Australia Trip Part 1

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28 November 2009

Where does three days into our Australian vacation find us? Today has been by far the most interesting. But I’ll back track for the sake of chronological order and start from the beginning.

Thursday night, we flew in to Brisbane. By the time we got out of the airport and to our hostel, it was about 8 pm. Even though we were served a delectable in flight meal, we just good let another day go by without eating something in Australia. And just for the record, Subway smells the same in Australia as it does in the States.

A bulk of the next day was spent holed up in our room with wireless internet. After the indulgent tasks of catching up in the world of e-mail and facebook, we were on to the practical matters of where we were going to sleep, rent a car, and spend our time for the next week.

That afternoon, we romped around downtown Brisbane. It is your typical downtown in a “white man” city: lots of coffee shops, funky fashions, and shopping. I was pleased to find a Target in the midst of the Queen Street plaza mall, nice and reminiscent of home when home was in Manhattan. We had sushi and donuts in the food court for lunch and THEN discovered a grocery store in the mall too! Way too exciting.

This morning, we were off to the train station catch a train to the rental car company. Another “man bush” moment: I had never been in a train station. I kept thinking about Harry Potter. I was secretly relieved by the fact that we missed our intended train by about 2 minutes and had 14 more to wait for the next one. Even though it was early in the morning and the station was relatively empty, there was so much to look at! Station markers, ticket booths, advertisements, people… It was nice to have those extra 14 minutes to sit down and take it all in.

As we cruised out of the city, towards the Sunshine Coast, it was a relief to get away from the fast pace and high standards of a big city. Billboards with Steve Irwin advertising his zoo made me feel right at home, most are the exact same picture as my infamous cardboard cut-out of him. Driving through the smaller towns along the highway, we stumbled upon a new favorite pastime: walking through grocery stores.

Grocery stores are magnetic. We’ve gone through three of them, just today. Every town we go through seems to have one, and in every town we seem to need to stop. We just look around, buy what would have been “normal” to buy at home but that we haven’t bought in months. Just what do two grocery-store-deprived Peace Corps volunteers buy in a grocery store in Australia? This will probably sound pretty typical to our readers at home: crackers, apples, cheese, dark chocolate, and (as if we don’t get enough of these on the island) bananas, to name a few.

The perk to our obsession with grocery shopping is that eating is much cheaper on vacation when you aren’t eating out all the time. We are quite giddy to have cold milk and cereal for breakfast, sandwiches, and, tonight’s menu, tortellini with pesto, asparagus, and a side salad. Oh, and some Oreos and cold milk for dessert.

Our first non-grocery-store-stop on the road out of Brisbane in route to the Sunshine Coast was the Glass House Mountains. The tourist literature describes these mountains as “volcanic plugs” that were created by moderate volcanic activity. The mountains were named by Captain Cook in the late 1700s. They are of spiritual and cultural significance to the Aborigines native of Australia. (For an interesting read about the Aboriginal culture, check out The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.) I really noticed how different these were than the other mountains I have seen; those typically consisting of ranges with lots of peaks, or at least rounded tops, that stretch on for miles. The Glass House Mountains are sporadic peaks and rather scraggly, though still impressive, looking.

A short but very steep hike took us to the top of Mt. Beerwah where there was a lookout spot to see some more of the peaks. On the way up, I noticed the vegetation too. Lots of the plants that I would have expected to see sparsely populating a dessert grow fairly thick along this eastern coast; an odd effect to have dry looking plants growing abundantly. Many trees have black burn marks ringing their bases, evidence of fires in the dryer times. Still, there are plants familiar to Vanuatu, tropical flowers and pantanas leaves. It’s interesting to see those mixed with pines and then the arid looking flora.

Our bed for the night was in Caloundra. A coastal town that is small enough to feel cozy yet still seems to draw the tourists. We’ve got a beach front self-contained unit (hence the pasta cooking) and high hopes of watching the sunrise tomorrow morning. We’ll see if we can pry ourselves out of bed in time.

In the meantime, we are watching Ratatoulle and feeling very unempathetic towards that rat. No matter how cute or smart of a chef it is, the past year and a half of our lives have been sprinkled with too many pesky rats that deprive us of sleep and chomp on our food and possessions. An audience with less traumatic rat experiences may be more inclined to empathize with him, but as for me, I completely side with the dwarf cook guy in the moments when he wants to eradicate the rat at any cost.

1 December 2009

It’s the first of the month, and even though Australia markets Christmas just as much as we do and even though the streets are decorated with evergreens and blue and silver tinsel snowflakes, it’s still not quite feeling right. It is nostalgic to see all the décor, the wrapping paper and gift tags in the grocery stores, even fruit cakes for sale. And yet not as nostalgic as I think it would be if we were in a country that has winter and snow at Christmas time.

Our attempt to see the sunrise at Caloundra was semi-successful. We got up at 4:30 am and were disappointed to see clouds on the horizon. Disappointed but still very awake, so I waited for the sun to rise a bit above them to take a picture. We took advantage of the cool morning air to walk along the boardwalk for about an hour before heading back to breakfast and then on to check out the street market that Caloundra hosts every Sunday.
The market reminded me of the kinds of stalls you would see at the fair. Jewelry, kettle corn, pet collar engravings, such like that. I was hoping for goods a bit more authentically Australian. The saving grace was that there was one booth with a man playing a didgeridoo and selling his CDs. We didn’t find much to buy though.

We spent the rest of the day working our way north by driving the “Blackall Range Tourist Route” and getting very lost. Australia, or what I’ve seen of it thus far, has a lot of roundabouts, which only increase one’s chances of making a wrong turn, especially when not intending to turn at all. We also find roads are not marked as we would expect, and maps don’t seem to need road names, AND we turned down the $10 a day GPS system from the rental car company. But, being lost is a fun way to get to know the locals I suppose.

We finally found ourselves a grocery store (yay!) to pick up dinner on our way out to the Noosa North Shore Retreat for the night. Since it was a Sunday night, the restaurant and stores would all be closing early and we were on our own for dinner. No problem for us, easy to please as we are. The retreat is a ferry ride away from the town of Tewantin. We boarded the ferry in our car to be towed across. The grounds were equipped on half of the park for tents and campers and the other half with “units” featuring electricity, ceiling fan, shower, and a fridge. Since it is still the tourist “off season” we pretty much had full run of the place, save, of course, the kangaroos that were roaming the grounds.

In the morning, Justin called home while I went for a run, stirring up white and pale yellow cockatoos as I went. In fact, the skies above the retreat were loaded with birds. Parrots, cockatoos, kookaburras; all very exotic and exciting to me. Then, we checked out some of the local attractions. A portion of The Great Sandy National Park was only minutes from our lodging, so we went for a peak. The park requires a 4 wheel drive vehicle as the road is basically driving along the ocean’s edge. We just romped around a bit on foot on the gorgeous and soft sand, picked up some shells and called it good. Then, we went on a short bush hike. The area is supposed to house koalas, but we weren’t lucky enough to spot one. We did enjoy all the birds and new flora surrounding us.

From here, we headed to the point farthest north on our journey: Noosa. We snagged an excellent deal on lodging, a two story apartment that could sleep four (or ten, if you know Brock style) with a swimming pool in the backyard and a luscious mattress. We are enjoying being walking distance from a shopping strip that has a used bookstore, grocery store, cinema AND tourist shops too.

This morning, we went for a hike at the Noosa National Park. An absolutely fantastic place! The park is situated right on a peninsula-esque bit of coast. The first part of our trek headed through the bush (again, no luck spotting koalas, though we did find the squiggly markings that they leave behind when climbing up gum trees). I never cease to be impressed by the new vegetation here. Then, we popped out on the coast at a point called Hell’s Gate. Here the wild coastline could do little less than impress the true power and energy of nature. The trek back was less isolated, lots of local walkers and more tourists that our bush portion. Even with the extra folks around we were still treated to some spectacular views with new combinations of familiar landscapes.

And here I leave you for now, off to take full advantage of our posh pad and take a nap…

3 December 2009

My third addition to this blog finds us back in Brisbane, awaiting an early morning flight to Sydney where we will meet Justin’s family at the airport. My hopes are that while we are waiting for their plane, we can take advantage of free wireless internet at the airport and get this blog posted.

I’ll pick up where I left off last, nap time. We treated ourselves to dinner and a movie that evening: Chinese food and New Moon.

The next morning we left our divine accommodation and headed back south, stopping in Eumundi for their infamous Wednesday morning market. This time, I was more content with the amount of local artists and products available. This market was considerably larger, yet felt more small-town-ish. We got to chatting quite a bit with vendors and consumers alike, such was the congenial atmosphere. We even met a guy from California running one of the food booths. It took us a couple hours to peruse around a hundred booths, make our purchases, listen to the didgeridoo man and, his rival, the bird call man, and take advantage of the food booths before hitting the road again.

Still heading south, we bypassed Brisbane and headed for our last destination on this leg of the trip: The Lamington National Park. We landed in the Green Mountains section around 3:00 in the afternoon after a beautiful, though rugged, drive and in enough time for a couple short hikes. This part of Australia was surprisingly even lusher than the last. There was also the smell of cool, crisp mountain air. We did the short canopy walk on suspended bridges where we were given a birds’ eye view of the forest from the tops of giant buyong trees. Then, we meandered through the gardens where plants had been transplanted from all over the world. All along the way, different colored parrots kept us company.

We had to make that rugged drive back in the same day to get to our lodging. Justin had me keep statistics so we could share: 26 blind curves, 25 portions of one way road, 68 turns greater than 90⁰, 10 hairpin turns, 3 times that we “klosup” crashed, and 4 kangaroos spotted along the way. I was especially grateful that he was willing and chipper about making that drive twice.

We slept in a different portion of the Lamington National Park called Binna Burra. They offer on-site canvas tents that are already set up with beds and mattresses. This section also is the access point for many of the national park’s trails. We checked in as it was getting dark, just in time to familiarize ourselves with the park before heading to bed. And, just like in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, when the sun goes down, it gets cold! Though the tent was secure and the grounds were naturally quiet, we did not sleep that well because of the cold. Our Peace Corps issued Chinese Store sheets didn’t cut it with that mountain air chill. But it did get us up early in the morning.

We hiked for about four hours the next morning. The trail markers described the ecosystems as “gullies” or “rainforests,” terms I never thought could apply to Australian lands. On these hikes we saw lots more wildlife on the ground: these gruesome black lizards, wallabies, kangaroos; but still no spotting of the elusive koala bear. Much of the hikes were in dense, rainforest vegetation, with a few lookout points over the Green Mountains. We avoided the waterfall hikes since we see so much of them back home and didn’t want to feel disappointed. Plus, Australia seems to be in a dry season right now.

We headed straight back to Brisbane, stopping only for a quick lunch at the Australian fast food place, The Red Rooster and to fill up on fuel and grab some ice cream (bless the Magnum brand, also Australian owned I believe) and checked in to our hotel right by the Brisbane airport. Here, we are vegging out in the air conditioning, charging our electronics, and planning to have a pizza delivered. We should be in bed early as check in for our flight to Sydney is 4 am.

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Photos

Sunrise
at Canoundra

Cockatoos
White with pale yellow head and belly feathers. We saw these at Caloundra and Noosa North Shore.

Great Sandy National Park
The softest sand I have ever felt.

Funky Flora
This thing reminded me of cousin It.

Hell's Gate
The highlight of our hike at Noosa National Park.

Granite Beach
Another stop at Noosa National Park. So many wild coastlines here, all dynamically different.

The Didgereedoo Guy
At the Eumundi market

Cave Circuit Hike
More vegetation, this time at Lamington National Park

Lookout on the Green Mountains
Enjoying our last few moments in the mountains before heading back to the city.

Comments

[b]

yay! i'm commenting!
ok, so i'm going to take this opportunity to comment on a blog i haven't previously viewed before others! i'm reading this at work and loving the pictures. i wish there was a 'Like' button, like on facebook, b/c i would 'like' all of them! you need to change your profile pic to the last one posted on here. it's pretty legit. or of the one of you and justin. =) also, the kookaburra made me want to bust out in song...do you know which one i'm talking about? ok...i'm planning on calling you later this evening after my workout session at the rec. love you! -b