Travel Logbook

Sydney, Bondi & the Blue Mountains, Australia: 18th November-3rd December.

I arrived in Sydney at lunchtime on the 18th November. Had lots of trouble finding somewhere to stay; all the places in the traveller's center of Kings Cross were full, but I eventually found a place out near the Central Station.

My first task after checking in was to go and get a look at the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. The weather was agreeably spring-like but for the first time in best part of a year I was walking on the sunny side of the street instead of searching out the shade. I thought Sydney Harbour was suitably impressive; some other travellers I've met say that the Opera House and Harbour Bridge come as a bit of a disappointment because they're so famous - people feel like they've seen them before. But for me they made a nice change from Asian temples.

Being a true Budget Traveller, in order to keep costs down in expensive Australia I needed to cook for myself instead of eating out every night. I practiced all the recipes from my University days - beans on toast, jacket potato and beans, jacket potato and cheese, cheese on toast...(no mixed vegetables though, Aled)

I felt a strange sense of culture shock on my first few days in Sydney after having spent so long in Asia. It took me a while to re-adjust to the pace of life, but even so I spent far too long in Sydney - 6 nights - before heading out to Bondi Beach for a couple of days. Considering that it's maybe the most famous beach in the world, it isn't really much to write home about.

Having roasted in Bondi for a while checking out the scenery, I then went out to the Blue Mountains, two hours west of Sydney, to check out scenery of a different kind. I did some nice short bushwalks out to some waterfalls and down the Three Sisters, but the highlight of my stay was the day I spent canyoning. This involved donning a wet suit and abseiling harness, then wading down a freezing river through a deep gorge; occasionally sliding down the rocks on our bums, making 12 foot jumps into splash pools, and then finally abseiling 30 metres down a waterfall with the water crashing into faces. Cold but exhilirating.

Back in Bondi, I met up with two of my cousins from Ireland, Heather & Adrian. Adrian had been working in Melbourne for a few months and had driven up to meet his sister who had just arrived from Ireland. They were planning to head back down to Melbourne along the coast road so I tagged along for the craic. Before we left though, we took the Olympic Sprinter out to Homebush Buy to get a look at the Olympic Park.

Sydney to Melbourne along the coast: 3rd-9th December.

On the morning of the 4th we piled into Adrian's beautiful Ford Falcon and motored south. Our first stop out of Sydney was at a place called Pebbly Beach. A colony of kangaroos live on the beach there and they've lost all fear of humans thanks to all the picnickers who hand out food. They're completely tame and you can stroke them but watch out for your chocolate because the buggers will steal it when you're not looking. I was a bit nervous of them at first because they're quite large beasts and obviously have very powerful legs with sharp nails on them. But they really are the softest, funniest things I've ever come across. They're definitely my favourite animals.

Following the Princes Highway south, we stopped that night at a coastal town called Narooma. We stayed at the Youth Hostel, where Adrian knew the owner. He invited us to come for a swim in the estuary with him late that evening, but it looked bloody freezing so I bravely volunteered to stay onshore and guard the towels... Next day Heather went horseriding through the bush so while waiting for her, Adrian and I went hunting for Huntsmen spiders. Huntsmen are big and like to hide in dark, confined areas such as under the peeling bark of fallen gum trees, under toilet seats and behind sun visors in cars, from where they drop onto motorists' laps, generally causing panic and sometimes accidents. After tearing all the bark off every fallen tree in a nearby wood, we eventually found one. From Narooma we continued down the Princes Highway, crossing from New South Wales into Victoria and stopping at another coastal town, Lakes Entrance, for a couple of days.

Next stop was Phillip Island, south of Melbourne. We went to the Penguin Parade, which sounds, and is, horribly touristy, but still a great experience. You sit on a big concrete terrace to watch the sea, and as the sun sets groups of Little Penguins can be seen assembling off shore. Little Penguins are the littlest in the world and don't grow beyond one foot high. Once they decide the time is right groups of penguins start to come ashore. First one group then another swims through the surf and assembles on the sand - but it takes them ages to get across the beach to their burrows in the dunes beyond. They'll waddle a few feet up the beach but it only takes one Little Penguin to have a crisis of confidence and turn back for them all to follow. Eventually all the penguins are waddling up the beach into the dunes where you can watch them as they greet their chicks and get beaten up by rabbits.

We also went to the Koala Conservation Centre on the island where a treetop boardwalk lets you get up close to the dozy marsupials in their natural habitat. No cuddling (of koalas) is allowed in Victoria so no cheesy photos for the website yet...

From Phillip Island we reached Melbourne the next day. Adrian and Heather were catching the ferry from there across to Tasmania. My plans were to move quickly on to Adelaide and then Alice Springs before returning to Melbourne and going across to Tasmania for Christmas and New Year.

Adelaide, Coober Peedy, Alice Springs and Uluru: 10th-22nd December.

I spent four days in Adelaide, a city I really liked for no particular reason. There isn't actually much to do there but I did take a walk around the old GP circuit. The final hairpin and start/finish straight are still there in Victoria Park although they look very different without all the grandstands and advertising hoardings. Near the chicane at the end of the pit straight is a memorial to Ayrton Senna, just a simple concrete slab recording his championship years and with a pair of tiny hand prints that presumably weren't actually made from his hands...

Next I took a night bus up into the desert to a place called Coober Peedy. This place is quite famous because the people live underground to escape the searing desert heat. Most of the houses seem to be built into the sides of hills rather than being literally underground but the upshot is the same. I stayed at Radeka's Underground Motel where the Backapcker dorms are 8 metres underground, and while it wasn't particularly hot above ground, it was still remarkable how much cooler it was underground. Coober Peedy grew up on opal mining and the opal fields surround the town - marked by thousands of small conical mounds of rubble sitting beside unfenced 30m deep mine shafts. It's illegal to mine for opals now within the town limits, but it isn't illegal to extend your underground house by a room or several - know what I mean?? Someone told me you could buy dynamite in the supermarket in Coober Peedy so I went for a look. I couldn't find any though and I couldn't quite bring myself to ask the shop assistant which aisle the high explosive was on...

Next stop was Alice Springs. I was expecting a dusty one street outback town so was a little disappointed to find it reminded me more of Dartford... It was raining as my Greyhound bus arrived and it rained all that night; next morning the usually dry Todd river was a raging torrent of dirty brown water. They say if you see the Todd River flowing three times you'll never leave...

The rain let up briefly on the first day of a three day tour I took to Uluru (or Ayers Rock). Our first stop was at Kings Canyon where we took a walk to the top of the canyon's 80m high sheer walls and then went for a swim in the hidden gorge called the Garden of Eden. On the way to the canyon our guide, Carney, had taken us to the roadhouse where he grew up, which was near to an Aboriginal community. There was a small gallery at the roadhouse selling art produced by the community and Carney explained to us the significance of the symbolism of the Aboriginal paintings. He also got us discussing the Aboriginal "situation" and the problems that existed in the community, in the Alice and in Australia as a whole. For instance, is it right that, on the request of the local community leaders, the roadhouse won't sell alcohol to any Aborigine even though, for all the staff may know, the guy trying to buy it may be an astrophysicist with a doctorate from Sydney University?

That night, after a dinner of kangaroo steak which tasted exactly the same as beef, we slept in swag bags under the stars. Next morning we drove to Kata Tjuta, otherwise known as the Olgas. Kata Tjuta means "many heads" which is a good description of the huge rounded domes believed to have weathered down from a single monolith that was once ten times the size of Uluru. Today the highest peak in Kata Tjuta is 200m higher than the Rock, and Anangu beliefs hold Kata Tjuta as a far more important place than Uluru. We walked through the domes for a few hours getting a good look at the remarkable geology of the place.

After lunch we drove to Uluru, but before reaching it we stopped at the Aboriginal Cultural Centre for a couple of hours where we read about the stories attached to the Rock, explaining its cultural significance to the Anangu people. So, should you climb the Rock or not? Why shouldn't you? Because the place is tjukurpa pulka tjara, which basically means it's a very important spiritual place. But so what, there were no Aboriginals around to see us. And besides, the Aboriginal culture doesn't really exist anymore, it's just run by the tourist industry while the blackfellas sit under their gum trees drinking grog... I don't know what the truth is, but I felt it was right to respect the wishes of the owners and not set foot on Uluru. By the time we left the centre to go and get our first close look at the Rock the clouds had rolled in again, obscuring the top, and the rain was pelting down. Which was cool, because the waterfalls cascading off Uluru's convoluted flanks were absolutely spectacular. The cloud cover was 100% that afternoon so the sunset wasn't going to be worth watching and we skipped it. But next morning we arrived at the Rock at 5.00am to eat breakfast while we watched the changing colours of Ayers Rock as the sun rose. The rain had stopped, the waterfalls had gone and the Rock was dry as we walked the circuit round it before heading back to Alice Springs.

Hobart & Port Arthur, Tasmania: 23rd December-6th January.

From Alice Springs I made my way all the way down to Hobart in Tasmania, where my cousins Heather and Adrian had found jobs and a flat. On Christmas Day we were invited to a barbie with the family of one of Heather's work colleagues, then on Boxing Day we went to another at the home of a chap they knew from back home in Ireland.

Between Christmas and New Year I went to Port Arthur. This was a prison settlement from 1830 until 1877, a place where, in the words of the then Governer George Arthur, a convict's whole fate should be "the very last degree of misery consistent with humanity". Today the site has been preserved and some of the buildings restored but unfortunately the quaint cottages, church and prison buildings converted from a granary, all set in a leafy bay, generate the atmosphere of an English country village rather than the horror of Van Diemen's Land's most feared penal station. In fact the only thing that had any effect on me was the poignant memorials to the three staff members who were among the 35 people killed by a gunman there in 1996.

For New Year's Eve I was back in Hobart. Adrian, Heather & I went down to the waterfront and wandered between pubs until midnight. Heather had got a job at the Cascade brewery in Hobart, one of the most famous in the whole of Australia, and chose this moment to inform us she could have got us free tickets into Irish Murphy's New Years Eve bash, with free beer all night. Doh!

It seems you couldn't go anywhere in the world that night without seeing fireworks and, sure enough, 12.00am came, the fireworks went up, the streetlights stayed on and the world didn't end. We stayed up all night and watched the first sunrise of the new millenium while you guys back in Europe were still counting down the hours to midnight.

Before I left to go back to the mainland we visited Bonorong Wildlife Park where among the friendly roos and dozy koalas we also saw some baby Tasmanian devils. I had gone to Tasmania intending to do lots of bushwalking but it was so nice staying with Adrian and Heather, and I was feeling so lazy after Christmas excesses, that I just hung around in Hobart until it was time to return to Melbourne to meet my sister who was coming out to join me for a couple of weeks.

Melbourne, Great Ocean Road, Sorrento & Sydney: 7th-18th January.

I met Lorraine at Melbourne airport early in the morning of the 7th January. We spent a day in Melbourne while Lorraine recovered from her flight, then the next day we hired a car and set off for the Great Ocean Road. Before leaving Melbourne though we first popped out to the suburbs to have a look at Ramsey Street then went for a quick lap of the F1 circuit in Albert Park. Although I pushed the little Mazda as hard as I could, my lap time of 9m14.353 was a little bit off the lap record...

Heading out of the city, our first stop was a place called Torquay where the 30 degree heat and deep blue sea must have come as a bit of a shock to Lorraine after the miserable English winter. Continuing on we stopped for the night at a grotty YHA in Appollo Bay. One plus was the free use of boogie boards and next morning Lorraine & I went down to check out the surf. The water looked warm and inviting but in actual fact it was bloody freezing. Was that Antartica on the horizon?

The rest of the day we spent driving the remainder of the Great Ocean Road. Along the way we stopped at such famous landmarks as the 12 Apostles and a double rock arch known as London Bridge. A sign at the London Bridge lookout tells about the two lucky people who, back in 1990, had just crossed the inner span of rock when it crashed into the sea, leaving them stranded on a newly formed island from where they had to be rescued by helicopter. What the sign doesn't tell you is that, according to popular rumour, the pair were having a secret affair and the ensuing publicity was disastrous...

Eventually we reached the end of the GOR at a town called Warrnambool. That evening we drove out to Tower Hill, a game reserve set in the huge crater of an ancient volcano. The evening was drawing on as we set off on what we thought would be quite a short walk but as the sun sank close to the horizon and the light failed, the path just seemed to go on and on uphill forever. I began to think about Blair Witch and cursed having thrown the damn map away... But just as our spirits were sinking, we came across a wild koala, a family of baby emus and a group of kangaroos that stubbornly refused to get off the path and out of our way. We got back to the car just as the sun was setting.

Next day we drove up to the Grampians national park for a whistle stop tour; just enough time to have a ganders at a couple of the lookouts and cook the greasiest BBQ I've ever had. Then we drove back to Melbourne, out the other side and down to Sorrento on the southern shore of Port Phillip Bay. The following morning we went out on a dolphin swimming trip. First off they took us out to a seal colony on some rocks in the middle of the bay. The visibility wasn't too good and the water was freezing but the seals were quite friendly. We then found a pod of dolphins and did, technically, get to swim with them but it was a little disappointing really. I got one brief glimpse of a dolphin underwater while being towed on a rope at a couple of knots by the boat. I'm left still searching for that real dolphin experience.

From Sorrento we took the Mazda back to Melbourne then took a night bus to Sydney. Over the next couple of days we did all the Sydney things; Opera House, Harbour Bridge, ferry ride to Manly etc. We also went to Watarrah Park where Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was filmed. You can still see Skippy, or at least her great-grandkids, roaming the park and we got to hand feed more 'roos and emus and also got to stroke a koala. Back in Sydney we met up with one of Lorraine's friends from home and spent an uncomfortable couple of nights on her floor before I left Sydney bound for Tamworth.