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Published: March 5th 2008
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Always on the left!
A gentle reminder and a good laugh along the road side Ok, ok, so I haven't updated my blog in a shamefully long time and somehow I've magically turned up in Australia without even giving you guys a full report on Thailand. Opps and opps again! Sadly, you'll just have to take a rain check on Thailand for the time being and instead, settle for hearing about mine and Jules misadventures across the great state of Victoria, Australia.
Let's start the blog with the Aussie/American English barrier that we seem to encounter more often than not. Yes, it maybe called "English" in general, but in reality, it is two completely different languages. Cookies are biscuits, flip-flops are thongs, bell peppers are capsicum, gas is petrol, the hood of a car is a bonnet, the trunk of a car is the boot and beer is a frothy. We can usually navigate around the language barrier fairly well during the day, but as soon as we get to a bar, we are completely lost. You need a dictionary just to order a beer! Do you want a stubbie, pot, schooner, longneck or jug love? Huh? My favorite language barrier moment is when we tried to order a pitcher of beer at the bar
The twelve apostles
Four (or three and a half) of the seven remaining apostles. Pretty ain't it? my friend Jackie works at. She looked at us funny, her co-worker looked at us like we were crazy and then it finally clicked what we had meant. Apparently a "pitcher" is known as a jug here. Anywho, the next day Jackie was telling her friend about us ordering a "pitcher" of beer, my recreation of the conversation is this . . .
Jackie: "My American friend ordered a beer last night and ask for a"pitcher" of beer"
Friend: "They asked for a what of beer?"
Jackie: "A "pitcher" of beer?"
Friend: "WHAT!?!?! They wanted to see a "picture" of the beer before they bought it?"
Maybe it isn't that funny, but we all thought it was quite humorous!
Now back to the trip . . .
We arrived in Melbourne late on Feb 20 after a lovely 9 hour flight which I rather enjoyed. Every seat had it's own personal touch screen TV that you had individual control over and after spending the past 3 months living in bamboo huts and showering by dumping a pail of cold water over my head, it was a really welcome luxury to eat airline food
Great Ocean!
View from a rest stop. Nice, nice, very nice! and watch some good ol' TV. Anywho, upon arrival in Melbourne, Jules and I were stopped at customs and questioned for 15 minutes. Where are you going? Who you staying with? How do you know each other? Who is your employer? etc. No one else got questioned so apparently we don't look as innocent as we think we do. After passing the questioning, we collected our bags, found our friend Mark and headed off to his house. We met Mark when we we're in Pai, Thailand. We hung out with him and his friend Liam for two nights. Mark invited us to stay with him and his Mom when we got to Melbourne so given that Mark seemed like a mentally stable kind of a guy and we're very poor backpackers, we decided to take him up on the offer. It has been great staying in a home again. We have a kitchen to cook in, a bed that isn't like a concrete slab, a bathroom with a regular toilet and access to laundry facilities, it's the little things that you really miss when you're traveling all the time.
Mark has been an amazing tour guide taking us to
Sandstone towers
Sandstone towers looking pretty just offshore while the waves explode againest them see all of the nice little shopping districts of Melbourne as well as making sure we get a good taste of the nightlife here. If you love to shop, Melbourne is the place for you! I've managed to avoid spending too much money on shopping here, however I've been forced to make a few critical purchases like when I'm walking down the street and my thong (flip-flop) disintegrated under my foot, a new pairs of "thongs" were essential to say the least. Other than shopping and wondering around the city until we dropped, we also took a road trip along the Great Ocean Road. It is one of the best coastal drives in the world so we decided to load up the car with camping gear and check out this infamous coastal drive. The scenery was amazing on the drive and we got to see the 12 Apostles. They are these famous limestone (or sandstone . . . some kind of stone) formations that sit off the coast looking all dramatic and stunning, however, there are officially only 7 Apostles cause they are slowly falling into the ocean. In fact, they don't even know if there were 12 to begin
with or if whoever named them just thought the name sounded nice. After taking in some of the lovely coastal scenery, we decided to spend the night "camping" in Port Campbell. The "campground" was the most interesting one I've ever been to. It's basically a big lawn area that you can park your camper van or car in and then throw your tent up for the night. They had a full kitchen which was for general use as well as a TV room. Who goes camping to sit inside and watch TV!?!?!?! Luckily, they also had a little campfire area as well so as people cooked dinners in the kitchen with the microwave and oven, we taught Mark how to cook over the campfire.
It was interesting trying to teach an Aussie how to camp like Jules and I do back home, but after some convincing he decided to give it a go. We taught him how to roast a hot dog over the fire which he wasn't convinced would work. Apparently, they only boil their hotdogs here and Mark seemed fairly certain that boiling was the ONLY way to cook a hotdog. Of course, we taught him that
you could slap it on a random stick you found while walking around, hold it over some nice coals and ta-da, roasted hotdog goodness! We also attempted to teach him about America's number one claim to fame in the camping world, S'mores! They don't have s'mores in Australia, in fact, they don't even have the right ingredients to make them (Raspberry flavored marshmallow's, what?) so Jules and I had to get a little creative. We ended up making "S'more surprise" which consisted of making a bowl out of tin foil then placing it in the coals with some Teddy graham like cookies and milk chocolate and then roasting marshmallow's over the fire, as usual, then throwing them in the bowl and mixing it all into a gooey, yummy, super sticky mess. It was delicious and Mark ate 3 bowls worth. A job well done for us!
So while Mark has his first taste of American camping food on this trip, Jules and I had our first Australian wildlife encounters. We saw our first wild kangaroo on the trip and battled many giant spiders which attempted to steal our log chairs from around the campfire. They also have these beautiful
An Aussie forest
Camping at Dando's in the Otway National Park. We stayed here the second night and no one was there except us and nature, including giant spiders! parrots that fly around the forest which are bright red, yellow and green. It's quite a wildlife change from camping in the forest back home. We also visited a wildlife park on the way back to Melbourne which has these giant lawns that have grey kangaroos all over them. The best part is you can just walk up and rub their bellies like you would to a dog back home. They were so cute!
Tomorrow is a travel day which will begin at the lovely hour of 4am. We fly up to the Gold Coast in the morning to see some of our other friends for a week. I can't wait to spend some more time on the beach! Then on March 14th I'll be off on my next great adventure and can I have a drumroll for this one please . . . . . . . . . . . . I'm going trekking for 20 days in NEPAL!!!!!!!!!!! Over 200kms will be trekked, almost 5,600m of elevation will be gained and lost and I'll eat rice and lentils till I'm blue in the face! I can't wait!!!!! I'm going to be doing the Annapurna trek which
Packaged greasy greatness!
We had a seaside lunch of greasy (a.k.a. yummy) fish and chips. Minus fighting off the seagulls, it was an amazing lunch! should be one of the greatest adventures I take on this trip! It will be so good! Can you tell I'm excited!?!?!?! Well, off to bed for me, but I'll throw up another blog before I fly away to Nepal! Take care guys! I miss you all! Less than 3 months until I come home!
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Jacquie
non-member comment
sounds like fun!
Hey traveler! Good to hear from you. Love the pictures, keep them coming.