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Sydney Opera House
We had to put at least one in.... On to the East Coast of Australia then. We flew into Sydney resigned to the fact that everything was going to cost an arm and a leg... so with that behind us we decided to go out for a few beers! It's good to get over your issues we thought (beer helps too). The following day we headed out to do the typical tourist thang and stroll round the harbour. It was all a pretty impressive sight and it was so weird actually standing in the shadow of a building that you've seen so many times in pictures, on the telly etc. etc. (that’s the Opera House by the way). After a few days of wandering the city and its botanic gardens (and seeing some wild Fruit Bats in the trees!) we decided it was time to head up the coast and that the cheapest way to do this was to get a campervan (Oh yes. Cold nights and meagre, self cooked dinners would follow but it made men of us, even more so that is of course). We opted for the Wicked Campervans company as it was the cheapest we could find, also it was blatantly the coolest and all
Our Badboy "Wicked" Camper
Mine and Ross' home for 10 days up the East coast the vans had a theme graffitied on the side. The camper we were given was a 4WD badboy (we managed to get upgraded from a standard as the original hirer didn't want it, good news!) with a Gorillaz theme along the side. Once we'd been run through the dos and don'ts we were off, across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and away!
Our first stop up the coast was the most easterly point in Australia. Apparently whales can be seen from here at certain times of the year (that’s wHales, no one wants to see the other sort) but despite out best efforts neither Ross nor I spotted any. Rubbish. So with that grim defeat in our hearts we made a further move up towards Brisbane stopping at several special sights along the way. First was the ‘quaint’ town of Nimbin. I say quaint as this notorious tourist hippy town attraction gave me the impression of a hippy town gone bad with tourism. Sure, peace and love may have resided here some 40 years ago but now the streets were lined with chavs and the ‘hippies’ gave off such a ‘holier-than-thou’ attitude that it kinda ruined the experience. Ho-hum. Oh
well, after a rainy night at one of the camp sites we moved on to do the really exciting stuff and climb some mountains! We first wanted to climb Mt Warning, discovered by the illustrious Captain Cook back in the day, but it was raining really hard so we thought we’d give it a miss (we did come back later but then one of the park rangers told us we couldn’t climb it due to helicopter operations, just our luck…).
So instead of climbing up Mt Warning we decided to head through Brisbane to climb Mt Tibrogargan, one of the highest peaks in the Glass Mountains range. Before we got there though we had to spend a night parked up in an abandoned quarry in the middle of the mountains (yes, we got a bit lost…). As there was absolutely no one else about and we were basically in the middle of a forest we were both papping ourselves whilst cooking dinner in the open (we only had a tiny camping stove that had to be used outside the van). This was mainly due to our self-fuelled paranoia of course, but there could easily have been wolves, cassowaries, red-backs,
Roos
Thess guys just wandered around reptile world, pretty cool! crocodiles or T-rexes about, as you know Oz is a dangerous place. After a surprisingly good nights sleep though we were ready to tackle Mt Tibrogargan. As you can see from our piccies it was supposed to be for ‘experienced climbers’ only, but as Ross and I are so hardcore we thought we’d go for it anyway. Needless to say we totally bossed it, hitting the peak in half the quoted time (check us out!). Having gained a bit of a taste for the climb we reckoned we’d go for another the next day. This time we chose a peak around Cathedral Rock. This was a slightly different climb as once you got near the top it basically became loads of boulders piled up on each other. Once Ross had shifted a few around to his liking (see the pics) we had a bit of a dance in the clouds and headed back down. Driving back through the national park we saw (and managed to get a picture of for the first time) some wild kangaroos, one even had a joey in its pouch and Ross, blossoming into an expert photographer, managed to capture it on film.
With our
Steve Irwin Way
Our tribute to the legend time coming to a close on the east coast we spent one of our last days exploring Reptile World just outside Sydney. This awesome zoo didn’t just house reptiles though, oh no, it contains all manner of beasts and birds from the cute and cuddly koalas to the brutal man-killing cassowaries (emu sized, flightless birds with a really nasty temper). They even had tame(ish) roos wandering around some of the zones as well as a Tasmanian Devil enclosure, which was pretty good fortune as it’s quite possibly the coolest animal in the world (in my humble opinion that is). Once we’d finished with the world of reptiles, mammals and birds it was time to offload our trusty camper (no breakdowns, not one!) and jump in a taxi (splashing out I know…) to catch our flight out to New Zealand. Sayonara Oz.
Sean
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