Joe & Rachel, somewhere around the world

Well this is it, the last blog entry. After a year of circumnavigating the world we are almost back at Heathrow where we started 358 days ago. Not exactly up to Phileas Fog standard, but still a good effort.
So what happened on our last few weeks, you ask? Well…..

We flew out of New Zealand on Saturday 27th December and after a 12 hour flight from Auckland found ourselves in Los Angeles 4 hours before we left….which was weird. After getting over our Time-Travelling experience we spent the next three days waiting in line at LAX passport control to have our photo’s taken, fingerprints scanned and an anal probing. I swear security gets tighter every time I come here. We finally made it out on to the streets of LA in our Chrysler Hire Car and spent a few hours driving around the block trying to find the interstate over to Santa Monica. We learnt the hard way that LA is quite a difficult city to navigate without a map after narrowly avoiding spending the night hanging out with the Bloods in Compton. But we finally stumbled on to our Motel and went to a café to eat the best beef burger in the world. The side order of fries were the size of my head and when the waitress brought out the burger it was so big it caused a total eclipse, temporarily blocking out the sun…welcome to excess America.

A 15 hour kip recharged the batteries and the next day we headed out to Hollywood for a walk down the Boulevard and past the Puerto Ricans hanging around the Ricky Martin star over to the Chinese theatre to see the hand and footprints of people we’ve never heard of. A quick stop at the Hollywood Museum then on to drive around Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive. The second day we ticked off the other sights, Walt Disney Hall, a church, the library, Venice Beach and other things I’ve already forgotten about, then spent the afternoon and evening hanging out in Santa Monica. Disappointingly, in the two days we were there we didn’t see one police chase, nor even a drive-by shooting, but what was surprising was how much we enjoyed LA…shhhh, don’t tell anyone but we kinda liked it.

Destination number two was Vegas, a place that needs to be seen to be believed. This was New Year and like everywhere in the world at this time it was insanely busy. But we fought the crowds and spent the next couple of days drinking free Budweiser and Miller light (the worst beer ever) while playing the 1 cent slots in Venice, then Paris, Luxor, Rome and New York. We watched the high rollers gamble away a years salary on the turn of a card, while a volcano erupted and the fountains danced outside the Bellagio. Weirdly a highlight here may not of been the casino’s or the free beer or the Lions in the MGM or the Flamingos in The Flamingo, it was probably the best buffet ever in the Bellagio hotel. What other buffet do you get Shrimp Nigiri, Hungarian goulash, grilled swordfish, roasted mussels, Chilean sea bass, African Bluenose, lobster, lavender scented quail, Kobe beef, Alaskan snow crab legs and many things served with Jus, not sauce, jus!…and if that’s not enough, just look at the photo’s of the deserts…crème brulee, chocolate covered strawberries, pies, tarts cakes and cookies…And all this for a measly $19.95! I bow down to the Chefs of the Bellagio. Remember if you’re eating a buffet, rule number one is find the most expensive thing offered and eat your money’s worth, after that everything else is a bonus! Of course the buffets here are so popular you’ll have to queue for ten hours and it will be a battle of nutrition just to get a seat, but once you do, it will be a taste sensation. If you’re ever in Vegas I demand you eat here.

After the New Years celebrations we left Vegas with our clothes smelling of fried food, beer and fags and drove over the Hoover Dam towards destination three, the Grand Canyon.

We didn’t read about snow in the brochure, but there was definitely plenty of it here. None of that slushy crap we get at home, this was Columbian Class-A winter wonderland stuff. Unfortunately we hadn‘t planned for the -19 degree temperatures, but as wise man Sir Rannulph Fiennes once said “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing”. So after putting on every single t-shirt we had plus wearing a pair of socks on our hands like mittens we ventured out to the Grand Canyon. Now it might be blasphemous to say, but even with all the stunning and majestic scenery around us (it is very grand that canyon) the highlight of the trip might not of been the canyon but rather the snow around it. I think we were like the kid at Christmas who unwraps his expensive present only to spend the day playing with the box. We even built a life-size Joe Pesci Snowman.

After we’d had our fill of the Canyon and the snow we started the very long drive back past Vegas up to San Francisco. On the way we spent one night sleeping in a Fairytale Castle on the Vegas strip, then just as a contrast spent the next night in a Truckers Motel off the dull, nothing to see here, Interstate 5.

For our last day with the car, we drove north of San Francisco to Muir Woods to see some Redwood trees, the tallest living thing in the world, then down across the Golden Gate Bridge, around a big park, over to a Japanese Tea garden and through a modern art gallery. As usual we did other touristy things I don’t really need to describe, but our favourite place by far was Vital Tealeaf in Chinatown. Owned by 76 year old Uncle Gee, officially the nicest man in the world, we sat and drank free Chinese tea for hours while he explained about tea and its place in the world. It almost turned me in to a tea drinker…almost. If you’re ever in San Francisco I demand you go there. Other notable mentions in the city are the Museum of Modern Art and Alcatraz. If you fancy mixing with homeless people, drunks, beggars, prostitutes, tuneless buskers, weirdoes and screamers, have a walk around the Tenderloin area. You might even be lucky enough like we were to have a guy stop in front of you, pull down his pants, squat and take a piss in the street. Fortunately we were around the block before the turtle came out of his shell, if you know what I mean. Now that’s the real San Francisco right there.

Sadly this is the end of the blog and the trip, as tomorrow we leave America with a couple more inches around our waists, thinner arteries and the bank manager calling every five minutes wondering where all his money is. We come back to a different world from which we left all those months ago. Without MFI, Woolworths, Jeremy Beadle and Captain Birdseye, I just don’t know how we’re going to cope in 2009.

See you all soon no doubt and if anyone has a job lying around the house that you’re not using anymore give me a call.

And they all lived happily ever after. The End.

Cheers,

Joe n Rachel.x

Hello,

After spending the last 5 or so weeks driving around the north and south islands of New Zealand, I guess it’s probably time for an update. I’m writing this sat in our hotel in Christchurch on Boxing Day. There’s not much to say about it so we’ll go back to the end of November when interesting stuff was happening.

After picking up the campervan in Auckland (upgrading to one with a heated towel rail…an essential item on every great intrepid explorers wish list) we spent the next five weeks driving a lap around the north and south islands.

This is a beautiful country, no if’s or but’s about it, it’s just beautiful. Unless I say otherwise you can almost guarantee that every place we went and everything we saw, from the volcanoes of the north to the glaciers and mountains of the south it was well worth spending a few seconds of our short lives standing and staring at it. They also have some fantastic drives and with road names like ‘The Forgotten Valley Highway’, ‘Twin Coast Discovery’ and the ‘Thermal Explorer Highway’…how can you not be tempted to take a detour just to see what’s down them. Even the photo’s don’t do the country justice, but they do present it better than I could ever describe so have a look if you want. If you can’t be bothered, but you’ve watched Lord of the Rings, or Narnia, or one of the other films shot here, then you already know what I’m talking about. One thing we thought we had left behind in Australia though was the stupid town names. Looking back now, Wagga Wagga sounds quite sophisticated next to some of the rubbish places here. It’s like the Kiwi’s commissioned a 12 month old baby to name each town…Wahwewoowoo and Whangamumu, and even Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu!

During our quick drive around the north Island, we tried to visit as many highlights as we could.
Our first stop was at the Springs on the Coromandel Peninsula, where natural hot water seeps up through the sands on cleverly named ‘Hot Water Beach’ (in some points it’s hot enough to burn your feet). There’s something cool about digging a hole, letting it fill with warm water and sitting in it looking out to the sea…if only the other 98 people hadn’t had the same idea.

Next stop was Rotorua and one thing I can confidently state about Rotorua is that it smells terrible. There is a very good reason why it smells, it’s the Sulphur, but that doesn‘t make the eggy odour any easier to digest. So after the “was that you?” joke wore a bit thin we walked around looking at the geothermal pools, steaming lakes, bubbling mud and spouting geysers at Te Puia. After spending the rest of the day Mountain biking around the forest we chipped back to the caravan park to a very welcome hot spring bath and a beer. After a couple of days just sat in the hot pools we realised we could wilt away if we didn’t get out and move on, so we drove on to Lake Taupo via a ridiculous detour to the Waitomo Caves. These caves are the best place in the world to see glow worms, even Sir Richard Attenborough thinks so, so it must be true…they were very glowy.

As the wind picked up and the rain swept in making the volcanoes and mountains disappear quick enough to make David Copperfield jealous, we spent our time playing cards and drinking hot chocolate in true British caravan holiday stylee. When the sun finally came out and the cloud cleared we found just enough time to hike around Mt Ngauruhoe, which played the part of Mt Doom in Lord of the Rings and look up at Mt Taranaki, which won an Oscar for its role as Mt Fuji in the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai. We even managed to squeeze in some canoeing down the grade three rapids (some going backwards) on the Wanganui River, which was fun. Our final stop was Wellington to visit a museum, drink some Mac‘s beer and catch the ferry across to Picton on the South Island.

The ferry journey was as it says in the brochure, very scenic, and whoever writes these things is probably right saying it is one of the best ferry journeys in the world. Although I think Phuket to Ko Phi Phi in Thailand was better, this one was definitely a lot safer as it didn’t constantly break down and float aimlessly in the water until the engines kicked back in.

Our first South Island stop was the Marlborough Wine region and I’ve just realised who got the short straw here…Rachel got to drink free wine and fall asleep in the van, where as I had to drink water and drive us hundreds of Km to our next camp site! What’s that about?!? Oh, and Rachel’s favourite wine here was Matua Sauvignon Blanc if you’re interested…hint, hint.

Our next stop, Abel Tasman Park, is one of the best National Parks we frequented. The weather was perfect and the beaches beautiful. We only wished we had taken our swimming stuff, especially after getting a wet arse from trying to cross a low-tide only crossing at high-tide.

Before heading on down to the Glaciers we popped up north to Golden Bay to see some Sea lions, stopping en route at Waikoropupu springs, the worlds clearest freshwater outside of Antarctica (I think you need a keen eye to spot the difference though).

After a few more miserable days of wind and rain (we’ve had 50:50 good to bad days here) we found ourselves heading off to hike up the Frank Josef glacier. We had a bit of a stuttering start to the morning when the guide said to the group, “You can put your crampons on when we get to the glacier face”. We both looked at each other and said under our breath “what crampons?”. We had to fess-up that we didn’t have any after our plot to steal the weedy kids crampons was foiled when we realised we were the weedy kids. But after that little hitch (solved by another guide driving from the office and running a couple of Km to catch up and give us some) it was an amazing day, squeezing through little crevasses and clambering over the glacier ice. It was tiring, but definitely worth the effort. It makes you laugh when you look at the old Victorian photo’s back in town and compare yourself to the old Hikers. There’s us, all dressed up in our flash gortex coats, gloves, boots, and crampons when the moustachioed guys back in the day were climbing up to the top wearing just a woollen suit and some hobnail boots…and doing it all while smoking a pipe!

After stopping over in Wanaka to watch the new James Bond film we pulled in to Queenstown, the self proclaimed adventure capital of the world. Here I took the decision to jump off the 109 meter high Shotover Canyon swing where I developed my own jumping style called ‘the cat falling out of a tree’, I think they were most impressed. The day didn’t start too good when we though we had locked the keys inside the van, only for me to find them in my pocket just before I smashed the window…my bad. It ended up a great day though, riding the Shotover Jetboat and watching buskers in the street as well as jumping off the cliff.

We moved on to Te Anau then up towards the Milford Sound (which if it wasn‘t a big lake, would be a great new romantic’s band). The drive up was so great, through the tunnel and past the snow covered mountains and parrots, it was actually better than the cruise on the Sound (which isn’t really a Sound anyway, it‘s a Fiord - I can’t be arsed to explain the difference - although Milford Fiord would be a good name for a Pulitzer Prize winning author). The weather was rubbish, but they kept telling us it looks better when it‘s like this anyway…Yeah, right, find me a postcard that has Mitre Peak half covered in cloud and pissing rain, rather than with blue skies and its reflection in still crystal clear waters, then I’ll believe you. Bad weather wasn’t that surprising around here though as they get 7 meters of rain annually on the west coast. London’s 1.5meters now seems like the Sahara in comparison. So to sum up: The drive brilliant, cruise so-so, weather crap.

From here it was on to the Catalins via Invercargill just to see Burt Munroe‘s Indian bike (of the film ‘Worlds Fastest Indian’ fame) on display in a tool shop. We stayed the night near Porpoise and Curio Bay, a wicked spot where you can see Hector dolphins playing just off the beach and Yellow Eyed Penguins (the worlds rarest penguin) waddling past you on the rocky bay. I even got chased by a Sea lion. Honestly, they make look like big balls of blubber, but they can run like the wind! Less than 24hours after seeing the worlds rarest penguin, we had driven up to the Otago Peninsula to see 100 Blue Penguins (the worlds smallest penguin at 25cm tall) waddle up the beach to their nests and a couple of Royal Albatross (with 3 metre wingspans) gliding around the cliff edge…you don’t get that in Trafalgar Square.

After the towns of Dunedin, Oamaru and Twizel and with a brief stop to help a couple of guys unhitch a jack-knifed trailer from their car, only to see it roll down in to a 20ft ditch, we headed up to Mt Cook National Park. This is one of the most beautiful places in a beautiful country and a great place to hike around the Hooker Valley and Tasman Glacier, which is what we did. The next day we woke up to a fine crisp cloudless morning, a perfect day to climb a mountain….obviously not Mt Cook, we’re not crazy. Only last week two mountaineers have died in separate incidents on the highest peak around these parts (12,246ft). Instead we climbed Mt John, which is a little smaller, but if you squint and tilt your head a little it almost looks as tall and has good views over Lake Takapo and the Southern Alps...oh, and there’s a café on top, which is one thing Mt Cook doesn’t have! From here we headed over to Christchurch via Akoura. A former French settlement, it was built back when New Zealand was first populated. Unfortunately I think it has as much in common with France as Tesco Value French Salad Dressing, but maybe it was just the miserable weather clouding my judgement.

The five weeks went fast and we had a great time driving around and experiencing all that we have here. Even sleeping in the van was as fun even if it just made us appriciate a comfy bed and hot shower. One day you think you’ve discovered the most perfectly beautiful campsite in the world, the next day you’ve paid $40 to camp in a glorified carpark and get bitten by sandflies while stood under a cold shower that must have been built for an Aqua-phobic. Our last couple of nights with the van were spent at a ‘Qualmark 2 Star’ caravan park in Christchurch. Looking around the horrible place that’s three stars too many if you ask me. Anyway, we took in all the usual sites, the river, the art gallery, the cathedral, the Museum...If there is one thing I’ve learnt on this trip that is that every Museum around the world has a bloody Egyptian Mummy! We sent the van back on the 23rd and spent the last few nights locked in the hotel watching the Sky Movie channel. We did manage to venture out for a few hours on Christmas day to eat at a Bengali restaurant (the only one in Australasia) and to watch some Carol singers. But just sitting in the room, eating chocolate and drinking beer has been as good as any other day we’ve had here.

And you’ll be relieved to know that this is the end of this blog entry and the Australasia leg. Now it’s time for continent number three and Los Angeles and our last few weeks of the trip. We’ve updated the photo’s and the Beer diary is looking better than ever. We’ll update this again soon, maybe.

Laters,
Joe.n.Rachel.x

So we found ourselves back again on the East Coast of Australia...

Before arriving in Sydney we found a studio flat to rent on Gumtree. Being in a block of flats near the Ferrari and Masarati garages on William Street, with a huge TV and comfy bed, it seemed the ideal place to spend 2 weeks. How wrong could we be…I don’t think it was the first cockroach that did it, it was probably the 75th one that crawled over the Coco Pops that made us think this wasn‘t the place of for us. Unsurprisingly we didn’t stay long and booked a last minute cheap rate hotel down in the lovely Potts Point instead.

Anyway, the day we turn up just so happened to be the weekend of The Australian Beer festival. It’s like they heard my Birthday wish! So after a quick visit to the Quay we went to The Australia Hotel to try many many beers and top up the beer diary…it was good. Over the next few days we ticked off everything the in-flight magazine told us to do. We walked across the bridge, sat in the Botanical Gardens, looked up at the Opera House and stepped over the bums in Kings Cross.

We were lucky enough to be in Sydney the weekend the Botanical Gardens had a Titan Arum on view. Now it’s not often we get excited over flora, but this one only flowers for two days every three years and is the largest, and some say, smelliest flower in the world. It grows up to 12ft high and is only found in the wild in Western Sumatra. Have a look at the photo, its scientific name (Amorphophallus Titanum) is translated as ‘huge deformed penis’ (I’m not joking it was on the fact sheet).

In the Sydney museum we enjoyed reading what crimes the convicts had committed to be sentenced to transportation. The not so good John Mason was sent ‘down under’ for committing an unnatural crime with a cow (their words) and Bryan McWilliams got 7 years for cutting hair from a cows tail. Nowadays you couldn’t even get yourself locked up in Guantanamo Bay for that!…ooh a political joke, and near the U.S. election too, it‘s just like ‘Have I Got News For You’.

In the second week we took the ferry over to Manly, had a cup of hot chocolate and booed at the English Rugby League team who were training on the beach (they deserved it after that embarrassing thrashing by Australia, not that I did it loud enough for them to hear you understand). When the weather turned for the better we spent a day in Bondi to join the rest of the slackers grilling themselves on the beach. I swear one girl was so over done she had morphed into a frazzled piece of bacon normally found down the back of a cooker.

After a couple more uneventful days we took a very long and very dull 12hr train journey down to Melbourne, where we checked in to the Grandview Hotel in Brunswick for a bargain $300 per week. While here we hooked up with Rachel’s old workmate who had just moved back to Melbourne. We owe those guys a thousand Thank you’s for letting us play bowls with their friends (it’s a cool, young, hip thing to do here, honest they‘re not 80) and for driving us down the brilliant Great Ocean Road to see the 10 Apostles. We spent the rest of our time walking around town staring at stuff, like Csirac in the Melbourne Museum. For all you computer nerds out there this was the 4th stored-program computer built and is the only intact first generation computer surviving anywhere in the world. We’re lucky they now make them a tad smaller because you’d be hard-pressed to fit that bloody thing in your front room. If we weren’t looking at stuff like the Csirac we were riding the Tram down Brunswick street looking for something to eat. The trams are so repressively grey and communist looking here, it’s like the local council bought them on the cheap at the great Soviet Union garage sale in the early 90‘s. Although Melbourne doesn’t have the aesthetic beauty of Sydney it’s definitely more lively and probably our most favourite city we’ve been to so far. One place we regret not visiting though was the set of Neighbours. Muslims make their pilgrimage to Mecca, we make ours to Ramsey Street. But at least it gives us an excuse to come back some day.

And that’s pretty much it for Australia. We recently flew to New Zealand (staying at the Rizla thin Formule 1 Hotel - have a look at the photo, I don’t think they could make buildings that skinny!) and have just spent the day walking around the Auckland Museum and watching a Maori cultural performance, the Hakka never get’s tiring. Every city has its HSBC and Pricewaterhousecooper skyscrapers and Imax cinema, Auckland is no different. So one days sightseeing here has been enough and we‘re now looking forward to picking up the van and driving off to see some volcanoes.

The photos of Sydney nor Melbourne are up yet as we haven't had time.

Bye for now,
Joe n Rachel.x.x.x

As Kununurra is where I left the last blog entry I guess it makes sense to start this one there as well…

There’s isn’t much to Kununurra town, but we did head up to Kellys Knob lookout to make the obligatory childish innuendo’s you have no choice but to make in a place called Kellys Knob. We also took a day ’s drive out to Wyndham, population 800, to visit a Crocodile Farm. While waiting for the croc feeding tour Rachel popped in to the bathroom and when she flushed the toilet half a dozen frogs fell out from under the rim in to the toilet bowl. I think that gave her more of a fright than the large 4.2 metre croc they have penned up, who was captured from a river after he had eaten 24 dogs…one while still on a leash! Before heading back to Kununurra we had our photo taken by the town’s 20 metre concrete crocodile (one of the ‘big things’ dotted around the country) and soaked up the fantastic panoramic views from the five river lookout. Back at the campsite we got chatting to a friendly family of Grey Nomads. ‘Grey Nomad’ is a name given to the retired Australians who leave their home for months on end and travel around the country in caravans. We bumped into them frequently along the way down and spent the evenings drinking their beer and eating their cheese. At one point they thought their water in the caravan was tasting a little odd so they checked the hose and found that for the last couple of days they had been filtering their drinking water through a dead frog!

Our next stop was Halls Creek, pop 1289, which according to a Bank West’s quality of life survey is the worst place to live in Australia. I’ve read stories of drunken adults collapsed in the streets, men standing in the middle of the highway masturbating at two in the afternoon and a young mother walking down the street holding her baby at her breast while drinking from a can of VB. It sounds like a dark episode of the Simpsons or a night out in Swindon. Luckily we didn’t see any of those shenanigans while there and we soon moved on to Fitzroy Crossing, population 1,500. Like Halls Creek alcohol seems to play a big part in community life here. At 12pm locals suddenly appeared from all directions heading for the pub. I don’t think the world has seen a migration like this since Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. We duly followed them in to The Fitzroy Crossing, the oldest outback pub in the Kimberly region and where men in Stetsons play pool and drink cans of VB while listening to Country and Western. They even had a sign up which said ‘if you spit in the garden you will be banned for 3 months’! After a swift beer we headed for a walk and wonderful boat cruise around the Geikie Gorge, then back to the campsite before the next days drive to Derby.

With Derby being short on decent tourists attractions (a Boab Prison tree and a cattle trough being the highlights) we just stopped for a quick Barramundi lunch and drove the 220km to Broome.
Broome was one of our favourite towns of the trip. It developed around the pearling industry so we took a tour of the Pearl Luggers Museum where we got to taste Pearl Meat and play with a $100,000 pearl. It’s also known for its sunset camel rides along Cable Beach, Broome’s version of a Blackpool Donkey Ride. The biggest problem we had was choosing which company to go with…Do you chose 'Red Sun Camels', who, according to their leaflet, ‘have the longest and most photographed camel train’, or 'Broome Camel Safaris', where you can ‘feed your camel a carrot and meet Broome’s only true camel lady’ or maybe 'Ships of the Desert' where you can ‘meet Chris who makes all his own comfortable saddles by hand’!?! Even though meeting Broome’s only true camel lady was intriguing, I imagined some centaur like creature with a head of a woman and arse of a camel, the 'Red Sun Camels' won the day as it was the cheapest. Over the next few days we drove out to see some dinosaur footprints, walked through the Broome Museum, had Mango Beer at Matso’s Brewery and caught a movie at the worlds oldest outdoor cinema. We could have happily stayed here for a few weeks, especially as our Dutch neighbours at the campsite let us siphon off their electricity and tolerated me pressing my grubby little face up against their caravan window to watch the Euro 2008 highlights. But we had to leave at some point, so we drove on through Port Headland and Port Sampson in to Exmouth.

In Exmouth we had a small hiccup when our petrol gauge went down quicker than an Amir Khan boxing opponent and we almost ran out of petrol 90km from town, but apart form that we had a lovely couple of days hiking in Cape Range National Park and braved the cold water snorkelling on the Nigaloo Reef. We then drove to Coral Bay and took a wicked day trip out to Snorkel with huge Manta Rays and come face to face with turtles and Black Tip Reef Sharks. Once we had had our fill of underwater critters we drove via Carnarvon’s Big Banana to Monkey Mia. Now don’t ask me why it’s called Monkey Mia, sadly there are no monkeys there, but there are plenty of dolphins and big Pelicans which reminded me of those Lancaster Bombers from the Dambusters as they flew low over the water. Every morning the wild dolphins come up to the beach to be fed and have their photo taken by a frenzy of camera totting tourists. On the first feed of the day I was very lucky to be picked out the crowd to give a dolphin a fish, unfortunately Rachel wasn’t…her mouth said she wasn’t bothered, her eyes said I’m going to kill you in your sleep. Fearing for my health we hung around and waited for the dolphins to come back for a second helping, which they duly did and Rachel got the chance to feed one for herself. In the afternoon we drove to Shell Beach, which is a beach made of tiny cockle shell’s 6 metres deep, then over to see the Stromatolites. 3500 million years ago these Single cell oxygen releasing organisms helped create the conditions for more complex life forms to exist and evolve. There are not much to look at, but if it wasn’t for these little fellas we wouldn’t be here today. So big-up to the Stromatolites.

On the way down to Kalbarri National Park the landscape changed and the weather suddenly turned for the worse. There was a burst of trees, the road became twisty, sheep appeared out of nowhere, it started to rain heavily and Tom Jones came on the radio….after all the hours of driving and we go and find ourselves in bloody Wales…we really should have stayed in Broome! Things didn’t get much better in the morning and our plans for the day were ruined as the mighty morphin Park Rangers closed the dirt roads heading in to Kalbarri. So after a quick look at the craggy cliffs we drove on down to the cool Shipwreck museum in Geraldton. Not far from Geraldton we stopped by a great little wildlife park in Greenough, which is run by two women from Fremantle who’s only previous experience with animals was watching a few old Steve Erwin videos. There’s a little 1 year old joey kangaroo that hops around the shop and you can buy some food to feed the animals around the park and stroke a snake. If you tire of the sheep, goats, kangaroo’s et al you can pay a few dollars and they’ll happily throw you in with the dingoes. While there we bumped in to the owner of a pub in Port Denison who invited us over for a drink if we were going that way. Not to seem rude we popped in for a swift half. It quickly turned in to quite a few swift halves and we soon found ourselves being dragged along to the landlord’s own house for a few beers then on to the Cray Fishing end of season party at another pub across town. With this being the highlight of their year, everyone was packed in to the beer garden watching a cover band playing rock tunes (imagine Fred Durst after he had eaten all the pies) and all having a jolly spiffing time. The next morning with hazy memories and hangovers we drove to Nambung National park to see the The Pinnacles, where we hung around to watch the sun go down over the sand dunes and headed back for a deserved nights sleep in Cervantes.

The next day we made our way through the suburbs of Perth and Fremantle using a cartoon map which looked like something you would get with a McDonalds happy meal and found ourselves in Rockingham. Unfortunately the ‘all-seeing-eye’ Lonely Planet failed to tell us that in the winter all the penguins bugger off and the town pretty much shuts down. So after hexing the editor we headed for Busselton. Bussleton has the longest wooden jetty in the southern hemisphere and not a lot else so we soon found ourselves driving down the road to Margret River.

The wineries are not at their aesthetically best at this time of year, but it’s a lovely area with or without the grapes on the vines. On a spring-like day we spent hours driving around having free tastings. Here’s a tip for you, tell them it’s your birthday and they’ll give you more expensive wines to try!
It’s not just wineries though, there’s breweries too and also the chocolate shop with vats of free chocolate buttons and not forgetting the cheese shop with free cheese tasting. Who needs to buy lunch when you can just stuff your face with marinated feta when the old lady behind the counter has her back turned! Being the designated driver I had to entertain myself in the shops while Rachel was tasting the wine. For some weird reason in one gift shop everything they sold was green. So I started to touch each object and whisper “oz” under my breath, hoping tick-tock might magically appear…looking back I think I may have had too much chocolate by that point. Oh and if you we wondering, out of all the wines Rachel tasted the Tassell Park Chenin Blanc was the best…hint hint.

We took one more morning winery tour of the oh so fancy Lewelin Estate and then from here we went on to the National parks around Pemberton, where I climbed a tree. This wasn’t any ordinary tree though. I climbed up 60 metres of a pegged Karri called the Gloucester Tree, which is an old fire lookout from the 1940’s. Look at the photo’s and you’ll understand why I needed a change of pants half way up. Great view from the top though. We took a few short forest hikes looking up at the Karri’s (the third tallest trees in the world that can grow up to 90 meters) and around a lake, then back via another brewery and passed fields full of wild kangaroo’s and emu’s to the campsite. The next day we dropped in to the fantastic Jewel Cave, full of little crystal stalactites, then headed down to the most south-westerly point in Australia, Cape Leeuwin lighthouse, where the Southern and Indian oceans meet.

By this point our brains had absorbed so much I don’t think they could soak in much more and we were running out of money fast. But we had just two stops left on out trip before we could settle down in Perth for a few months. First was a trip to the ‘Valley of the Giants’ tree top walk, which is 60 metre platform up in the tree canopy then, after shooting through Denmark, we went to Albany. It’s a nice town with a replica of the Amity, the ship which bought the first settlers to Western Australia from Sydney. The top tourist attraction here though is Whale World! a fun place for all the family! It’s an old whaling station which has been turned in to a museum and tells the story of commercial whaling in Australia, which ended in 1978. Have a look at the size of the saw that was used by the Flensers to cut the whales head off!

From Albany we drove up to our last stop Fremantle and spent our last few dollars on a beer in Little Creatures Brewery, the best pub in the world. It was now time to update our CV’s, visit the hairdressers (I had mine done by a school girl who seemed to have learnt to cut using a Play-Doh Barber set) and kit ourselves out in cheap work clothes in preparation for 3 months in a dull office job in Perth. All dressed up Rachel looked as beautiful as ever, unfortunately in my ‘Spend less’ Velcro shoes I looked like a Jehovah’s Witness, such is life. We rented a room in a house in Leederville, living with a German couple and landlord who used to be in the Foreign Legion and found work easily through a temp agency. Rachel worked at the Disabilities Department and I for The department of Racing Gaming and Liquor. After a few days we had slipped effortlessly in to a comfortingly normal 9-5 week day life, spending the weekends visiting places like Kings Park, Whale watching and fishing to make the weeks breeze past. One of our favourite weekends was at the Perth Royal agricultural show, where we got to watch sheep shearing and wood chopping competitions.

Looking back, in the six weeks we had the van we drove over 6000km and was lucky enough to see some of the most interesting and beautiful places in the world, as well as some of the dullest and most depressing like Port Headland. A place where even the lady at the tourist information centre admitted there is nothing to see or do…they wouldn’t even open up the museum unless there was a minimum of 10 visitors! We drove for many long hours down straight roads that looked like they were never going to end and around twisty tree lined lanes over lush green hills that look like the most English of Australian countryside. We passed by miles of flat spinefex infested land, Eucalyptus, Karri and Boab trees and termite mounds that Rachel eloquently described as looking like giant dinosaur turds. We sped over dried up creeks and river beds and through savannahesq plains that make you feel like you’re on an African safari. We had to pull off the road to let road trains scream past (the largest and heaviest freight carrying road vehicles in the world that can be over 150ft long!), overtook crazy Japanese guys on bicycles and was overtaken by 70 year old couples pulling their caravans as they follow the other grey nomads around the country. We spotted Parrots and Parakeets, Cockatoos and Kookaburras, Orb spiders and Redbacks and Snakes. We’ve peered down gorges, in to dark caves, got stung by Jellyfish and watched the sunset over the sea. We drank beer in outback bars, ate our own weight in potato wedges and in the evenings swapped stories with other travellers in the caravan parks. We stopped in small towns with old goals and restored colonial buildings that told stories of Australia’s pioneers, aboriginal clans, flying doctors and the school of the air. We narrowly missed a huge Woma Python sunning itself in the middle of the road, swerved around a Goanna, slowed down to let emu’s cross, was given the evil eye by huge eagles stood like kings protecting their road kill and had to slam on the breaks as kangaroos and wallabies who haven’t learnt the green cross code jumped out from the bushes. To conclude the blog like a poorly written English exam, the Road Trip was really brilliant and that is all I can say about that. As Tin Tin out famously, “here’s where the story ends” and soon we will be in Sydney and Melbourne and I’ll write about that no doubt.

Here’s a link to the photo’s…again: http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

Joe n Rachel.x.x.x.

It was mid-June at the ‘Top End’, the sun was shining and the campervan was just a twinkle in a credit card’s eye. Darwin is a nice place and although being the largest city in the Northern Territory it still has a small town feel to it. Its highlight is definitely the Mindil Beach Sunset Market, where you can listen to live music, buy some food and watch the sun go down. We also enjoyed sitting on the dock of the bay eating Barramundi and chips after a walk around the museum and art gallery. We flew here though because this was the starting point for our drive down the west coast of Australia. So the next morning with ‘sweet’ and ‘dude’ tattooed on our backs we jumped on a bus heading for an Industrial Estate to pick up the campervan, which was to be our home for the next six weeks. We were off in to ‘The Bush’ for our Roooooaaaaaaaad Triiiiiiiiiiiip!!!

Now I’ll tell you a news story that lingered in the back of my mind while we were travelling through the ‘Outback’. In May of this year a backpacker was busting to go to the toilet while in a remote part of Australia. They pulled up on the side of the road so the guy could jump out and squat down behind a bush. Just as he was making himself comfortable a Brown Snake jumped up and bit him on his willy!…Now you can’t blame the Snake, who wouldn’t have done the same if you were woken up by a man taking a dump on your head, but it really makes you think about what is out there waiting to pounce when you’re least expecting it. There really are just too many things in Australia that can kill you, it’s quite unnerving. There are Jellyfish and the Spiders and the Snakes and the Sharks, but up here there is the daddy of them all, the Saltwater Crocodile. As the Kakadu National Park leaflet says: “Estuarine Crocodiles are dangerous and aggressive. They have attacked and killed people…Keep away from the waters edge.” You don‘t have to tell us twice! The Backpacker survived the snake bite if you were wondering, but later sadly died of embarrassment.

On our first day we drove 140km east from Darwin, passing hundreds of Termite mounds of different shapes and sizes, Eucalyptus trees, scrub fires and dead Kangaroo’s in various degrees of decay, on the way in to Australia’s largest National Park, Kakadu du du push pineapple shake the tree, ka-ka-du du du push pineapple grind coffee, to the left, to the right, jump up and down and to the knees, come and dance every night, sing with a hula melody…right that‘s enough of that. The landscape here is fantastic and it’s coincidently where they filmed Crocodile Dundee, so if there was any doubt in your minds, this really is Croc country. As it was getting late we booked ourselves in to a campsite for the night and drove to Woolworths to stock up on food and ice. Now I know what you’re thinking, but honestly Woolies is a proper supermarket here, we didn’t just buy two ton of Pick n Mix and a Lionel Richie CD.
After a pasta dinner and getting some friendly old guys to check our gas bottle (we didn’t want to blow up the campsite or gas ourselves on the first night) we turned in for a surprisingly comfy sleep in the back of our Mitsubishi ‘Breezer’ van.

Kakadu is 20,000 square km of parkland, jointly owned by the local Aboriginal clans and the Government Parks office. Our morning stop was up at Ubirr to see the fantastic rock art painted by some talented aboriginal folk a few thousands of years ago using red ochre and animals blood. While there we climbed up some rocks for a great 360 degree view of the Arnhem land that Mick Dundee called the “Land of the Never-Never” and also spotted our 4th snake of the trip. After a quick browse of the cultural and tourist centre we finished the day with a brilliant Yellow River boat cruise along the Kakadu wetlands. We saw Sea Eagles, Kites, Cormorants, massive Jaribu’s and many other birds I can’t remember the name of as well as turtles, our 5th Snake of the trip and what we were all really there to see, plenty of Crocodiles.

After another night in one of the campsites we left early for the long drive via Pine Creek to Katherine and Nitmiluk Gorge. Now I have to sadly report that while driving through the last of the National Park we hit a Parrot. The stupid bird shouldn’t have been sat in the middle of the road in the first place, but it’s weird seeing them ten-a-penny in the trees when we’re used to them being an exotic pet locked up in a cage…It’s horrible thinking we just killed something that would fetch us a princely sum back home! Actually it’s weird seeing many of the animals and birds around here. On one particular stretch of freeway there was a ridiculous amount of road kill. It was strewn with dead and rotting Kangaroos’s, Wallabies, birds, rodents, snakes, lizards, cows and even a Water Buffalo. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on anyone when they built the Darwin University Campus at the end of the road! Anyway after driving for 211km we found ourselves in Pine Creek, a small mining town with a population of 500 and three petrol stations. We didn’t stop long, just enough to fill up on petrol (yes I did drive around all three to find the cheapest one!) and chocolate milkshake before driving off for another 284km to Katherine. Its population of 8000 (the third largest town in a state that’s five times the size of Britain!) is made up with a large proportion of Indigenous inhabitants and Cletus from The Simpsons Australian cousins. This place had a bit of a Hicksville feel to it and the local Woolworths smelt of serious BO. It was so bad it brought tears to our eyes and we had to shop like contestants on Supermarket Sweep. While the Cletus’s drove around in their pick up trucks listening to the duelling banjo’s cd on repeat the Indigenous folks seemed happy enough to sit around on the floor in the shade not doing very much…although to be fair it’s probably what they would have been doing 100 years ago before the ‘Whiteman’ came along and with no bye or leave built a town on top of them! There’s not much else to say about Katherine, we had a nice walk around the outback heritage museum reading about the harsh old country life and the Russian Peanut Farmers from the 1920’s. But we weren’t there for the town anyway, rather the spectacular Nitmiluk Gorge just down the road.

Now if you’ve ever want to test the strength of a relationship come up here and hire a two man canoe for the day. The gorge echoed with shouts of “left!, left! for f#*k sake paddle LEFT!!!!” and “why have you stopped paddling? keep paddling dammit!” and that was just from our canoe! But once we got the bloody thing to go in a straight line and ignored the crocodile traps set up on the banks of the river it was a great way to experience it all. We stopped for a bit of lunch by a trickle of a waterfall just soaking up the views and we surprised ourselves with how far we managed to go, even if on the return leg I had to paddle the last of the four Gorges on my own!

The next day, after an early morning visit from a mechanic to jump start our battery (by the time we had reached Fremantle five weeks later the third mechanic called out finally replaced it) we were off for Timber Creek, a grazing township, population 100. Before leaving Katherine we went to a music store and bought the cheapest pop compilation cd we could find. Listening to ABC Darwin with its phone-ins about country life and farming had started to grate a little so we thought singing along to ‘China in your hand’ by T’Pau would be a saner option instead. Anyway, Timber Creek is a funny little place, it’s a rest stop, a pub and a petrol station and that’s about it. Wolfe Creek is just down the road so if you’ve seen that film you can imagine what Timber Creek is like. In the afternoon they had a fun wild Croc feeding show, although all I could think about was the meat they were using and wondered if it was chopped up Backpackers who had stayed there the night before. We had a few beers in the pub and with all the scary movies ever made flashing through our minds we slept the night with half an eye open. We weren’t woken by any cross burning locals rocking the van, but Rachel did stumble upon a crazy lady pacing up and down in a pitch black toilet block, who then ran and hid in the cubicle when Rachel turned the light on.

The next day we were off again for the drive across the border. After stopping to look a pointless piece of scrap metal called the ‘Beef Road Monument‘ we drove up to boarder control for a van frisk. After a quick check for cane toads and fruit ‘n’ veg we found ourselves in Western Australia on our way to Kununurra, population 5000.

…And this is where this Blog entry abruptly ends for no apparent reason. Tune in next time for the Western Australia leg.

Here is a link to the photo’s again:
http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

Right I’m off to set some Parrot traps. Get your orders in now, I’ve just seen a lovely red one in the garden.
See you later. Joe. And Rachel.x.x.x