Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Happy Xmas everyone!


Love from Grom and Debs xxx

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Brisvegas

For the last few weeks we have been settling in to the Brisvegas lifestyle. Staying in one place will never be as good as travelling, but we have managed to fit in some fun times along the way.


Not long after our last blog post our friends Bobbie and Stuart, the fellow-Brightonians who we met back in Canada, came to stay with us. They are travelling around Oz in a camper van which they parked outside our house for a week. The weekend they arrived we went to meet them in a town called Surfer's Paradise along with our friend Paul and a Chilean girl called Merasol who he works with. Disappointingly, Surfer's Paradise turned out to be nothing but a beach and some high-rise hotels, and when it rained in the afternoon there was nothing for us to do except go to the pub. Luckily it happened to be happy hour so we all spent the rest of the day getting so smashed that no one could remember the journey back to Brisbane.



The next weekend the four of us drove up Mount Coot-tha in Bobbie & Stuart's campervan, where we had a bbq and got some great views over Brisbane. On the Sunday we went to the Bowls Club for an afternoon of barefoot bowls - all that practice playing petanque in Brighton has finally come in useful! We also drank lots of dangerously alcoholic ginger beer, and lowered the previously refined tone of the bowls club by several notches.



Over the last few weeks the weather has been getting really hot, and in Brisbane hot weather also means big thunderstorms. A few weeks ago a really bad storm hit the next suburb to ours (the worst storm in 25 years, apparently), roofs were being ripped off houses and people lost everything to the floods. We got off quite lightly with just a little bit of flooding and a visit from a giant spider that took refuge under our front porch.


The beginning of summer also marks the end of the Australian school year. Coastal towns are invaded by a swarm of 'schoolies' – teenagers who have just finished school celebrating in time-honoured fashion by drinking alcopops until they throw up. The university year has also finished, and after finishing his exams our friend James has gone travelling to Africa for the summer break. The upside of this for us is that we have moved into his room in a lovely big old Queenslander house. So now we have a garden with a BBQ, a flatscreen TV and a lovely flatmate called Ellie whose band have just found out are going to play at Big Day Out (hooray, Ellie!).



Last weekend we decided to get out of Brisbane for a few days, and five of us (us, Graeme's sort-of cousin Adam, Paul and his sister Leanne) hired a 4wd and went to North Stradbroke Island (aka Straddie). On our first day we stayed in a campsite next to the sea and tried our hand at bodyboarding; the second day we took turns at fanging (driving really fast) along the beach, went for a swim in Blue Lake, then found ourselves a free campsite which was completely deserted except for a few kangaroos and lots of insects. Debbie had a big shock when she shone her torch at her glass of wine and saw a giant spider swimming around in it. It could have been much worse though - if we had been drinking red wine, she probably would have swallowed it whole.


Now we are just chilling out in our new house and looking forward to to a hot and sunny xmas. We hope you lot are all having fun and enjoying the winter. Brr!

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Brisbanus

We spent our first week here in Brisbane staying with our friend James and his flatmates Dave and Ellie. We met James back in Central America in 2004, where we formed a bond when he lent us money for the bribe to get throuh the dodgy border crossing between Belize and Guatemala. We also shared one of the most surreal experiences of that trip, the bizarre Todos Santos drunken horse race.


James lives in a typical 'Queenslander' style house, made out of wood and raised off the ground on stilts, with a storage (party?) area underneath, and possums in the roof. We spent a few fun evenings with James & co, eating barbecue and drinking beer, playing guitar hero and Traveller IQ challenge while reliving our Guatemala experences.


After a few days exploring Brisbane, we went on a day trip to Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo. Australia Zoo is really hands-on and you are encouraged to feed the elephants (which slobbered over our hands) and stroke the kangaroos and wallabies which roam free in an open enclosure. You can also stroke the koalas, but they aren't as cute as they look – apparently baby koalas eat their mums' poo! The excuse for this is that they can't digest the poisonous eucalyptus leaves themselves, but still! As we were leavng, Graeme almost wet himself with excitement when he spotted the original 'Crocodile Hunter' Jeep.

With our savings rapidly diminishing, we registered at loads of employment agencies in Brisbane and quickly found ourselves work; Debbie found a temp job in local government and Graeme has ended up back in hospital admin. We also found ourselves our own little studio flat which is pretty small but is located in a leafy part of town called Ashgrove, with views over the whole of Brisbane. We have decorated one of our walls with a collage of pictures of lots of our friends printed out from Facebook.


There is a lot going on in Brisbane and we haven't had time to get homesick yet. Better still most of it is free. We have been to a couple of free screenings of old silent movies with live music accompaniment, a few free festivals, a free Operator Please gig, and we also got free tickets to see Queensland Roar FC. They were almost as bad as Spurs (only joking, they were loads better!). They are playing LA Galaxy next month, but sadly there are no free tickets for that, so no David Beckham for us. One weekend we went to a bollywood-themed party, where the guests were given bindis and bangles and a bollywood screen-name at the door, and the monsoon-style rains just added to the atmosphere. This weekend, we dressed up as Zombies for an early Halloween party.

A few weeks after we arrived in Brisbane we got a message from Graeme's aunt saying that he had some relatives in Brisbane – his Granddad's brother's daughter (Barbara), and her son (Adam). We met up with Adam for a few drinks during the week and then went to their house for Sunday dinner. It was really strange to discover we have relatives on the opposite side of the world, especially as they also live in Brisbane.

We have also been hanging around with Paul, a fellow Arsenal fan we met in the Whitsunday Islands who is also working in Brisbane, and the three of us discovered the Brisbane Polish club where we found decent beer at last. Since then we have visited the German and Irish clubs with the Czech club next on our list.


It was still officially 'winter' when we arrived in Brisbane, and the locals were complaining about the bitter 20 degree nights. However, as spring advances the weather is getting slowly warmer, and we have already had a few humid days and a couple of big thunderstorms. And it's only going to get hotter!

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Kangabarberoobeque


By the time we arrived in Cairns we were running very low on funds, but after a week of jobhunting we finally accepted that there were no jobs.
We spent a few drunken nights at the Dreamtime hostel, where we drank lots of goon and Graeme discovered the delights of kangaroo barbecues (kangabarberoobeques, or barberoos for short). Goon is really cheap wine that comes in 4 litre boxes and results in killer hangovers. The lesson - never to drink anything that says it 'may contain fish products' on the label. Despite being broke we also managed to afford a dive on the great barrier reef, which was amazing. Debbie poked a giant clam which slammed shut when she touched it, and we both swam with a sea-turtle.


We de
cided to head down to Brisbane and try to get jobs there, funding the trip with money borrowed from our savings for South East Asia and the bank of Graeme's mum. We bumped into a guy called Jonny who we had met before at Ayer's Rock and who also wanted to head down to Brisbane on the cheap. Between us, we managed to find the most battered rental car in Cairns, complete with two broken tents and half a sleeping bag, and, after loading up the boot with Coles' own brand pasta twirls we set off on the great road trip south. First we drove up to Cape Tribulation, a remote area of beaches which back onto tropical rainforest. To get there you have to take possibly the world's shortest ferry crossing, across a river no wider than the Thames; we have no idea why they don't just build a bridge. The river is teeming with crocodiles, which added a bit of excitement to help pass the long four minute journey. Safely on the other side, we stopped at a local 'family fun day' which consisted of a lot of bogans getting drunk at three in the afternoon while their children participated in a fish-throwing competition, where they took turns to chuck a rapidly disintegrating dead fish as far as possible, presumably gaining bonus points whenever they landed it on the head of one of the spectators.

Next we headed south and inland to the Atherton Tablelands and Lake Eacham, where we went on an evening walk along a riverbank and saw a platypus swimming around. We made our way back to the coast and caught another (considerably longer) ferry crossing to Magnetic Island where we spent some time lazing on the beach, and shared our food and our tent with a gang of possums. Graeme was also set upon by some very pretty multicoloured birds that he tried to feed who landed on his head and pecked at his ears instead.

We continued south down the coast to Airlie Beach where we embarked on a sailing trip to the Whitsunday Islands. On the first day we stopped at an island to go for a walk through the bush, where we were encouraged to lick a green ant on its arse. We were surprised to find out that the ant's backside tasted of intensely concentrated limes; apparently they are very high in vitamin C and the Aboriginal people used to eat them all the time, but we will probably stick with orange juice. Graeme also ate some termites, which less surprisingly tasted of wood. After a night spent sleeping on the boat, we sailed to Whitehaven beach, which has the softest whitest sand you can imagine and the bluest sea: in fact it looks exactly how a tropical beach is supposed to look. The only downside was that box jellyfish are a real danger here and everyone had to wear a rather unflattering 'stinger suit' whenever they went in the sea. Every 100 metres or so there are 'vinegar stations', where bottles of vinegar are provided in case someone gets stung.

Despite only camping in the cheapest places, we were always trying to save money wherever we could. We employed various tricks such as trying to hide from the park ranger to avoid paying, camping in a in car park, and pretending that there were only two of us in the car so we didn't have to pay for the third person. This succeeded once, but the second time we tried it the owner rode up behind on us on his bike and caught all three of us eating lunch together.

After a while we decided to head inland again to try to get off the beaten track. We visited the Gemfields area, where the towns have names like Emerald, Sapphire and Rubyvale, and you can go 'fossicking' – searching through bags of dirt to find precious stones. We found some small sapphires and bits of zircon – sadly not enough to pay off our debts. Other notable local attractions included a piano in a tree at Clermont, the world's largest Van Gogh sunflower painting in Emerald, a giant mango in Bowen and our favourite, a lifesize statue of a dingo in the town of Dingo, which was hidden behind a hedge and smelt of piss.

We travelled back to the coast and on a trip to Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island. Our hostel organised us into a group to rent a 4wd truck to explore the island together. This consisted of the three of us, four other Brits, three Americans and a German guy. The Americans were a bunch of stoners who lived up to every stereotype of their nation, and were known to everyone else on the trip as 'Team America'. There are no roads on the island, only bumpy 4wd tracks and beaches; driving on the dirt tracks was fun but scary, and the sound of everyone in the back screaming whenever we went over a big bump added to the fun. By comparison, driving along the beach was easy and much faster, although we did get stuck in some deeper dry sand a couple of times and had to enlist some passers by to help get us out. The first day was really beautiful and we saw a lot of the island and had a couple of good swims in lakes (you can't swim in the sea as it is teeming with tiger sharks.) However, after dinner we felt a few drops of rain which quickly turned into a torrential downpour. Everyone headed for the nearest shelter, and the storm quickly got worse with lightning bolts and thunder every few seconds.

The next morning we woke to blue skies. The atmosphere in the group was a little sour as lots of people's tents had collapsed and/or flooded in the night so they had spent a sleepless night trying to sleep in the truck. Matters weren't helped by the discovery that during the night, Team America had fed the rest of the group's meat rations to some dingoes that had been hanging around, so there was nothing for lunch. Miraculously our tent had survived the storm, despite us not having any tent pegs, although we must have blown about a bit as in the morning Graeme woke up lying on his shoes, which had somehow found their way underneath the tent.


Later that day we arrived back in Hervey Bay, had our first night's sleep in a bed for a fortnight, then took the coastal route down towards Brisbane, real life and jobs.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Beware of the Gingas!


When we arrived in Darwin we were very happy to discover that the temperature was over 30 degrees, a nice change from New Zealand. The only problem was that Darwin's nightlife is Australia's answer to Ibiza, full of club 18-30 types vomiting in the gutter. The one exception to this was our favourite Country & Western bar which lured us in by playing 'Achy Breaky Heart' and kept us entertained with their Guns n Roses pinball machine.


Despite the charms of the Country & Western bar, we didn't hang around in Darwin and instead spent our time in the nearby National Parks. On Debbie's 30th birthday she went back to her roots by visiting Litchfield National Park (OK so they spelt it wrong but full marks for effort). There we swam in some waterfalls, and went on a 'jumping croc cruise' where we saw saltwater crocs propel themselves out of the water using only their tails. You can't really swim anywhere in the Northern Territory because of the danger of becoming their lunch. They are so mean that mother crocs will even eat their own babies. We heard a story about a German woman who was recently eaten by one of them when she went swimming in a billabong with a group of friends while they were all drunk. Apparently one of the group felt something brush past their leg, then looked around and she was gone. The others quickly got out of the water and shone a torch back where they were swimming and saw a sea of eyes. The crocs had all been sitting there waiting for their chance. Debbie had nightmares for the next few nights and refused to go within a hundred metres of the water.


On returning to Darwin, we hired a battered old Nissan and drove ourselves to Kakadu National Park. We borrowed a tent and spent our nights camping in the bush, sleeping with the tent windows open so that we could see the stars. On our first night, we both woke up in the middle of the night, because the moon was shining right into our tent. Debbie needed to go to the loo, and bumped into a wallaby on her way back to the tent.


The next day we headed to Ubirr and saw Aboriginal rock paintings which are up to twenty thousand years old, although some were painted as recently as the 1960's. We camped out again but the experience was marred by the army of mozzies that descended on us, and we ended up eating dinner inside the car.


The following day we took a walk along a river bank and saw three big fat salties sunning themselves on the opposite bank, and trees full of flying foxes. Then we went on a cruise of the Yellow Water River which was stunning. Our aboriginal guide told us lots of fascinating facts about the local wildlife, for example, the aboriginal name for a saltwater crocodile is a Ginga. He also told us about the local Firestarter bird, which catches most of its food by hanging out around near forest fires and eating the insects and small animals that are driven out by the fire. When all the animals have been eaten it picks up a burning branch and carries it over to another section of forest where it will deliberately start a new fire to get more food. We also saw a mother bird feeding its baby chicks in their nest.


On Graeme's birthday we flew to Alice Springs and the following day we left on a three-day tour to Ayer's Rock/Uluru. Despite the temperature being over 30 degrees in the day, the temperature in the desert falls below freezing at night, but we were kept nice and warm by our swags (canvas sleeping bags with mattresses built into the base), and the fact that we all slept in a circle around a big bonfire. We could see thousands of stars as we went to sleep, and saw loads of shooting stars too. Thankfully no creepy crawlies got into our sleeping bags in the night, but our poor tour guide was woken up in the middle of the night by a kangaroo doing a dump right next to his head, and then he had to get up and move his swag as the smell was keeping him awake. After seeing the sun rise and set over Uluru, and doing the obligatory base walk in the baking 32 degree heat, we headed to the airport and caught our flight to Cairns.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Greetings from Brighton beach (NZ)


We had only planned to stay for one night in Queenstown, but overnight a blizzard covered the ground with a thick blanket of snow which even forced the ski slopes to close for the day. The snow also blocked all of the roads out of town so we were stuck with nothing to do except to sit in pubs drinking bad Guinness (and it wasn't just us; according to a newspaper article, 62% of people asked were 'very disappointed' by NZ Guinness).



When the roads were finally cleared we headed across the country to the east coast, which has some of NZ's rarest wildlife. Our first stop was the Otago Peninsula, home to one of the few albatross colonies outside of Antartica. Here we saw great fat (8kg!) albatross chicks, who grow to twice the size of their parents before they learn to fly. They sat stupidly on their nests, exposed to the freezing cold wind and looking just like oversized fluffy slippers. Afterwards we walked down to a small beach where we watched the resident Blue Penguins (the smallest penguins in the world) come out of the sea and onto land for the night.



The following day we stopped at a place called Moeraki (just down the road from Shag Point!) which has some perfectly spherical boulders scattered along the beach. They were just big rocks really, but made for some nice photos.


Further north we saw some Yellow-eyed Penguins which live in a colony near the town of Oamaru. They emerge from the sea in the late afternoon, but it takes them several tries before they make it ashore as every time they nearly get there they are swept back to sea by a big wave. Once they get onto the beach they then have to climb up a steep cliff-face to their nests, no easy task on tiny penguin legs. The first penguin to make it up there was a bit of a bully who then blocked the others' paths and attacked them when they tried to pass, tilting his head back and emitting a piercing scream from deep in his throat.



We took a slight detour en route to Christchurch to visit Brighton. Just like the British one it is a cute little seaside town, although the New Zealand version has a population of about 100 and their beach is sandy, and apparently their Pride parade isn't much to write home about.
After a day's shopping in Christchurch we headed north to a town called Kaikoura where we went out on a boat trip and saw four sperm whales. They were massive creatures, at least the size of our boat, and each one hung around for a few minutes blowing water out of its blowhole, before flicking its tail into the air and diving back to the bottom of the sea. We also saw some fur seals who swam past on their sides waving at us with their flippers, and a couple of adult albatrosses, no doubt out looking for more fish to feed to their fat chicks.


Our last stop in New Zealand was a spa town called Hanmer Springs where we spent two days soaking the cold out of our bones in preparation for the tropical heat of Darwin, in northern Australia, where we fly tomorrow.

Thursday, July 3, 2008

It's grim down south


Lots of people had told us that the South Island was their favourite part of New Zealand and we have to agree. Howevever as we have headed further south the weather has become progressively worse, with lots of really heavy rain and freezing cold nights. Therefore we have given up parking up overnight in laybys, and started staying at powered campervan sites with our little fan heater on full blast all night.


Our first stop was the Abel Tasman national park, where we spent a day walking along the coast through lots of tiny bays with golden sandy beaches, covered in little starfish, which backed onto coastal rainforest. It was beautiful, but the sight of so many deserted beaches made us wish that it was warm enough to have a swim; instead a torrential downpour came out of nowhere and soaked us to the skin.



Our first attempt to get to the northern tip of the south island was thwarted as the road through the mountains was blocked by a heavy snowfall. However we made it through on the second try and spent a day in the Golden Bay area, which is famous for the clearest freshwater springs in the world. At lunchtime we went to a salmon fishery on the Anatoki river where visitors are given a rod and bait, and invited to catch their own lunch. The staff then fillet and smoke your salmon for you while you wait. The river was teeming with fish, and the most difficult part was holding them still while we bopped them over the head hard enough to finish them off. Debbie's salmon refused to die, and kept coming back to life every time like Freddy Krueger at the end of Nightmare on Elm Street.



Next we headed down to the west coast and the bad weather seemed to follow us. We drove through high winds and driving rain to a place on the coast called Punakaiki where at high tide the waves are forced up into the air through 'blowholes' in the rock. We were told that that this spectacle is most impressive in foul weather, so for once the bad weather worked in our favour.




Then we contiued south until we reached the glaciers at Franz Josef and Fox. The weather suddenly improved, giving us a couple of perfectly clear days to see the glaciers in the sunshine. However for Graeme the view from the ground was not enough. The glacier looked even better while skydiving 12,000 feet above it.


That evening, after a few celebratory beers, we went on a slightly tipsy walk through the forest to a glow worm dell. Halfway around we realised we were being followed, and our suspicions were confirmed when we shone the torch directly into the eyes of a big fat possum. Possums are public enemy number one here and a few days ago we even found a cafe which sold possum pies, though the vast majority that we have seen have just been roadkill.


Yesterday we drove down the long and winding road to Milford Sound. Despite some snowfall the road was clear and we made it through, despite being ambushed by the Kea – cheeky New Zealand parrots who beg for food from every passing tourist. Milford Sound is a fjord on the South West coast of New Zealand and we took a boat trip along the whole length of it, past the mouth and out to sea. It was another miserable day but the torrential rain just added to the atmosphere, as the mountains seemed to rise dramatically out of the mist. We stayed overnight in a caravan park and in the middle of the night there was a storm and our van was shaking so much that we thought it was going to topple over in the night, or that we would wake up in Oz. Instead we woke up still at Milford Sound, albeit with a a few extra waterfalls that hadn't been there the night before.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Kiwi Country






Somehow we have managed to time our arrival in the southern hemisphere with the beginning of the southern winter. However it isn't really very cold, just a bit wet, and on the plus side there aren't many tourists around and everything is cheap in the low season. We also arrived in New Zealand just in time to watch the English rugby team getting destroyed by the All Blacks, which was probably for the best for us as we found the dodgiest pub in Auckland in which to watch it.



Despite the cold (and partly because it is so cheap in winter) we decided to hire a campervan for our trip around New Zealand. We survived the cold so far, with a little help from our sleeping bag, three duvets and hot water bottle.








Ours is quite a small van, a converted Toyota Hiace who we have named Topsy after the rugby player Topsy Ojo, because he is going to take on New Zealand single-handed. The back of the van has been converted into a living area, with a table and chairs that convert into a bed, a little kitchen, and a roof extension where we store our rucksacks and blankets.



We have been driving all over the north island, mostly sleeping for free in picnic areas by the sides of the roads but occasionally stopping at proper sites in order to wash (ourselves and our clothes) and to recharge electrical equipment. The only problem we have had so far was when we parked on a grass verge one night, then woke up the next morning to discover that everthing was frozen over, and that when we tried to drive back onto the road the wheels couldn't get any grip on the icy grass and we just skidded instead. We finally escaped by collecting bits of gravel from the road and arranging them in front of the wheels to give us something to drive on.




Heading south from Auckland, our first stop was Rotorua, an area of volcanic and thermal activity. Close to the town there are several thermal reserves, each with its own selection of crowd-pleasing smoking craters, geysers and boiling pools of mud. There were also some hot springs where we soaked for far too long and emerged looking like red prunes.


No tourist attraction in New Zealand is complete without its own kiwi house, where one or two of the birds are kept in a special darkened cage. They have really long beaks and apparently they are the only bird in the world to have nostrils at the ends of them. They prod the ground with their beaks before every step, and they remind us of blind people walking with white sticks. They aren't blind though, just really stupid. While it is of course very sad that they are facing extinction, part of us suspects that that this is the inevitable result of natural selection rather than anything that humans have done.


Next we headed to one of our favourite places so far, the Waitomo caves, where you can take an underground boat trip through the caves which are lit by millions of tiny glow worms hanging just above your head.
Finally, we headed to Wellington, aptly described by someone we met as the most pointless capital city in the world. From there we drove Topsy onto the ferry for the journey to the South Island.

Beach Bums


Debbie spent the flight to Fiji wedged in a seat next to a rather large Tongan rugby player, which wasn't as much fun as it sounds. On top of this she also lost a whole precious day of the last month of her 20's when we crossed the international date line.

We spent the week in Fiji living in a little thatched hut on the beach, lying in hammocks all day drinking rum and coke, and occasionally going for a swim or a snorkel around the coral reefs that were just off the beach where we were staying.


We managed to stir from our hammocks a couple of times, once to go snorkelling with manta rays, which were as big as Debbie, and another time to go snorkelling with sharks. They swam within a foot of us which was a bit unnerving although apparently they only like to eat little fish.


Another night we were forced to join in with a Bula Dance which was like the Fijian Macarena , only worse (if that's possible), followed by a Kava ceremony, where we drank bowls full of the disgusting stuff to little effect.


On our last evening we went out on a fishing trip along with about eight other people, and Graeme was the only person who caught a fish. Unfortunately it was a beautiful coral reef fish and he had to throw it back. No fish and chips for dinner for us.