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Published: September 30th 2008
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Well, the time has come. After nearly ten months, 31,047km, several hundred photos of tame parrots and nearly getting wiped out by road trains a couple of dozen times, its time for us to leave Oz. We're back at Tony and Vals in Koo Wee Rup packing our stuff up ready to be dropped at the airport in a few hours time. We'll stay in the motel there for the night and tomorrow fly out to Kuala Lumpur where we've got a choice of two onward flights to take, either south to Johor Bharu (near Singapore) or north to Kota Bharu (for the Perhentian Islands). Why have we got a choice of two flights? Because we booked one to the wrong bloody place, thats why! Hopefully, we're going to take the Island option. Beau, Tony and Val's dog isn't helping the packing process. Obviously aware that she's about to lose a couple of members of her pack, first she tried laying on top of the bag that Claire was trying to pack, then started taking stuff out as Claire's back was turned!
Since our last blog, we carried on northwards from Sydney as far as Coffs Harbour for a spot
Watching us take pics of the echidna
Hopped over to see what we were doing! of whale watching, then turned inland to Moree before heading south through telescope country eventually down to the Blue Mountains and then Albury to see Claire's cousins Jeff and Tracey. Then we spent our last three camping nights (and our 10th wedding anniversary!!) at Lake Eildon, a regular spot that Tony and Val have taken us to the previous times we've visited Australia.
Hoping to complement our stack of immature pictures from Iron Knob in South Australia, we drove through Bald Knob but blinked and missed it. Spent a day in Inverell fossicking for sapphires. Basically sift through a bucket of mud and look for anything that sparkles like glass. We never realised that they could be such a wide range of colours, not just blue. Actually they can be any colour other than red. Red sapphires are rubys. After a days hard work we had a fair collection of sapphires, about the size of dust. Peter, the professional miner, sorts through 1 1/2 tons of mud at a time, and we helped him then pick through his final selection of stones ending up with a handful of sapphires worth about $400 which unfortunately we weren't allowed to keep!
Pulpit Rock
Blue Mountains Stopped in a layby in the absolute middle of nowhere where we had one of the more surreal moments of our trip. You gotta realise that this was really, miles from anywhere. There was a knocking at the door, Jehovahs Witnesses! Get everywhere don't they!
Inland New South Wales is blessed with abnormally clear skies for much of the year and other stable weather conditions, and so it has become Australia's astronomy capital. At Narrabri there are a collection of six 22m radio telescopes that combined mimick a single dish six kilometres in diameter. Five of them are on a 3km railway line (laid completely flat, not along the curvature of the earth) and can be moved about. 120km south at Coonabarabran there is one of the world's largest optical telescopes. Its a shame that we couldn't look through it, but then nobody can, today the images are received by computer. What was interesting was a time lapse photo showing the problems from light pollution, the lights from Sydney could be clearly seen here 350km away. Completing our astronomical tour we visited the Parkes Observatory. This massive 64m radio telescope starred in the film
The Dish which told
the partly true story of how Parkes received the TV images of Neil Armstrong taking his one small step and fluffing his lines in 1969.
We had a long standing invite to visit Tracey, Jeff and their three kids in Albury. We popped in on the way back to Koo Wee Rup expecting to spend a night there, but were made so welcome and had such a good time we ended up staying four! Nearly nine year old twins Milly and Megan tried swapping identities to confuse us but we actually got quite good at working out who was who. We took them ten-pin bowling where the girls demostrated their rather unorthodox overarm bowling technique (sorry about the dent at the start of the bowling lane). Eleven year old Jez navigated us around for the day, at one point taking us onto the highway to see what Tilly could do which turned out to be not very much, chugging along at about 90. We wish we'd visited them earlier in our trip so we could spend more time with them, but hopefully we'll see them again soon.
Our last three nights in Tilly we spent at Lake Eildon,
Cockatoo with a view
Katoomba - Blue Mountains
only 150km or so north of Melbourne, an artificial lake we'd visited a few times over the years. We've always been amazed at the wildlife there, and this year weren't disappointed with a large echidna ambling about and as I lay on the ground taking photos of it a kangaroo hopping over to see what I was doing. We spent our tenth wedding anniversary there and woke in the morning to the sound of several stunning king parrots walking over our roof.
So its all over, this part of our trip. We've had a fantastic time here in Australia, not least for some of the amazing people that we've met. Some we're sure will be friends for life. The wildlife as well has been stunning, from the smallest eyebrow beetle (in WA) to the massive whale shark we swam with in Exmouth. We used to joke with Pete and Nirbeeja about being so disappointed with leaving such wonderful camp sites but then just moving on a few miles and finding somewhere even better, it almost became mundane. Waking to the sound of kookaburras laughing and then opening the van door to see kangaroos waiting outside, or a parrot on
our table has become so familiar we're not sure how we're going to adjust to life back in the UK. Hopefully we won't need to for long, we're seriously thinking about trying to move here long term.
One last mention has got to be of Tilly, our bus. For a 21 year old converted school bus, she's lasted the 31,047km journey fantastically with no major problems. Whenever we had a problem, like a leaking master cylinder and when I filled her with petrol rather than diesel (Doh!) it couldn't have happened at a better moment or somewhere easier for it to be fixed. The one (slow) puncture we had towards the start of our journey might have been a bit of hassle, but we'd only just started to prepare to change the tyre and someone turned up with directions to their friends tyre depot just round the corner. Even though it was late at night, and they were half way through their slab of beer, they'd sorted the tyre in half an hour. With all the back of beyond places we've been to, we really couldn't have hoped for a better van. Tony's got custody of her until we
hopefully get back here.
Still the journey's not over yet. Got two weeks in Malaysia, and then it will be good to get home to see the people we've left behind. Then we'll see where we end up next!
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