Copyright © Tanya Piejus, 2001

10 February 2001

G'day from Woolloomooloo

Well, that's a bit of a fib actually because I'm not technically in Woolloomooloo but I like the name better than King's Cross - all those Os...

So here I am in Sydney at last. I inadvertently got my suntan off to a flying start when I arrived on Wednesday. In my jetlagged, brain-addled state, I went out for a stroll without my suncream and in an hour of hazy Sydney sunshine I got more sunburnt than I would have spending a whole summer's day in Brighton. Take care of that ozone layer, folks, believe me you need it.

I'm taking a break today after three days of heavy-duty sightseeing. First stop had to be the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. I was somewhat surprised to find that both were smaller than I had imagined. They seem to suffer from the Sphinx Effect of looking much more colossal in photos than they actually are. Not that it was a disappointment, however, they're both damn fine pieces of engineering and every bit as impressive as they're cracked up to be. The other surprise was that the Opera House isn't white. The tiles are pale brown and gold when you get up close.

The harbour itself is absolutely beautiful. I took it all in on a cruise yesterday, stopping off at the excellent Taronga Zoo from where you get a superb view back towards the Central Business District. The best part of the zoo was the Australian nocturnal mammals exhibit which houses such oddities as bilbies, brush-tailed phascogales (giant shrew-type creatures with bottle brushes stuck to their bums) and spinifex hopping mice. The only thing that horrified me was that McDonald's have sponsored the Orangutan and Gorilla Rainforest sections. How hypocritical can you get? When South and Central America's rainforests are being hacked to bits to farm cows for M... Mmm... I can't even say the word, it makes me so angry... those money-grabbing devils' burgers, they have the brazen cheek to put their names to a rainforest exhibit containing two of the world's rarest ape species. Grrrrrrrr!

OK, I've calmed down now. Where was I? Oh yes, sightseeing... I've also been up the AMP Tower with the highest observation deck in the southern hemisphere - more great views of the city. There are some other fab buildings in the CBD including the wonderfully flamboyant Town Hall, stately and enormous Queen Victoria Building and the State Theatre which has the most over-deocrated box office area I've ever seen. The Rocks and Miller's Point are stylish and full of history as these are the oldest areas of Sydney, once home to the First Fleet settlers and convicts. Now The Rocks is full of trendy bars, live music in the square, cafes and designer shops.

The Sydney Aquarium was well worth the visit with its walk-through tunnels in tanks of nurse sharks, humungous manta rays and assorted smaller fish. They have an excellent Great Barrier Reef tank too - can't wait to see it for real. The botanical gardens are also lovely and fruit bats hang, squeaking, in the trees until sundown when they fly in their hundreds from park to park.

My bed for the night is in The Pink House, a friendly backpackers' hostel in the notorious King's Cross area. The main drag is Darlinghurst Road which at all hours of the day and night is rife with prostitutes, drug pushers and a nefarious collection of dodgy characters. There are also hordes of backpackers who wander through this melee with a slightly bemused we're-only-here-for-the-atmosphere look on their faces. The sleaze is easily avoided though and running parallel to Darlinghurst Road is leafy Victoria Street with some of the most gorgeous colonial houses, all curly iron balconies, pastel colours and shutters on the windows.

17 February 2001

G'day from Katoomba

When I left you last week I was a couple of hours away from doing the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb. This involves donning a natty Star Trek-style jumpsuit, a hat and headlamp and, most importantly, a safety harness. Those of you who have had a chance to look at my digipics will have seen me looking rather damp. Well, it ain't all sun, sun, sun Down Under. The weather's actually been very changeable and quite chilly at times. I even had to put my fleece on once. Not that Sydneysiders seem to mind the rain. They stomp about in their shorts and T-shirts regardless. Anyway, the Bridge Climb was great fun even though it was teeming. We walked up the arch as the city began to light up and by the time we got to the top it was all lit up and looking very pretty indeed. The bridge itself is really quite awesome when you're standing on top of it.

Sunday I went to La Perouse to see where white Australia all began. Captain Cook parked his ship in Botany Bay in 18-something, said 'That's nice, we'll take it' and the rest, as they say, is history. For the last 104 years there has been a Sunday reptile demonstration there too which I watched. I can now identify half a dozen of eastern Australia's most deadly snakes - just in case. This has been a good week for wildlife all round. On Tuesday I rode my bike over to the north shore and went for a walk to one of the many headlands that looks out over the harbour. I saw several large waterdragons and some smaller lizards sunning themselves on the path. One particularly fine waterdragon let me get so close that I could have stood on its tail. I also saw my first wild kookaburra sitting plumply in a gum tree. I would have broken into the kookaburra song I learnt when I was about 10 but there were other people present.

But the wildlife highlight of the week came yesterday here in the Blue Mountains 100 km inland from Sydney. I went for a bushwalk along the top of the sandstone ridge on which Katoomba sits. I hadn't been long on the path when I heard the most fantastic birdsong. It was varied and melodious, like a nightingale on acid. I scanned the branches to try to find the source but couldn't see anything. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I was looking in the wrong place. What I was listening to was a male lyrebird. Once I lowered my gaze to ground level, there he was doing the whole hey-babe-come-and-get-me mating routine. He had his long striped pennant feathers arced over his back, a fan of white tail feathers shivering around it. Lyrebirds are known for their mimicry and his song contained notes that sounded uncannily like human laughter which is not suprising considering where he chose to build his bower. Anyone who's seen 'The Life of Birds' series will appreciate what I'm talking about but to see this ornithological marvel in the wild is something else.

Today being Saturday, it's adventure day, so I went down The Plughole. This is a vertical system of caves through which you slip, slide, wriggle and climb before emerging into one of the public show caves. Abseiling in was the worst part for me, never having done it before. The cave system was great. Lots of stalactites and stalagmites, graffiti from the earliest cave explorers and some really tight holes to squeeze through. Fun but definitely not for the claustrophobic.

That about wraps up the main events of this week. Highlights for next week include:
a giant fibreglass sheep
a night on a yurt farm
bush tucker and Dreamtime stories

Cheerio from 3000 feet.

24 February 2001

G'day from Ulladulla

I think Ulladulla sounds like a part of the body; 'I have a slight pain in my ulladulla, doctor'. Something pink and fleshy that wobbles when you speak, perhaps. Anyway, Ulladulla is in fact a cute, quiet town snuggled into a natural harbour to the south of Sydney.

When I left you last week I was still in the Blue Mountains, counting the bruises from my Plughole expedition. I spent Sunday there off-roading on my bike to view the appropriately-named Megalong Valley. In the evening I was booked on a night bushwalk to see glow-worms. We walked down into Australia's own Grand Canyon and sat under a rock overhang. Looking up, there was an arc of deep black studded with brilliant blue points of light from hundreds of hungry glow-worms fishing for their dinner. Above them was a lighter arc of night sky littered with bright, white stars. To add to the magic, our guide played his didgeridoo. It was an aggressive sound booming out of the darkness and felt like going back in time to when Australia was a hostile and uncharted place and the Aboriginals still unmet.

On Tuesday morning I took a two and a half hour train ride out of Sydney to the town of Goulburn. About the size of Tonbridge, Goulburn has two major attractions, for me at least. The first is a 15 metre high concrete sheep, otherwise known as the World's Largest Merino. For those who are unaware of them, Australia has about 60 of these Big Things, ranging from soft fruits to shellfish to historical figures, and I intend to see as many as possible on my way round the country. Why? Well, anyone who's seen my snowglobe collection will understand why I find this sort of large-scale tackiness irresistible. The Big Merino featured a fascinating exposition about the Australian wool industry and you can view the town through the sheep's eyes.

Goulburn's other draw is the Yurt Farm to which I cycled 20 km down a very pretty road through rolling New South Wales pastureland with curious cows. Yurts, for those not in the know, are traditional Mongolian dwellings, usually made from leather and in the form of a sort of round tent. The Yurt Farm consists of a village of permanent wooden yurts, some occupied by volunteer farmworkers from all over the world who work on the sheep farm for a couple of weeks in return for their board and lodging. They also take overnight guests and I selected a yurt on the edge of a small lake as my home for the night. What I didn't appreciate was that, after dark, the lake is stuffed full of frogs in full chorus. I identified at least five species but there were probably more. During the night, I also had to liberate a small bat that must have followed my torchlight into the yurt when I went to bed.

Having seen the Harbour Bridge from just about every conceivable angle, it was time to finally leave Sydney on Thursday. I have a twelve-month bus pass with Oz Experience that will take me in a clockwise loop round the eastern half of the country. It's designed by and for backpackers and allows me to hop on and off the buses for as long as I like anywhere along the prescribed route, which meanders off the main highways to interesting places like Ulladulla. Yesterday I walked up a big hill called Pigeon House Mountain and spent the afternoon sunning myself on nearby Mollymook Beach with some of my fellow Oz bussers trying to remember what day it was.

Next week's bulletin from somewhere near Melbourne...

4 March 2001

G'day from Cowes

No, I haven't been magically teleported to the Isle of Wight, I'm actually on Phillip Island just south of Melbourne but it may as well be the IoW as there's a Ventnor and a Rhyll here too.

I was on my way to Canberra when I last wrote. I've read several descriptions of Australia's capital but the impression I got of this totally fabricated city in the middle of otherwise-empty sheep country is of what would have happened to Milton Keynes if George Lucas and Alan Titchmarsh had been in on the design stage. It's an odd place, not entirely devoid of charm, but I don't think I'd fancy living there. It has some pretty funky buildings though, especially Parliament House which looks very Space Age. Digipic coming soon. I only spent a short period of time in Canberra and spent most of that drinking Aussie beer in an Irish pub with a Texan so wasn't able to make a fuller assessment.

Next stop was in the Snowy Mountains, made famous by tacky TV series, 'The Man from Snowy River'. Karoonda Park YHA is in the middle of nowhere so the overnight deal includes all meals which means a four-course scoff every night. I haven't eaten so much food for a long time. Being out in the country, I became properly aware of the smaller, more vicious, forms of Australian wildlife. I saw my first snake which was one of the top ten deadliest in the world, then a small black and white spider ran over my leg. I later found out that it would have made me pretty ill if it had felt the urge to bite me and I finished the day by standing on a bee which stung me. Considering what might have bitten me that day I got off lightly with a throbbing big toe. Fortunately, most of these things run or slither away as fast as possible when they see people so the chances of getting bit are slim.

At Karoonda Park I also went abseiling, indoor wall-climbing, horse-riding and took a ride down a 180m long zip line through the bush. I got to do all this and get a night's accommodation for free by taking a bunch of 10-year-olds wall-climbing for the afternoon. I had one of the more surreal moments of my life there too. I went out on a night drive with a load of Oz bus people during a thunderstorm. We were driving through a field of livestock and kept getting strobe-like flashes of startled sheep and bemused cows as we bounced on a trailer through their field. Then the heavens opened and we got suddenly and completely drenched. We all just started laughing. Finally a bus loomed out of the dark and rain to pick us up.

I jumped off the next Oz bus at Wilson's Promontory, the most southerly point in mainland Australia and a National Park. It was absolutely beautiful there. Paradise beaches, thick bush, swampland, great walking tracks and heaps of critters. Night-time was particularly special there. One night I sat in the door of my tent, David Grey crooning in my ears, sipping a spicy Shiraz from my enamel mug, spotlighting with a torch the wombats and possums ambling past the tent and watched the stars come out. The following night I was lying on my sleeping-bag reading and next thing I know a wombat is poking its teddy-bear face in through the door and climbing in with me. I had to shove it back out with my hands before it got its paws on my biccies. Sure beats working for a living!

I'll tell you about the penguins next week...

Posted 11 March 2001

G'day from Franklin Street, Melbourne

Blimey, another week gone. How time flies...

I think I mentioned something about penguins last time, didn't I? Phillip Island's main draw are the little penguins, who used to be called fairy penguins until someone decided that it wasn't PC anymore. They spend the night in burrows dug into the sand dunes and, at dusk each day, they come out of the sea after a day's fishing and waddle up the beach like so many little old men in navy blue frockcoats. I saw about 100 come ashore, which was relatively few, and one had eaten so much fish that it couldn't even walk. The Penguin Parade, as it's called, is a shamelessly commercial enterprise but it means that the penguins get to do what they do in a protected and otherwise undisturbed environment, which is good both for them and the tourists.

You can't come to Australia and not learn to surf, so I took my first lesson before I left Phillip Island. Imagine standing on an ironing board balanced on top of an unruly washing machine on its fastest spin cycle and you'll get a rough idea of what it's like trying to stand up on a surfboard for the first time. That said, I managed to get vertical for a few seconds a couple of times and I'm looking forward to trying it again. I now feel qualified to wear a Rip Curl T-shirt, unlike most people who buy them.

And so to Melbourne... It was a bit of a shock being back amongst rush-hour traffic, symbol-bashing Hare Krishnas and wall-to-wall junk food and it took me a couple of days to readjust to city life. After Sydney's instant good looks and easy style, Melbourne seems like the goofy, bookish kid sister, but it's grown on me this week. It's not the prettiest city to look at - the river's just a bit too muddy and narrow and the skyscrapers just not quite tall enough - but it has an olde worlde charm about its extravagant Victorian facades and its chuntering trams. Its a very arty sort of place with a laid back atmosphere that's elusive in Sydney.

Melbourne is particularly well endowed with green space and I spent a very pleasant afternoon pottering about in the fine Royal Botanic Gardens. There are also lots of cinemas too and I'm catching up on a few films while I'm here. The weather's been hot and sunny (it topped out at 34 deg. C on Friday) so I'm now a couple of shades browner after a visit to trendy St Kilda beach.

Nostalgia for mis-spent afternoons at university took me out into the suburbs to visit Pin Oak Court, otherwise known as Ramsey Street. Not having got round to visiting the 'Home and Away' set in Sydney, I had to pay homage to 'Neighbours' and have my photo taken outside Lou Carpenter's house. Last night I took part in another national institution and went to an Australian Rules Football match. It was the semi-final of a pre-season Cup game between local team, Hawthorn, and Brisbane. I went with a Melbourne-based Brisbane fan who explained the rules, such as they are, and I cheered on the Lions with gusto during a particularly close second half. It was great fun and Brisbane were triumphant. Brisbane Liiiiiiions, Brisbane Lions!

I've been here a month now and have been ruminating at length in my diary about the trip so far. I think Oz Experience was a good choice for transport although it can feel like being on a school outing sometimes. I've met some great people on the bus and seen some great places that I probably would never have got to otherwise. The Aussies have been universally friendly and welcoming so far and it's hard not to love the country they've made. In fact, I can't think of anything I really dislike about Australia. Actually, there is one thing - their attitude to cyclists, but I think that has more to do with the universal lunacy that descends upon human beings when they get behind a steering wheel rather than the fact of being Australian. Oh, and there are far too many biting insects and British people here, and the TV sucks. Apart from that, it's fab!

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