Goodbye Shelly!

Tuesday, January 04, 2011 Katie and Taylor
We left behind South Australia and hopped forward 30 minutes into Victoria, the last state on our tour of Australia. One of the most scenic and famous roads in the world is the Great Ocean road which we chose as our route to Melbourne. Which we sped along as Shelly had her first viewing that evening.

The Great Ocean road is a 243 km coastal drive along the south east of Australia starting in Warrnambool and ending in Torquay. It was built to commemorate those who fought in World War One and winds around limestone rocks, beaches, rain forests as well as little towns and hills. Scenic photo stops are dotted along the route which include the 12 Apostles, London Bridge, Loch Ard Gorge and the Grotto. These are all limestone rock formations which have been created from the waves and the weather, the so called London Bridge actually party collapsed in the 90s so the amazing rocks are subtly (and not so subtly) changing over time. Luckily we were travelling east against the traffic along the road as the sun was out and day trippers from Melbourne were out in force, sections were queued back about 5-6 kilometres.


We arrived in Torquay where someone awaited Shelly for a test drive which proved pointless as they didn't think she was worth the money (shocking! Luckily we had an e-mail waiting for us that night in Geelong and Shelly was booked in for her second viewing the next day, this time with some Dutch backpackers in Melbourne which was a little more promising.

Neill and Kylie from our Odyssey trip live in Melbourne and kindly offered us a place to stay while we were visiting Victoria's capital so after a quick shopping trip in Geelong we headed into town for Shellys viewing before heading on to Kylies mums. The viewing went really well and the guys decided to buy her and asked if we could keep her until Jan 2nd, which was perfect as we needed a car to get to Kylies anyway. We had a few nice relaxing days at Kylies, headed into Melbourne for some sightseeing on the 30th, booked our flights to New Zealand and had a pool party/BBQ at her friends for New Year. Unfortunately Neill was working but he treated us to some nice cocktails and food in his work which was great, well worth a visit for its cocktails! 

On New Years day we had a BBQ and went to the movies and went to Philip Island the next day after dropping Shelly off in town. We are so happy the car has sold as it was stopping us from making our next plans for New Zealand, I'm sure she will do fine with the Dutch guys even though they have never driven on the left side of the road before!
 
Philip Island is a small island just outside Melbourne which is home to little/fairy penguins. At night they can be seen coming home after a few days fishing at sea, while dodging the many seals. They stand in the water being taunted by the sea gulls before making a mad dash to the rocks to get to their burrows. It was very cute but also very funny to watch. They get scared off and run back to sea a few times before getting the courage to cross the beach. A viewing platform has been created for tourists so we enjoyed the view with hundreds of people from all over the world. Definitely an experience worth doing!

We've had a great time with Kylie and Neill, we've had a chance to stop and sort stuff out as well as catch up with them and their new life in Australia. We've been spoiled rotten and tonight we get to enjoy our first roast dinner in 9 months! Tomorrow we are heading into the city for a few days before catching our flight to our new life in New Zealand on the 7th - can't wait!!


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G’Day Santa

Thursday, December 30, 2010 Katie and Taylor

A visit to South Australia wouldn’t be complete without a visit to Barossa Valley, theBarossa Valley (6) famous wine region and home to Jacobs Creek and Penfolds wines. We had an objective to find a bottle of wine for our Christmas dinner. The winner was a bottle of Moscato from Jacobs Creek after much free tastings and dodging the plague of locusts which have hit the region just as we arrived. Shelly has been painted red with the blood of insects a fair bit on her travels but nothing prepared her for having locusts committing suicide on her face! We’ll clean her soon.

 

Adelaide is quite a modern city with the CBD being surrounded by parklands and the centre being full of grand buildings and churches. Weirdly enough the shops were quiet, compared to what Christmas shopping is like back home. Adelaide is known as the city of churches, and they ain’t lying as almost every corner has a church on it. Quite a strange sight to see was Santa driving around in a mini-moke and wearing shorts. I don’t see it catching on to be honest……big red jacket, full beard, santa hat and a nice tight pair of khaki shorts, mmm festive!

Adelaide (2)Adelaide (12)

Adelaide (9)We originally planned to be in Coober Pedy for Xmas but luckily we ended up ahead of schedule and lucked out on a 4 star apartment in the centre of Adelaide, complete with swimming pool, balcony, Sky TV and most importantly our own kitchen. After 9 months on the road, all we craved was to be able to cook our own food so it was great to be able to cook proper food and even a batch of Chocolate Balls (thanks mum for the recipe.)

To be honest it never really felt like Christmas, as being used to snow from back home it felt weird being in 36 degree heat. It was great though to settle down for a few days as after being on the road for the best part of a year, we are ready now to settle down for a while.

 

We are currently on our last leg of our Australian adventure, via the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne, where hopefully Shelly will gain a new owner to continue her travels. We shall then be flying onto Auckland and hope to get a job for a while and sample a bit of Kiwi life.

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The Red Centre to Civilisation

Monday, December 20, 2010 Katie and Taylor
A tour of the centre of Australia isn’t complete without a visit to Uluru and Kata Tjuta National Park, home of the infamous Ayers Rock, so we headed there from Alice. After 450kms, a night stop with a friendly emu and lots of desert we made it to the Ayers Rock Resort. A purpose built holiday village just outside the National Park which offers accommodation for the budget traveller right through to the multi-millionaires there’s something for everyone, we opted for a campsite and slept in the car - for a change. There’s a bank, post office, supermarket and it even has it’s own airport!  The resort was built as motels and campsites built beside Ayers Rock in the 70s were ruining the landscape so everything was moved 20kms away.

The day we arrived we set off in sight of the Olgas, not as famous as Uluru/Ayers Rock but just as stunning. Also known as Kata Tjuta, so called by the Aboriginals meaning many heads, the spectacular orangy red domes stand 200 metres higher than Uluru. There’s 36 of them packed together and there are a couple of walks to do around them. We opted for the gorge walk which took us through the middle, very cool if a bit windy.

Next we headed to the sunset carpark at Uluru for our fist proper close up of the huge rock. We made ourselves comfy and prepared dinner whilst watching the sunset. A bit of an anti-climax to be honest, it was a very cloudy. Ayers rock lit up beautifully though and we did get some lovely photos!


Sunrise was much the same, but worth getting up at 5am for. We picked up a Japanese hitch hiker who missed his bus into the NP. At 5am we were both a little dozed and offered the guy a lift thinking we were going to the same place.. we weren’t. Toshi wanted to go to the Olgas 45Kms away from Uluru, oops. So we dropped him off at the buses at Uluru hoping he would make it to the Olgas after sunrise (he was to late to catch it at the Olgas anyway). Ben....... I mean Toshi then left his camera in our car and came running back, very confused and said he couldn’t get on any buses. Luckily he found some willing backpackers to take him. The national park is so huge that you can’t go off walking very easy and he probably would have tried to walk to the Olgas and get lost in the process, so we were glad he was no longer our responsibility.

After an early morning cuppa and some breakfast we headed off on the 10km base walk around Uluru. It was strange seeing the rock so close, it was absolutely massive and not smooth like it looks in all the pictures. There were lots of bumps and holes in it, some of which were sacred sites, so photos were prohibited in many areas. This was slightly frustrating as there was no explanation to the sacred sights, just that they were there and not to take photos. Climbing Uluru is not advised as the Aboriginal people don’t want tourists up there as it is sacred to their culture , so we didn’t climb up.

Our visit to Uluru was short and sweet and after our walk we set off south in search of opals in the 4th state of our visit, South Australia. Coober Pedy was our first destination, meaning hole of white man in Aboriginal, basically because 90% of the worlds opals are mined here and people from all over the world wanted a piece of it so moved there to mine. Temperatures in Coober Pedy can be excessive (50 degrees plus) which has drawn many of its occupants into underground houses where the temperature stays the same all year round. When we heard this we thought the whole place would be underground, but it was only a handful of shops and accommodation and since we arrived on Saturday afternoon nearly everything was closed so the only underground place we could see was the Catholic church, which was really small but really pretty. There was a drive in movie theatre here too which was closed for Christmas so we missed out on that too. Taylor did a bit of noodling (looking for Opals) and found a little piece. Unfortunately after all my hints for a new (not green-turning) wedding ring made from opal we left empty handed and continued our drive south. This started with miles and miles of nothing and ended in the third largest city in South Australia, Port Augusta.

We have now left the Outback, nothing can prepare you for the vast amount of nothingness in between roadhouses and mining towns. We are glad though to leave behind the multitude of flies, chance of mowing down a roo or breaking down in the middle of a desert.
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Reef to the Outback

Tuesday, December 14, 2010 Katie and Taylor
The Overlander's Highway spans 896 km and 2 states, not to mention linking the tropics of Queensland and the sparse wilderness of the Northern Territory.  It was the first real taste of our road trip towards the red centre and we had our fingers crossed that Shelly would last the marathon from Townsville to Tennants Creek, then joining the Explorers Highway to Alice Springs.

The landscape changed from mountain ranges and 99% humidity to the more bearable dry heat that we last encountered on the Silk Road in Central Asia. Our first pit stop was Charters Towers which was briefly the 2nd largest city in Queensland after Brisbane during a gold rush in the 19th century with around 30,000 people chancing their luck to pan for gold. It even had its own stock exchange but we found out that it involved a guy in a house who had a call twice a day, not quite what its like now! Our next stop was Hughenden and Richmond which is billed as the dinosaur capital of Australia as this area was a great sea millions of years ago and is home to the best specimens of fossils in Oz. We met another typically Australian dinosaur from Hughenden called Hughie!

We docked into a rest area after weaving our way through a bad storm which stopped half way through and the wind changed direction and hit us all over again. In the middle of the outback (which had the highest recorded temperature ever recorded in Oz at 53.2 degrees) we met a group of travellers and had a bit of a party with warm white wine and goon, very bizarre and I even fell asleep on the bonnet during the night as it was ridiculously hot inside the car only to be woken up by a road train pulling up. These road train can be as long as 55 metres and are particularly terrifying when the overtake you at 130 kmph.

We arrived into Mount Isa with a small hangover and docked in for a night, which to my surprise is one of the largest cities in the world. Yep honestly, as the the main street is 180 km long, not a place you want to traipse along shopping. The main street links the town with an even smaller village 180 km away near the border. It was nice to fill up on some supplies in the middle of nowhere and true to form, being the nations home of rodeo, most of the residents have matching stetson hat and boots.

The other end of the "main street" ends in Camoweal which doesn't have much in it apart from expensive fuel and very tasty cookies and warned us that the clocks go back 30 minutes and 5 years! But seriously why change the clocks by 30 minutes.....very confusing! So we crossed into the Northern Territory and the scenery changed very quickly to red ochre mud and bright blue skies. It was nice to leave the floods behind which have battered much of Australia as we have been here. 

The drive form the border to Tennant Creek took most of the day to cross, passing some of the largest cattle stations in the world and some lovely examples on what a road train can do the local wildlife.....very colourful!

Tennant Creek is another gold mining town but only seems to be home to locals wandering the streets so we didn't hang around too long and we started heading south on the Explorers Highway/Stuart Highway towards Alice Springs. 

First stop off while heading south was the Devils Marbles or Karlu Karlu by the local Aboriginals have many balancing rocks, quite spectacular! We also passed the UFO capital of Australia which homes a few people who have apparently been abducted by aliens and probed?! Interesting! Sightings are guaranteed if you stay the night but we moved on. We just found out today that the backpacker, Peter Falconio who went missing a few years ago was found here while we were visiting. Also stumbled upon a Hollywood stylee sign for a small aboriginal village of Aileron, with its very own large naked man and woman.


After 3 days driving we arrived in Alice Springs, the centre of Australia and surprisingly enough it is very hot (39 degrees today) We chose to stay here for 2 nights as Shelly is in for her first service and we are glad to report after having 2 new front tyres, she is ready to hit the road again.

Alice Springs can swelter to temperatures of 45 degrees in the summer and shiver to near freezing in the winter. We wandered the dry Todd river which hosts a yearly regatta with a difference, the bottoms of the boats are cut out and the teams run on the river bed. Alice is also home to the largest school in the world, as children all over the outback tune into the School of the Air and they are taught online/radio by a teacher in Alice Springs. Also the operational centre of the flying doctors is based in Alice which tends to the medical needs of the outback by flying to the remotest regions of Oz. 

Well now we have reached the centre, we are heading to Ayers Rock/Uluru tomorrow for a few days before heading through more of the outback southbound towards Adelaide for Christmas.. can't really believe it's Christmas and it's kinda hard to get in the Christmas spirit in this heat - I think this picture sums it up.. 

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East Coast Australia... done!

Wednesday, December 08, 2010 Katie and Taylor
After skipping the worst of the thunderstorms we made it to Airlie Beach after an early morning wake up call from the mozzies. Airlie beach is the main jump off point for the Whitsunday Islands so we went to price up a trip and spend some time on the beach and in the sea. However you can't actually swim there as there are marine stingers everywhere and you can probably guess from their name they aren't too cuddly. Airlie Beach have compensated for the mass stingers by building a lagoon where you can swim stinger free and there's also a mini beach there for sunbathing. So after a day there we wen't out for free pizza and a few drinks before staying in our $10 a night hostel thanks to the Sydney Expo in Nov.. so had a reasonably cheap time in Airlie. The weather warnings were threatening severe thunderstorms so unfortunately it wasn't worth risking a trip to the Whitsundays, it's pretty expensive to do a trip there and with the thunderstorms we opted to head to Townsville a bit earlier and skip the Whitsundays.


As we headed to our most northerly point of our trip, Townsville, we drove through at least 3 seasons, skipping out on the snow. Passed by a big mango to go with our pineapple and banana and worked out what our plans were since the East Coast seems to be experiencing some weather problems this year... rain in the summer can you believe it!!? Unheard of!


Magnetic Island or Maggie as the locals call it is an island 20mins ferry ride from Townsville, we had hoped to visit the Koala Sanctuary and do a bit of snorkelling over there but once again the weather dealt us a blow. We didn't want to risk the weather so checked into a motel in Townsville for the night and worked out our plans for heading west instead into the ominously sounding "Red Centre". 


The next morning was spent exploring Townsville and climbed Castle Hill which is a short steep climb in the middle of the city, it's a monolith rock (like Ayers rock but just a tad smaller) and gave us stunning views over the city. Ofcourse the sporadic weather decided to give us blazing sunshine and roasting heat while we went up which made it rather uncomfortable but we made it, just a little lighter than when we started!


That's us finished the East coast and tonight we head inland towards Mount Isa before reaching Alice Springs in just over a week. We celebrated the last month on the East Coast with our final BBQ lunch on the beach this afternoon, and prepared Shelly for the journey to the centre of Australia. Loaded up on supplies, water, wine and tunes.....off we go!
Internet might be a little scarce in the centre - and by scarce I mean it costs a fortune when you do find it so we shall update when possible and be in touch when we find a McDonalds (where wifi is free and ice cream is 50cents!)
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Why Does It Always Rain On Me?

Saturday, December 04, 2010 Katie and Taylor
While Scotland has been knee deep in snow, we have been caught up in a terrible storm in Queensland. All started well after leaving Dennis's as we headed North along Bruce Highway towards Bundaberg, home to Bundaberg rum or "Bundy" as everyone calls it here. The rum is distilled here due to it being surrounded by sugar cane plantations and subsequently it is a mecca for fruit pickers on working holiday visas. Also Bundy is advertised for some reason by the most Australian of animals! Yep you guessed it......a Polar Bear?!

We mosied on down to Town of 1770 which is built on the second landing spot of Captain Cook, surprisingly enough in the year 1770. In 1970 it was renamed from Round Hill to Town of 1770 to mark the bicentennial year of Cooks landing. Not much here to be honest and in fact the Town is actually a village, not sure why its not called the village of 1770.

This is when the heavens opened as we hit the beef capital of Australia - Rockhampton. Apparently there is over 300 days of sunshine a year here but we were greeted by flooding! In fact Rockhampton lies within the tropical cyclone zone, so as we crossed the tropic of Capricorn the cyclone hit! We had no option but to shelter in a hotel which resembled Raffles in Singapore, had a bottle of wine and watched Elf on TV. The next day the skies cleared to reveal the damage as the river right beside where we were had burst its banks and the car park we almost parked in, was flooded. Further West roads were closed and a few people are missing after being swept away, definitely a serious storm.

Anyway as I said Rockhampton is the beef capital of Australia and with over 2 million cows within a 250 km radius of the town it has a cowboy kind of feel to it. One of the famous bars in town is owned by a country and western singer and hosts rodeos and weekly country and western gigs. Shame we forgot to pack our Stetson hats! Also Christmas adverts have been adapted her to suit the local market and my personal favourite was "Buy your mum a diesel tank for Christmas." So Mum there may be a shiny new diesel tank winging its way home just now.

Further North we go on our way to Airlie Beach for hopefully a few days of sunshine (it's looking good so far), playing dodge the frogs/kookaburra/koala/wallaby/tortoise/pot holes on the roads. Last nights drive provoked a few screams from Katie as Shelly taught many a frog why its not safe to sit on the Bruce Highway.

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Glitz and Glamour of Bris-Vegas and Redcliffe

Wednesday, December 01, 2010 Katie and Taylor
We arrived in Brisbane after a short drive from Surfers and checked into our parking space at the best hostel we've ever stayed at. The hostel was fully booked as the Ashes was on at the weekend (did anyone actually know that.. we didn't) so we were a little stuck until the hostel owner offered us a parking space and full access to the facilities in the hostel. We slept in the car and had excellent use of everything including a swimming pool and BBQ all for under £25 for 2 nights! The hostel was within walking distance to the city so we took a wander through the main shopping area across the river to Southbank, formally the site of the World Expo '88 which has been made into a beach and pool area right in the middle of the city! There was a massive screen where the Ashes were being shown and a makeshift bar too.. if it wasn't for the sport on the box being cricket we would have stayed and relaxed all day!


The next day we went off in search for the nearby park which had its weekend markets on and somehow managed to walk through an artificial limb art gallery.. yes artwork made out of fake arms and legs, very strange but we bumped into Elaine from back home. That evening we were invited to a rodeo in Cabulture, north of Brisbane, with Elaine and Kenny (another traveller from Penicuik.. it's a small world). Elaine cooked us up a treat of tacos before heading to hicksville that was Cabulture. I think we must have been the only tourists there and we were certainly under-dressed for the occasion missing our cowboy hats and checked shirts, definitely a fun night though!


Next stop Redcliffe, north of Brisbane for a couple of relaxing days in style. Dennis from our Odyssey trip lives out there so a visit was needed, we spent 6 months with these guys and miss them all! Dennis lives right on the beach, we were greeted with cold beers and cheese before Dennis cooked us dinner. Already feeling spoiled he spent the next 2 days as our tour guide showing us the sights and telling us the history of Redcliffe as well as taking us out to Brisbane Forest where we went to a wildlife centre with sleeping wombats, kangaroos and even a duck-billed platypus! We were made to feel part of the family and can't thank Dennis and Pam enough for having us.


All recharged and clean again we set off up the Sunshine Coast just in time for the rain..again. Passed a big Pineapple so far - what's with Oz and the big Fruit?
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