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Published: September 8th 2015
Hello all again! It's been nearly ten months since I've last posted a blog. During that time, Yoni and I have been based and living normal lives in Melbourne. It really has been an amazing experience for both of us living away from home in a different country with 9-5 jobs and having our own independence. On the whole, our time in Melbourne was more than mostly positive and it was fairly sad to move on and leave the city we've lived in since January 2015.
I would say the main highlights would be, both enhancing our careers with me working in what I want to do and Yoni shooting a short film, meeting and making two very good friends in Ronn and Steve (and others of course) and the time our brothers, Jamie and Tal came to visit. Of course there were numerous more exciting things that happened (the houseparty we hosted for Yoni's birthday/Our leaving party was a big success too) but this blog is mainly about what has happened since we left Melbourne six days ago. Overall, although at times we slagged Melbourne off and the winter was very cold, we loved our time in the city and we lived a very comfortable and enjoying life.
So, on the 3rd September, we finally moved out of Melbourne and took the short flight to Sydney. We had previously visited Sydney a few months earlier when Jamie and Tal were in the country but decided to see it again as we were impressed with it. Being lazy/laid back, we booked to stay at the same hostel we had before as it did a good job and was fairly social. We arrived in Sydney at around 5pm and after grabbing a small dinner, we went back to chill in our room as we were shattered from going out in our last night in Melbourne. After meeting everyone in our room, we decided we'd go out as the people were cool (I think as it was just three other girls, we were more up for going out!) and we felt refreshed. After starting the evening casually drinking in our room with a quiet Paul McCartney album being played, the night ended up being pretty crazy. It's a bit of a blur from what happened (more so from Yoni's point of view as he still remembers nothing when he drinks!) but it was good to be back on the road and living the travellers life. The next day, we surprisingly woke up fresher than we thought we would, so made an effort to sort out what we were going to do during our remaining time in Australia (we leave on the 29th September). In the end, we spent pretty much the whole afternoon in the travel agent arranging our plans. We eventually sorted out that after one more night in Sydney, we would leave the city in a rented campervan and drive up the East Coast of Australia arriving in Brisbane on the 12th September (600 miles from Sydney to Brisbane). The plan after the 12th is that, we will be doing three tours to three different places (Whit Sundays, Noosa and Fraser Island) which are all meant to be extremely beautiful places and very untouched. We will be taking the bus further up the coast for this and finishing in Cairns before flying to New Zealand on the 29th September. Brisbane and Cairns are over one thousand miles apart from each other so we will be on the road an awful lot.
Our second night in Sydney mirrored our first night and as we had to get up early to check out (10am, but us being us, we didn't get out of bed until 9.55am or leave until 11am) so we took the bus to the shop where we had to collect the campervan and finally made off mid-afternoon. The morning/early afternoon was a bit of a struggle with both of us at one time feeling we may need to run to the toilet after the previous night's antics. We battled through though and the drive up was enjoyable. With the music blaring and the sun shining, we left Sydney behind and made our way up the coast. After driving for around four hours, we ended up in New South Wales's second biggest city, Newcastle. We were both by now absolutely drained and shattered and couldn't think of anything worse of sleeping in our van that night. Being not such hardcore campervaners and more middle class London boys, we both agreed to find a hostel and stay in a bed that night. I'm not sure how Newcastle is even a city, let alone NSW's second biggest city as it was a tiny ghost town on the Saturday night we were there. As we were both so tired, we decided to get a good night's sleep and were very happy when we realised we were the only two people on our room. Peace and quiet for a night, it all seemed so perfect.....
Living in hostels, you accept and get use to people keeping you up with their snoring. It's annoying but you understand it's part of the parcel while sleeping in big dorms. At around 10.30pm in Newcastle, I was just about to switch the lights off when two big Fijians opened the door. Both were all in their thirties or forties and were drunk. One was massive, like a rugby player. After they invited us to join them for dinner (they stunk of alcohol and body order), we politely declined and went to bed. The bigger one also mentioned about three times in five minutes that they were getting up at 5.30am which we weren't overly pleased about. They steamed back in not so long afterwards and threw themselves in to bed. It must have been ten minutes of them being in bed, I started to hear the loudest snoring I have ever heard in my life. I put up with it for a few minutes but it was relentless and was only getting louder, longer and more aggressive in sound. I had to wake up Yoni as I couldn't go through this on my own! All we wanted that night was a quiet and long sleep. Big Fiji man carried on and on so Yoni and I both were shouted at him and banging on our beds to try and wake him up. No luck though and he just carried on and on. After what felt like forever, he calmed down a bit, but it was a horrible nights sleep for both of us as we both continuously woke up various times in the night thanks to his monster snoring. Of course at 5.30am, we hear their alarm and then them making so much noise leaving. So our night in Newcastle wouldn't be classified as a success but we were still excited to begin a full day's of solid driving.
We left Newcastle at roughly 11am and began to head North up the East coast. For the first few hours, we stuck to the boring motorways. After we stopped for lunch, we decided, even if it was to take a fair bit longer, we'd drive inland more and get off the motorway and take the inland route through tiny towns and beautiful countryside scenery. We shared the wheel all afternoon and once it got dark, Yoni was now driving. We had found a campervan park online so at around 8pm, we decided to head there as we mentally tired from all the driving. Little did we know that the place we were heading to was deep into the mountains. With no street lights on any of the roads on the inland route, the drive was pretty exciting but scary at the same time. The drive was up and down these tight bendy mountain roads and Yoni did a more than adequate job dealing with them. We had decided to have a Beatle day in the car, so listened to their first album to their last in date order, By the time we got to the last album, we were completely lost and getting really tired. In the end, we gave up looking for the place and settled on parking up in this tiny mountain town (which was also like a ghost town) and stayed the night on a random street. We did feel a bit like gypsies (*traveller's) but I guess that's what we are with this van as our home until the 12th.
Anyway, the next morning, we got up early as the light woke us up and headed straight out of there. Our aim for the day was to get to a place called Byron Bay by the evening. We spent the whole day on the road only stopping for food and petrol and drove through such remote towns. It was all so different to anything we have seen in England with towns miles and miles apart from each other and the town itself only consisting of a handful of people. The drive itself was very beautiful going through such untouched places with greenery everywhere. We arrived (again shattered) at Byron Bay at 6/7pm and found a hostel which also has spaces for campervanners. Byron Bay is on the coast and is extremely pretty and peaceful. It's very popular with backpackers and also families as it's got a lovely beach and a real holiday feel to it. We had heard about how it's very hippie and liberal and full of older people from the sixties who still live in 1967. This description we had heard was fairly spot on but it isn't as bad as we'd feared. We've had a lot of 'Hey man' and seen a lot of signs outside of shops offering 'Free Hugs' but on the whole we still expected worst. Our first night in Byron Bay, we just chilled in the hostel common area and made friends before going to bed at around midnight. The next day, we woke up very early again as the van was so hot and drove to a place an around away from Byron Bay called Nimbin. Now this place was what we were expecting of Byron Bay. Hippies everywhere! We both can't help it but we can't take these people seriously! It was only a small town and we only visited for around two hours before rushing out of there and back to Byron Bay. We chilled at the beach in the afternoon and got some lunch. It's now early evening here and we plan to go out tonight. Tomorrow, we want to get up early and make the drive towards the Gold Coast which is another very touristy area.
That's tomorrow though. It's been very enjoyable for me to go back and start writing a blog again. I'll hopefully write them regularly again. I also hope you've enjoyed reading them. That's all for now! I suppose it'd be fitting to end the blog with a big PEACE!
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Tony
non-member comment
journey
What a brilliant read, really interesting to read but I'm glad it's you two doing all this and not me!