x x