A 10,000km roadtrip

Early April - June

Back in Sydney!
But oh we have seen SO much since I was last here from the stunning to the ugly to the downright bizarre.

Melbourne back in March was great fun with the stunning Commonwealth Opening (for those of you who saw it on TV, we were sitting on the Yarra river banks, where those fish sculptures were...) and the St Paddy's knees-up in an Irish pub that did have a few Irish people but was mostly filled with Aussies masquerading as Irish people... It does indeed seem that everyone is Irish on 17 March.
Got work out in the Yarra Valley about an hour from Melbourne dispatching plant bulbs. Not the most exhilarating of jobs and I still know nothing about gardening... But I've discovered something. Gardening is a rather sexy hobby... Oh yes it is... I mean, where else are you gonna find something called a Vulgar Dragon plant (dragonis vulgaris) otherwise known as the Viagra plant for obvious reasons.
Adelaide was our next stop after working for a few weeks. Stayed with Melinda, a great friend from London and her sister Sheena in their new place near the city. They showed us Adelaide's highlights from hugging Dot the Koala in Cleveland National Park to getting drunk on a tour of the wineries in the south of Adelaide. We had such a good time we ended up staying a week and a half. Then with Alex from Germany in tow (to split up the cost of petrol) we headed off into the outback.

The Outback
Flinders Ranges
First stop in the outback was the stunning rugged Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide... We took one of the more conservative routes and still encountered some nervewreaking moments as we wondered if dear old Amaroo (our car) would be able for the roads - lots of potholes, rocks and emus to content with. But the views were just amazing - really stark rugged mountains. Camping there that night was FREEEEEEZING - for those of you that think that Australia basks in 30+ weather all year around, think again. It gets REALLY cold here at night as Autumn approaches. A real treat the next morning as kangaroos came over to greet us as we ate breakfast!

Coober Pedy
I didn't think places like Coober Pedy, about halfway between Adelaide and Uluru, existed. A miner's town of about 4,000, what makes Coober Pedy stand out is the fact that most of its residents live underground or in cave dugouts. Opal was found here over 100 years ago and since it has attracted miners from all over the world meaning that this tiny town has people from all kinds of nationalities - churches of all kinds of denominations followed. You really don't
expect to visit an underground Serbian Orthodox Church in the Australian outback but Coober
Pedy isn't a place you can predict. The male:female ratio is like 4:1 or something (so a good place to pull, girls!) and then there's the underground living.... Temperatures can reach 50degrees in the summer and plunge down below freezing at night in the winter so to avoid these extremities people build houses in the rock where temperatures are more consistent. The most memorable house has to be Crocodile Harry's house which is covered in graffiti by visitors from world-over and in... underwear and pictures of naked women. Yes, for all his distinguished mannerisms and gentile appearance, Crocodile Harry is a bit of a pervert! Only in Coober Pedy....

Uluru and Kata Tjuta
Better known to most as Ayers Rock and the nearby Olgas Rock.
What can I say about Uluru? It really is as stunning as it looks in pictures except when you see it it has a mystical aura about it... It's really huge and what you see is only one third of it - most of it is underground. Everytime you look at it, it's different... And the effect of the sun on its colouring is remarkable - while most people will be familiar with the glowing red it goes at sunrise and sunset, it can be downright brown at times... While Uluru is definitely the most remarkable rock, the nearby Kata Tjuta is a better walk as you can climb over rocks and across little streams etc etc.
We stayed in Yulara, the resort for Uluru for three days - well worth giving yourself that kind of time to see the rocks. Before going onto Alice Springs, we went to King's Canyon which is (relatively) nearby - did a really hard but well worth walk there that included swimming in a freezing cold waterhole surrounded by red rock - fantastic!

Alice Springs
I've heard Alice Springs being described as an oasis in the middle of the dessert... In the middle of the dessert, it certainly is... I just always imagined oasises as being prettier than this place... It's a strange place in that it really is the the middle of the outback and yet is a proper town... One of the most noticeble things in Alice is the number of Aboriginals around. You could quite easily do a tour of Australia's east coast all the way from Cairns to Adelaide and not see any Aboriginals but once in the outback you see them. And it's quite sad as it's really obvious how several of them have turned to alcohol. It could very well be that out on Aboriginal land, you find strong communities that haven't been blighted by alcohol. However, it's very difficult to obtain permission to visit these places so the average traveller will only see Aboriginals in 'white' towns and those Aboriginals are often alcoholics. You really can understand the scale of the problem here... I always thought it was due to an ignorance on white people's part about Aboriginal culture and their refusal to accept the Aboriginal right to land. However, after seeing Aboriginals in the outback, you start to realise that the Aboriginals most white people come into contact with are people who have real alcohol problems, people who seem not to be able to accept Australia as it is now and adapt accordingly, which in turn encourages white people's racism. Real social problems there and it's hard to see how they can be resolved, especially when you see how it is for the most part ignored in the cities and by the government. Anyway, I don't know enough about the issue so moving on quickly before I offend anyone...!!
Alice doesn't have that much but it was good to relax for a while and stock up on necessities - supermarkets are a rarity in the outback and everything's really expensive whereas Alice has everything... It also has this baby kangaroo sanctuary where a man brings up baby joeys rescued from mother kangaroos killed on the road... The kangaroos were like half a metre high and so unbelievably cute!!!

Alice Springs - Tennents Creek - Mount Isa - Townsville
A journey of nearly 2000km with not much to see along the way except for flatness, flatness and more flatness. The roads in the outback are bizarre. They're not exactly pancake flat, more of a naan bread kind of flat... You know that shimmery glare you get on hot days - it obscures your long sight vision... Signs warn you of kangaroos, camels and cows... Cows?? In the outback?? Every now and then you see big black vultures (well, I think they're vultures) eating dead animals... Occasionally you have to overtake road-trains, or 54-metre long lorries with 4 or 5 carriages. Along the side of the road are several burned out cars... We were like, who drives out to the middle of nowhere and burns their car?? We were told that it's Aboriginals who crash their cars after being chased by the police... Don't know if that's true though. On the way to Tennents Creek, driving along the road, I saw a sign (one of those yellow ones that warn you of something crossing) with a plane. In other words, planes sometimes land on the road...!!
So we're just driving along (with a German guy, Ramy and a Dutch girl, Sonja) trying to get to Townsville as quickly as possible when we encounter a flood in Queensland on our second day... A tow truck was taking cars across for $30 but we reckoned the flood was low enough to cross. The tow truck driver told us to drive in his slip-stream so the water'd be lower. Bad idea. He stopped half-way across the flood and reversed onto our bonnet, scraping poor Amaroo...! The next day, I was stopped by the police for speeding. Treacy'd already been stopped back in South Australia and given a speeding fine. So it was just like, ohhh what next?! But arrive in Townsville we finally did...

Coastal Queensland
Whitsunday Coast
Houses on stilts, palm trees, sugar cane fields, beaches, beaches and more beaches, exquisite islands, rainforests, waterholes.... Queensland really is beautiful and despite it being autumn, the weather was still warm.
We headed down to Arlie Beach and booked a trip to the exquisite Whitsunday Islands - a 3-day tour sailing around islands covered in dark green forests and lined with white beaches surrounded by crystal clear water. Embarked on Whitsunday Island and lazed about on Whitehaven Beach (voted best beach on Oz or something) with its powder soft white sand. The weather was awful the next day when we were on the Great Barrier Reef which was a bummer but we went scuba-diving nevertheless. It was just OK - having scuba-dived in the Similan Islands and Bali, I think I just have very high expectations. But still good to have ticked off 'scuba diving at Great Barrier Reef'...
Eungalla National Park, just south of Arlie Beach, had gorgeous waterholes where you could swim under waterfalls if you were willing enough to brave the cold - which Treacy and I were. Saw platypus swimming the next morning at Broken River... It's little trips like this that make you really appreciate having a car - going on the bus, you miss out on so much.
Placenames are one of the great things about travelling in Australia and 1770 is as strange a placename as any... Yes, 1770! Arrived at Bundaberg only to find that I'd left my bag (with passport, camera and wallet, duh!) at a cafe 130km back so had to go back, making a round journey of 260km. Funny thing is after driving distances of 2000km in a few days, 260km felt like a minor inconvenience rather than a major journey. Now I understand why Australians laugh when we talk about how 300km is a good long way away! Visited a memorial to some 15 backpackers, including one Irish girl, who were killed in a fire back in 2001 in Childers then arrived in Hervey Bay.

Fraser Island
Definitely one of my favourite places in Australia!! We went over in a jeep with eleven people and all our bags and food. Took it in turns to drive and getting behind a 4 wheel drive and meandering through forests on bumpy sand tracks or negotiating soft sand on the beach is definitely one of the best things about Fraser Island! But that's not all it has - Lake MacKenzie, a freshwater lake ringed with powderwhite sand, is one of the best places I've ever swum in... Getting to Lake Wabby involves walking across a huge sand dune.. The Champagne Pools are so called because the water goes fizzy when waves crash in. You see eels whilst floating down Eli Creek. Fraser is one of the best places to see dingoes - they're everywhere especially at night when cooking. Just brilliant!!

Down to Brisbane and Byron Bay
Over the next few days we made our way down to Brisbane via Rainbow Beach with its different coloured sand, Noosa Heads where we were stranded inside most of the time due to rain but did get to go horse riding, along the Sunshine Coast and through the very unusually shaped Glasshouse Mountains. I didn't expect Brisbane to amount to much but we really loved it. Cycled around the city for a day and the weather was fabulous, people so friendly and a great vibe about the place as people are out and about. Brisbane even has its own 'city beach'... Nice!! Wet and Wild, a waterpark followed (just OK, like any waterpark you find in Spain or the Canaries) We only lasted in the absolutely awful Gold Coast for a night, took in the spectacular waterfall at Natural Bridge on our way to surreal Nimbin, a mini-Amsterdam in the middle of the Australian countryside! It took a few days in cool Byron Bay to recover from Nimbin but that was OK cos Byron Bay is definitely the place to chill out in. Spent a few days at a friend, Josh's place down in Evans Head where we finally got to try some surfing. I might have learned to surf but that was over three years ago and I had a learner's board at the time. This time, I had one of those nifty ones that require a very acute sense of balance and that professionals use to zip about on waves. Hence, failed miserably at my surfing attempts so gave up and just boogie boarded instead.
After Evans Head, it was down to Sydney for a few days work and selling our dear old Amaroo (still haven't managed to sell her....) Off to New Zealand tomorrow for a few weeks then back to Oz. Still no idea when I'll be back in Ireland - will decide when I get back from NZ!

Will update this sometime in the near or far future. In the meantime, happy holidays (for those in the northern hemisphere) and cheer up, it gets colder in the northern hemisphere (for those in the southern...)

Adios
Cat xxxx