May 2009

We finally heard our alarm this morning a full forty minutes after it had started ringing. And our first thoughts were:

a. Oh my God! We’re late

and

b. Oh my God! What’s happened to our heads!

We had, with no exaggeration whatsoever, the complete hangovers from hell. Normally, if at home and feeling like this, we wouldn’t have functioned all day and would just have stayed in bed. Unfortunately though, in some sort of sick joke, we not only couldn’t stay in bed but had to also get two flights to New Zealand!

We managed to get a bit of breakfast inside us, staggered down with our packs to reception to check out (still very obviously drunk), and managed not to be sick in the taxi to the airport. Where after checking onto our flights, we crashed in the waiting area just wanting to die!

Our first flight was from Cairns to Brisbane, and we managed to see some of the Great Barrier Reef from the window as we left Cairns. Two hours later, we’d just about reached a blood/ alcohol level safe enough to drive with as we landed in Brisbane airport.

We caught the Air Train from the domestic terminal to the international terminal,

and, on boarding the plane, finally took our last, lingering look at Australia, with the Brisbane skyline just visible in the distance.

So, how would we sum up our time here? Well, firstly, we’ve been in Australia for two months and one week in total. I think for the first couple of weeks or so we were sulking a bit about leaving Asia, but from the first night we picked our last campervan up in Adelaide onwards we have fallen more and more in love with this country.

We’ve learnt many of the idiosyncrasies of the Australians, notably how friendly they mostly are.
We’ve adjusted to being greeted by complete strangers.
We know where to get the cheapest food items and in which supermarket.
We think of the value of items in AU$ and don’t convert back to British Pounds.
We know the day of the week when the petrol prices change.
We’ve driven our campervans for 9,306km (5,816 miles) as well as flying and using trains for thousands of km more.
We’ve seen the scenery change radically as we’ve headed north from Victoria through to Queensland.
We know a Huntsman spider from a Funnel Web.
We know that mosquitoes will never leave us alone!
And we know that the Raspberry and the Lime drinks from Coles Supermarket are the nicest soft drinks on earth!

For someone in the UK, the best way of describing Australia is that it seems very much like the UK was in the eighties. Not in that I mean it’s outdated (although they do still sell audio cassettes in the supermarket!) but that it seems safer and much more pleasant than the UK has felt for around 20 years. The standard of living here is one of the best we’ve seen in the world. And the scenery beats anything that the UK has to offer. It truly is a complete and utter paradise!

And then, not wanting to with all our hearts, our plane to New Zealand set off into the sunset and we had left!

We arrived in Auckland Airport at 10:30pm, but by the time we had gone through customs and got to our hotel it was midnight. It was all a bit bewildering; we’d been travelling all day, we still had the remnants of our hangovers, and we were in a different country for the first time in months. And we couldn’t tell which country it was; the only faces we had seen were Chinese (including on reception in the hotel) and it felt like we were back in Asia again!

And it was absolutely bloody freezing! We’d left the constant summery 27/ 28 degree weather of North Queensland and it was now definitely a wintery 6 degrees! Looks like it’s goodbye to the shorts and t-shirts and hello to the jeans and coats for the next few weeks!

Today was our last full day in Australia. And for the majority of it, we spent most of the day on the internet, finally getting around to planning what we wanted to see in South America and booking flights to do just that! And we finally finished packing our rucksacks!

We’d arranged yesterday to meet Alison and her husband Neil in a bar called Shenanigans at 8:45pm so, at 8:50pm (being fashionably late as always) we met up with them.

Alison and Neil had emigrated to Cairns on the 24th January this year, exactly one week before we started our own trip. They live just up the road from Cairns, near one of the beaches we had passed on the way to Hartleys Crocodile Adventure a couple of days ago, and we spent the night finding out about their experiences in Australia (as well as drinking quite a bit!)

For our last night in Australia, it was everything we could have wished for. We spent most of the night laughing, Alison and Neil making it a fantastic experience for us. Not only had they booked a hotel for the night to make sure they could stay out longer, they also bought us drink after drink after drink when our meagre supply of Aussie Dollars ran out after two rounds!

We really can’t thank them enough for showing us a brilliant time on our last night. And we were left with the undeniable impression that they were living in Paradise! We made a vow to ourselves that sometime in the next couple of years we’ll return to Cairns and meet up with again, treating them to a night out like they treated us!

Finally finishing the night around 2:40 am, we said goodbye to them and staggered drunk back to our hotel. And pretty much just collapsed onto the bed and passed out!

We had been dreading today for a couple of weeks now, we’d been in complete denial that it was happening, but it had arrived and today we handed back our campervan.

We were due to leave our campsite at 10 am, but we’d not finished packing our gear up and disposing of all the rubbish we’d accumulated over the past 50 days, so we managed to get an extension to noon to allow us time. And by noon, we’d managed to throw away the equivalent of a wheelie bin’s worth of brochures we’d picked up along the way! So saying goodbye to the campsite fountain

and the Nemo bus

we headed into Cairns.

Our first stop was our hotel for the next two nights, the Cairns Hilton right on the marina. Parking the van outside, we made a few trips back and forth and finally emptied all our worldly possessions into our room.

The views from our balcony were stunning

and the room itself was big and luxurious as you’d expect, but we didn’t want it! It seemed too big and totally alien to us! Why did we need such space when we’d lived quite happily for 50 days in our little metal box!

Noticeably stalling the inevitable, we went back to our van, and drove towards the campervan depot. And then, lumps forming in our throats and teary eyed, we left our van behind for the last time and handed back the keys.

His name was Charlie. From picking him up in Adelaide, we had travelled 6,427km in him all the way to Cairns.

If you ever come across him, treat him with care. He might leak a bit, he sounds a bit rough, but we travelled with him for nearly two months and he was our friend!

We caught the bus back into town, and found a brilliant Asian Buffet place which went some way to lifting our spirits a bit. We then looked up one of Mandy’s friends from work, Alison, who is living and working in Cairns. She took a break from work, and we went for a quick milkshake, planning to meet up again tomorrow night for a few drinks.

And then we went back to our room, starting the process of uploading over a thousand photos and making an initial start on properly packing our rucksacks.

We still had the amazing view from the room

but we didn’t care.

We missed Charlie!

Total Distance Driven In Australia : 9,306km

We set an alarm this morning for 3:55 am to watch the Champions League Final. So bleary eyed we turned on the laptop, tuned into the station, and realised that we might have woken up but Man Utd were definitely still asleep! So a few hours beauty sleep wasted there!

As people in Manchester (and Bombay, Dubai, Ho Chi Minh City, and Outer Mongolia) drowned their sorrows and went to bed, we set off for our last full day in the campervan and headed north from Cairns towards Hartley’s Crocodile Adventure!

We finally reached the end of the Pacific/ Bruce Highway, having followed the same road in it’s many different guises ever since we first drove in Perth two months ago, and headed up the Captain Cook Highway.

This road was one of the most pleasurable ones we have driven. It hugged the coast for most of the way, and what coast it was! We stopped off at one particularly nice area, called Ellis Beach, dumped the van and went for a walk on the beach.

Like many of the other beaches we have seen in Northern Queensland, it was totally idyllic and totally deserted!

The hills behind which descend right to the beach and fringe it with the palm trees were just perfect!

From Ellis Beach, we continued up the Captain Cook Highway, past photo opportunity after photo opportunity,

until we reached Hartley’s Crocodile Adventure. Getting our YHA discount on the entrance fee, we had no sooner walked into the attraction than we were on a boat going through swampland and watching crocodiles being fed!

It was something else, being so close to complete killing machines!

After the boat ride, we went to see the crocs being fed, which gave you a real sense of the power behind their jaws,

and then we explored the rest of the park. As we were walking away, we heard some man asking his daughter what you should never do around crocodiles. Expecting her to repeat one of the warnings that the park rangers had mentioned during the feeding, we were amused by her answer that “you should never smile at a crocodile”! Which didn’t really help her when she fell into the crocodile pen, but at least she wasn’t smiling!

First stop was the Cassowary Garden, which finally gave us our first glimpse of a very camera shy Cassowary!

So we can now dispel our initial ideas that Cassowaries are as big as a three storey building, although we still wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark alley at night!

Apart from the Cassowary and a garden, there wasn’t much else in the Cassowary Garden, so we went for a walk in the Gondwana Gateway, which was basically a rainforest walk.

As soon as we’d entered the entrance to this, we spotted our first Wallaby of the trip.

It was totally tame, just hopping around the paths, and not at all bothered about us sticking a camera in its face!

Right next to this was a Koala enclosure.

As we’d already deduced in Australia, Koalas are very nice to look at, but are quite possibly the laziest creatures on earth. One second they’re awake and being all Koala-ish; the next second they’re fast asleep!

The walk continued, passing snake enclosures and monitor lizard enclosures,

and was quite pleasant. We came full circle and reached the entrance again, so obviously decided to chase the Wallaby again, sticking the camera in its face as it ate!

From there we walked past some pretty massive crocs

another couple of lazy sleeping Koalas

and then we were back at the entrance.

Which gave us a slight problem.

The “main attraction” of Hartleys Crocodile Adventure was the crocodile show at 3pm. But it was only 1:30pm and we’d done everything that needed doing, and the sun was beating down on us. So we were left with two choices.

Choice number 1 was to sit and be bored/ cook for an hour and a half.

Choice number 2 was to attempt to do a 60km round trip, take in another destination and try to get back for the show in one and a half hours.

So, it would come as no surprise to anyone that, five minutes later, I was whizzing the campervan round extreme cambers on the Cook Highway in a mad dash to Port Douglas!

Travelling faster than the speed of sound, we reached Port Douglas (which I kept calling Port Talbot for some reason!) at 2:05pm.

We managed to get to the beach

stop long enough to take pictures and remark “this is nice”

before we were back on the road again hurtling uncontrollably around tight bends and extreme cambers back to Hartleys Crocodile Adventure!

It was probably the second best driving experience of my life, only a close second to a made dash I did through LA at night a couple of years ago in a black SUV!

We reached a lookout point just before Hartleys Crocodile Adventure, travelling so fast we arrived before we’d even started, which gave a stunning vista over the whole highway.

and then, rubber burning from the tyres, we got back into the crocodile park just in time for the Crocodile Show!

And it was well worth the effort!

The crocodile snapped at food

performed its death rolls

and generally just acted completely evil.

And then the day was over. For sheer fun and hardly any expense, our last day in the campervan was one of our best!

Apart from the inevitable packing we had to do on reaching the campsite which, on a lack of sleep from the night before, was difficult to say the least!

Total Distance Driven In Australia : 9,290km

The weather today was a marked improvement on yesterday, but it was really too unsettled to plan anything. Each time the sun came out, within five minutes spots of rain started to fall, and the sky was generally a dirty grey.

Not wanting to spend the second day in a row in bed, we decided to find a Medicare centre and get some money back from my operation. So, a quick internet check later, we headed to the Cairns Central Shopping Mall, and the Medicare centre there.

Australia and the UK are supposed to have a Reciprocal Health Care Agreement in place, where UK citizens can get healthcare here and Aussies can get treatment in the UK. All I can say is that the UK must have got screwed in the deal. From paying out AU$185 for my surgery, I received the princely sum of AU$85 back, a deficit of AU$100 (about £50). Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure any Aussies getting treatment in the UK wouldn’t have to pay a penny for the privilege! So what’s reciprocal about that agreement!

Although AU$85 richer than when I woke up I was feeling a bit cheated, so we decided to go to a local multiplex cinema to watch a film rather than dwell on the matter any further in the campervan.

So, weeks after it’s release, we went to see Wolverine. And for the first time in our lives, we had the whole cinema to ourselves!

The strange thing was, there was only us in the cinema, no attendants or anyone else, and yet when we were talking to each other during the film we were still whispering! It would’ve felt strange to talk out loud, even though there was no-one else there to complain!

Bizarre!!

For the past few days we have had the best of the tropical weather conditions in Queensland. However, there’s a reason why everything is so green here, and that’s because for all the sunshine here, it rains in equal measures!

So the rain which drizzled in last night became a constant shower all day today!

Being hardy Glastonbury veterans though, we knew exactly how to cope with it. So, reverting to “festival mode” and with great effort on all sides, we stayed in bed.

For the whole day.

The van got muddy, the ground filled with giant puddles, but we just closed the door and dozed the day away!

One problem we’ve discovered with going on “tours” is that very often our campsite is the furthest place away and so usually the first place that the courtesy bus picks up at. So, being 7km from the Marina and on a tour that started at 9am, we had to wait outside the campsite to be picked up at 7:15 am!

For the next pick up after us, we ending up waiting for twenty minutes whilst the three lazy Klump families decided to get up out of bed and honour us with their presence. And so it continued, with the majority of stops taking inordinate amounts of time to board the lazy tourists! Finally, we arrived at the marina at 8:45 am; it had taken 90 minutes to do the journey and we could have walked quicker than that!

We boarded our vessel,

and then set off to the Great Barrier Reef, leaving Cairns behind in our wake.

The reason we picked this particular tour was that it had a reef platform, so you weren’t just diving off the boat, and the reef was only a 90 minute journey away. And so, 90 minutes and morning tea and cakes later, we finally arrived at the platform and the Great Barrier Reef!

After an initial debate about whether to hire lycra stinger suits to avoid jellyfish or wet suits to keep us warmer, the decision came down to one of fashion. So I would like to present to you, (drum roll), Mr Snorkel Wet Suit 2009!

And then, armed with digital camera and plastic bag with lens, it was into the water and the Reef itself!

What can I say. The Great Barrier Reef is often listed as one of the wonders of the world and usually features as the number one thing to do on Earth. After the day we had, it’s extremely hard to disagree with this.

Firstly, the number and variety of fish we encountered was amazing. You would be snorkelling along and a large school of fish would swim past; as soon as you tried to touch one they would all divert course and vanish!

The coral reef itself was fascinating, full of various different colours and types of coral, and full of canyons and valleys that you could swim and dive down.

The local attraction to this reef platform was a big fish (around the same size as a Labrador) called Wally. I can’t remember what type of fish it was, but it was huge and extremely friendly, allowing us to stroke it and providing excellent photo opportunities.

There were also sea cucumbers to hold! (This is the sign of an idiot; you’re underwater, about to have your picture taken, and what do you do? Obviously you smile and let all the water into your mouth!)

We spent over three hours snorkelling, spending vast periods of time on end not even lifting our faces out of the water. To say it was a whole different world beneath the sea would not begin to do it justice.

In the end, we took over 400 pictures in the three hours, far too many to display on this site but many of them excellent. This is just a small sample of some of them.

And then finally, as the tide began to make swimming through the valleys and canyons of the reef harder and harder to do, we finally left the water and got changed.

Sadly, it was then time to leave, and the catamaran set off from the reef platform for the 90 minute journey back.

We were tired, slightly burnt, and extremely, extremely, elated at the day we’d had! In fact so elated that I passed the time on the journey coming back irritating Mandy by repeatedly taking photos of her as she tried to speak! What can I say! I’m the perfect travel companion!

Finally, we pulled into Cairns marina just as rain clouds started to hover overhead,

and then started the next hour plus transfer back to the campsite.

We’ve already been asked on this trip by people at home what the best thing is we’ve seen. This is extremely hard to do; how do you compare something like the Great Wall of China to the Sydney Opera House etc? Unless we see something on the trip in the next two months that surpasses everything before it, it will remain an unresolved question.

But, without a shadow of a doubt, we can quite safely say that Day 114 of the trip has been the best day so far!

We’d planned late last night that we were going to do “something” today (Sunday), Tuesday and Thursday, with rest days on the other days we were here. So today we’d planned to go to a crocodile farm. Unfortunately, we realised this morning after setting an alarm that we wouldn’t be able to do a full day item on Thursday, as it would clash with the Champions League final. Any normal people would have still gone to the crocodile farm today and moved the Thursday event to another day. Not us though! We took it as another reason to do practically nothing whatsoever again today!

One item we did need to resolve though was how to take some photos when we eventually went to the Great Barrier Reef. We’d been pricing up disposable waterproof cameras and snorkelling masks with built in digital cameras since Melbourne, without actually getting around to buying any of them. So today was the day we had to force ourselves into Cairns and buy something!

Our first stop was an underwater camera hire place in the centre of Cairns. We’d picked a brochure up from the campsite and thought the price quite reasonable. After driving around looking for the street for ten minutes, we found a parking place a block away. Pumping our money into a parking meter, we then realised that parking was free on a Sunday! DOH!

So we walked a block and found the shop. And discovered a slight problem. What the brochure hadn’t told us was that the shop had gone into liquidation and looked like it had been deserted for some time!

Undeterred, we spotted another up the road. Of course though, it being Sunday, it was shut!

In a last attempt to find something, we headed to a shopping mall up the road. And finally found a solution to our problem! Having spent an hour looking for any other alternatives, we walked out of the shopping mall, the proud owners of a AU$60 plastic bag with a lens!

Obviously, having bought an expensive plastic bag with a lens, we were desperate to try it. So, risking our digital camera’s life in the process, we headed to one of the campsite pools.

And it actually worked!

The camera stayed completely dry, we managed to get around ten shots taken before our memory card ran out, and it gave us the perfect chance to include a cheeky “nipple shot” of me on this blog.

Don’t deny it; you’ve all been waiting for this all your lives!!!

So, toy successfully played with, we went and booked the Great Barrier Reef tour for tomorrow. And spent the rest of the day in nervous, excited anticipation.

We finally got a decent rest, not having to get up for moving sites, snorkel lessons, or any one of the hundreds of other reasons that seem to come between me and my sleep!

So, having a free day to ourselves, we thought about all the things we could do.

We could learn Spanish in preparation for our South American leg of the trip!

We could co-ordinate and mastermind a major spy network!

We could even contemplate tidying our 8 foot by 5 foot metal box and sorting out the millions of brochures and accumulated junk we’ve amassed!

In the event, though, all the options seemed like just a little bit too much effort, so we sat on our arses all day and did absolutely nothing!

CBA!

After the major drive to Cairns, and the tiredness we have been feeling, today would have been a good day to have a nice lie-in and take it easy.

Unfortunately, the campsite we are staying on in Cairns has organised “activities”. These are usually delivered by local tour operators and businesses, obviously in an attempt that you will use their company later on in your stay. And it just so happened that today’s activity was a snorkelling lesson!

Apart from briefly playing with snorkel sets when we were children, neither of us had the faintest clue about how to snorkel. So, at 9am this morning, we went to the TV room on the campsite to learn! And as you would expect, out of a room of eight people, there was only us and a four year old girl who’d never slapped a face mask on in anger!

The lesson was done by a company called Reef Magic, and started off with a quick presentation video about the Great Barrier Reef. Coincidently, we had researched trips to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns before we got here, and had already decided on using Reef Magic for this, so we had the luxury of knowing that any potential sales pitch would be “preaching to the converted”. After a fifteen minute presentation which featured heavily on “symbiotic relationships of marine life” and only briefly on our daily activity of “Nemo Finding”, we were off to the pool to put on a mask and snorkel and practice! And for anyone who’s seen my brother’s pictures on Facebook wearing a snorkelling mask, all I can say is that I make this look good!

Now, all my life I’ve been a water baby. Usually if I enter a pool or the sea, it usually takes an army of people to remove me from it. It’s no exaggeration to say that I could quite happily spend all my life in the water, until I shrivelled up to nothing. I have no fear of water, swimming, diving or any other water based activity. So it came as something of a shock when I put my head under the water for the first time and completely, totally and utterly lost my nerve! I don’t know if it was the shock of seeing under the water, or the chlorinated water rapidly filling my mask up, but I was not a happy bunny! Luckily though, it was explained to me that the water was coming into my mask because I’d not shaved for weeks and not through any mask defects so, although it didn’t resolve the leaking it did strangely calm me down and I was soon in full swing.

Mandy, on the other hand, has a much healthy fear of water. Maybe it’s down to the fact she can’t touch the bottom in paddling pools; who knows? So at first, she was a total lost cause and all thoughts of doing the Great Barrier Reef together started to disappear. Luckily though, the instructor (perhaps sensing losing potentially two customers), jumped into the pool fully clothed and slowly talked her through it. The end result was that by the end of the two hour lesson she was spending more time diving under the water and swimming like a dolphin than she was spending above water! The instructor even remarked to me whilst I was handing our masks back that he’d never seen such a complete and utter transformation! So Mandy, as well as being a Dwarf/ Umpah Lumpah/ Munchkin, etc is now also an honorary dolphin!

After having a rest for a couple of hours, we decided to take a quick drive into Cairns city centre.

Our first impressions of Cairns is that it seems like quite a nice place. More large town than city, there are some really good features like an artificial lagoon right on the seafront, which was packed full of sun worshippers and families.

We also got our first view of the Cairns Hilton, which at the end of next week we will spend our last two nights in Australia in!

So all in all, a very good day.

Only slightly ruined by the incessant dolphin noises and begging for fish from Mandy!