Nov 2008

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