Backpacking

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

Bam? It’s called Cillit Bang you Australian weirdo’s! I guess it’s just like Vincent in Pulp Fiction said: “It's the little differences. A lotta the same sh*t we got here, they got there, but there they're a little different.” And no I didn’t go in to Burger King either…well you can’t anyway because it’s called Hungry Jacks here.

So I’ll carry on where I left off, where we found ourselves at Brisbane airport freezing our asses off in 20 degree heat. I guess 20 isn’t that cold, but it’s a drop of 16 degrees from what we had been used to for the last 4 months. To be honest I was just relieved to be in a country where you don’t need to use two small pieces of wood to eat your dinner. Honestly, I think chopsticks must be Asia’s big practical joke on the rest of the world. Come on people, cutlery was invented way back in the 11th Century, you can’t tell me it hasn’t reached Vietnam yet! Anyway, Brisbane is a lovely city, it has a bit of a little London feel. Just like home it has a South Bank where the art galleries, museum and theatre is, plus they even have a mini London Eye, which is probably called the Brisbane Eye as that would make more sense. We took a trip on the river taxi (like the one at home) to the Suburbs then trekked 3 miles across a University campus just to eat some mediocre Fish ‘n’ Chips (the chips are rubbish here) and then rode the ferry back in to town again. As we always do we looked at paintings and skeletons and other things you find in galleries and museums, we drank beer and ate food, we browsed shops and walked around quite a bit. The highlight for me was a visit to the XXXX brewery, a beer so crap even Fosters outsold it in the UK. To be fair it’s a lot better beer than Fosters, but it’s not about the taste anyway, it’s all about the yeast oxidation. There’s just something so exciting about the fermentation process that can’t be put in to words…plus you got free beer.

After a few days we caught the Greyhound bus up to the small seaside town of Noosa. The beach looked good, although we only stood on it for about 30seconds to take a photo. But we didn’t stop to lie on a beach anyway, we were here for a trip to the Erwin Estate, otherwise known as the Australian Zoo. It’s pretty average, especially when compared to Singapore Zoo, but we touched a Koala, watched the overrated Croc show in the ‘Crocoseum’ and debated the age old question, do you stroke or pat a Kangaroo? After a quick stare at the Tigers we headed back to Noosa and the next day ‘Greyhounded’ it up to Hervey Bay.

We stopped at Hervey Bay for the same reason as most travellers do, and that’s for a trip to Fraser Island. But first we headed for the local airport for a flight by Tonka toy to the remote Lady Elliot Island. It’s right on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and is so small it’s pretty much just a runway with a few huts on the side. It’s a serious budget buster, but if you’re going to bust it I can’t imagine a better place to do so, this is one of the highlights of the trip. We snorkelled with many fish and watched huge Loggerhead Turtles and Manta Rays swimming by, plus we ate the best all-you-can-eat roast dinner, which was included in the price (I ate 15 roast potatoes to make up for the cost, that‘ll learn ‘em).

After a couple of days we jumped back on the plane to Hervey bay, which was bum clenchingly piloted by a 12 year old boy, who we mistook for a nerdy plane spotter before we saw him jump in the front and start the engine.
Back at Hervey Bay there was no time to rest as we took a day trip over to Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world. We saw Humpback Whales breeching in the sea while driving down the amazing 75 mile beach (which is a registered highway and where you have to give way to aeroplanes landing and taking off), we swam in the very cold but very beautiful lake McKenzie and didn‘t feel the even the slightest bit tempted to pat the wild Dingo‘s sniffing around for scraps of food.

After another Greyhound bus ride back to Brisbane and a few days watching TV in a hostel, we bought our tickets to Darwin. The flight was pretty uneventful although I think the Cabin Staff were conducting a secret experiment to see how much electricity they could produce using 200 statically charged blankets and a plane full of unsuspecting passengers. After eating our pack lunch we spent the next 4 and a bit hours watching the Flight Path Channel. Now it sounds pretty boring when you try and describe it out of context, but up there it becomes the most compelling thing seen on a TV screen since the 1986 Christmas episode of Eastenders when Den handed Angie the divorce papers. You’re on edge of your seat as the outside temperature drops from -50 to -51 degrees, or as the plane edges itself a mm closer to the final destination. Although it’s a bit of a farce really as the plane on the map is about the size of Tasmania, and if that was true the fortunate passengers at the front would be supping a cappuccino in Darwin Airport while the poor suckers at the back would still be stuck flying somewhere over the Great Sandy Desert. Anyway, we disembarked the plane and found ourselves in Darwin, the largest town in the Northern Territory, population 115,000. And that’s all I can be bothered to talk about for now, but tune in soon for the one about two Brits, a campervan and the long drive down to Perth.

Here are the photo’s if you haven‘t seen them already:
http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

Bye.

Joe n Rachel.x.x.x.

So here we are in Malaysia and our first stop Georgetown on Penang Island with its Chinese, Islam, Indian and Malay influences it’s the proverbial cultural melting pot. We turned up at a strange place, in the dark, without anywhere to stay…again. The first couple of hotel’s were full and as it was getting late we made the budget busting decision to stay at the Malaysia Hotel. Unfortunately our conversion skills weren’t up to scratch and we paid way more that we thought we did. But the room had a great view and with a complimentary newspaper delivered to your door everyday, plus a bathroom that actually had a bath in it, the price was easily forgotten…who says this backpacking lark is difficult! A free buffet breakfast was also a bonus, so I made up for the price of the room by eating 8 fried eggs a day, that’ll learn ‘em. Georgetown is a lovely place, with some interesting history and great food. We had a wander around Fort Cornwallis, the oldest British settlement in Malaysia and on the way passed a very white St Georges Anglican church, the oldest church in SE Asia. We also popped our heads in to some smokey Chinese temples, Islamic Mosques and down a very loud Little India. There were some beautifully restored buildings too, including the 19th Century Baba-Nonya ‘Penang Peranakan’ Mansion, where only the night before the local Mafia could be found smoking opium…but you didn’t hear that from me, right?

We took a day trip out by bus to see Kek Lok Si Temple with its big Buddha and some seriously cramped turtles (see the photo), then rode the funicular 121 metres up Penang Hill pointed out our hotel in the distance and came back down again. We also had our first taste of liquid gold, 5 pounds for a pint dammit! Beer intake was dramatically decreasing from here on in.

Kuala Lumpur was our next stop and boy we thought we paid a lot for a room in Georgetown. For a few more quid a night we bagged ourselves a dingy windowless box in squat of a hotel with only ESPN as a plus point. KL is a great city. We shot up 41 floors in 40 seconds of the Petronas Towers, which according to my reliable source tells me are 266 times my height. We looked out the window, pointed out our hotel and came back down again. Then we went over to the Aquarium with a 90 meter underwater tunnel and touched-up some starfish.

Day two took us to the Lake Gardens, which not only has the biggest covered walk-through aviary in the world, but also the largest butterfly garden. On the long walk back to town we dropped by the Masjid Negara mosque, where we dressed up like Emperor Palpatine from Starwars to have a look inside. We had a lovely chat with a guide and he gave us a book called, ‘20 most common questions about Islam’. Here’s a paragraph on why Pork is forbidden: ‘The pig is the most shameless animal on earth. It is the only animal that invites its friends to have sex with its mate. In America, most people consume pork. Many times after dance parties, they have swapping of wives, i.e many say “you sleep with my wife and I will sleep with your wife”. could it be that eating pork promotes pig culture?’ Interesting stuff. We spent our evenings in KL drinking Carlsberg very slowly and pondering the logistics of building a beer pipeline from Vietnam to Malaysia. This time next year we‘ll be millionaires, etc etc.

After a few days we took a bus to Jerantut, then a long boat down stream to Kuala Tahan. The town is nothing to write home about, but the location is top class, right in the heart of Taman Negara, the oldest rainforest in the world. It was like the land that time forgot, don’t you think there’s something so beautifully medieval about having to pay the boatman 2 Ringitts to cross the river? Our first activity was a guided jungle night walk where we annoyed some scorpions by poking them with a big stick and became very friendly with more Leeches than you could shake a bloody leg at. The next day we wobbled across a canopy walkway between huge Mersawa Keruing and Keledan trees 40 metres above ground and had a climb up Bukit Teresik hill to point at our hotel and climb back down again. Sadly we didn’t spot the elusive tigers, but did see some deer and Civets at a salt lick, wild pigs, monkeys, snakes, Sea Eagles, spiders, Monitor Lizards, Water Buffallo, Squirrels, huge ants and had fruit bats try and molest me in a pitch black cave. We had a great time and even stumbled into an Orang Asli minority tribe village, where we paused for an awkward few seconds before stumbling back out again. After two days of trekking in the humidity and sweat we thought it was time to move on.

Next up came a 12hr scenic train ride through the jungle to the Islamic north eastern city of Kota Bharu.
We turned up in the dark as usual, but this time we learnt from our mistakes and had booked our accommodation in advance. Unfortunately there were two hotels with exactly the same name and the taxi driver took us to the wrong one! Such is life. This hotel was very average and the room was only half carpeted! Not in a cool urban chic bare floorboard kind of way, more of a ‘bugger, we’ve just ran out of carpet…lets leave it and hope they don’t notice’ kind of way.

We took a few days to have a look around the town and people watch. Bank Kerapu museum has a nice collection of photo’s from the Japanese occupation in WWII and another had a cool weapons gallery. We ate some good Satay from a hawker stall and feeling cocky ordered some Roti in a café thinking we were getting something mildly exotic, but which turned out to be a slice of Kingsmill with some butter on. Sadly when Pizza Hut is a town’s gourmet highlight you know you’re in trouble and have a look at the photo from the market and see why we decided chicken would be off the menu here. It’s interesting to experience a truly Islamic town, although it loses brownie points because I lost my Vietnam hat. I dropped it walking down the street and some bum must of picked it up…I loved that hat. We quickly got bored here so wanted to move on down the coast. Unfortunately it was Labour day (seriously this place has more public holidays than public work days), which meant all the buses out of town were fully booked for the next four days. We panicked a bit thinking we were going to have to spend all that time here, so just for the sake of our sanity we walked in to the bus depot and booked any bus we could get that had two available seats going south…we were off to Kuala Terengganu at 4am the next day.

As soon as we arrived in town we walked around all the bus company windows (there was a surprisingly large amount) to see if any had buses going on to Cherating down the coast, but everything was fully booked for the next two days. This place gets a big raspberry blowing thumbs down for being so bloody dull. There is just nothing to do, it‘s like going on holiday to Reading. It’s the sort of place that makes you want to just lie down on the pavement and slowly decompose. Homer Simspon once said, “No beer and no TV makes Homer go crazy” and we all laughed didn’t we? Well we ain’t laughing anymore. The only plus point was how cheap our room was, I think we paid 5 pounds per night for an en-suit with air-conditioning and with wall to wall carpets! Food choice was limited here and we had to resort to eating McDonalds for dinner. What is it about McDonalds, you stuff your face with burgers and fries, but afterwards you’re left feeling so empty inside? I did read an interesting article in a newspaper though. Apparently they might bring in a law forcing all women under the age of 21 to have a permission letter from their employer or a family member to travel abroad! Gordon Brown could learn a thing or two from these guys, or maybe not. Anyway, after two lonnnnnng days we were on a bus, destination Cherating.

I think we loved and hated this place in equal measure. The town is shabby and dirty, as is the beach, which is nothing to write home about. There is nowhere decent to eat and there is nothing to do in the evening. What made up for this was the resort we stayed in and the very lovely owners who upgraded us for free. Even better though was that we were the only guests! We spent the whole week playing around in the pool and being entertained by the sling-shot carrying staff having a poolside running battle with a troop of monkeys. At one point 5 monkeys ran passed us being chased off by an old woman wildly swinging at them with a broom, then 10 seconds later they all came back running the other way, but this time about 20 monkeys were chasing the screaming old woman back in to the laundry room.

When we weren’t in the pool we were watching soaps on Tv, some with English subtitles some without, it didn’t make much difference they were all crap. This was only interrupted with the call to prayer. It’s nice listening to it on Tv and hearing it drift over the cities from the local mosque. All the hotel rooms have a little arrow stuck on the ceiling pointing the way to Mecca so you can pray…well done Rachel for working that one out, I just thought they were emergency exit signs. To cap it all off, on the last day we saw 6 wild hornbills, the coolest looking bird in the world, hanging around in the trees outside our bungalow. We timed the trip to perfection as the day we left the resort was fully booked for the weekend. Feeling nice and relaxed we picked up a taxi and Third Gear Freddy took us to Kuantan for a bus to Melacca. Driving through one small undescript town I saw a huge 6ft sign on a café wall stating “we sell corn in a cup!”. Now who exactly is that targeted at? I guess eating corn straight off the cob is just too uncouth for some people.

Melacca is one of our favourite places so far. Great people, loads of character in a beautiful China Town and plenty of bars which have 4 hour long happy hours. They have a great evening market where they set up a karaoke stage and you can sit and watch locals butcher their favourite pop tunes all night long. We went to the usual tourists sights and pulled our best sea faring pose outside a reconstruction of the Portuguese ship 'Flora De La Mar'. We spent our first night in a restored Chinese shop house then the rest of the nights in a brand new hostel down the road. This place was so new the paint hadn’t even dried in our room and we had to sleep with the window open for fear of poisoning ourselves with paint fumes.

Capitol Satay Cafe wins the award for most interesting evening’s dinner we‘ve had so far. Health and safety would probably have a field day if this place was back home. You have a big fat gas cylinder under your table with a pot of bubbling satay sauce sat on top, in which you cook the meat and tofu skewers you’ve picked out of the fridge. If you’ve ever had the urge to cook a pigs ear in Satay Sauce, head over here…you can’t do that at Gordon Ramseys!

We moved along by bus to Singapore, an island, country and city all-in-one. On the bus I found my new stage name: Delerang Merekok. Now if that’s not an Oscar winners name I don’t know what is. It means ‘no smoking’ in Malaysian. The journey was great until we found out our bus driver had driven off and left us at the border crossing, which is something we hadn‘t really planed for. With the nearest cash point about an hours walk away things didn’t look too good for us. We decided our only option was to find a pointy stick then hang around for their afternoon service to come through and hijack it, so that’s what we did.

If you’re thinking of stopping over in Singapore, a word of warning, book your accommodation months before you get here and be prepared to spend big bucks. We tried looking weeks in advance and even then all the cheap rooms everywhere were gone. At one point it looked like our only choice was either sleeping in Raffles or on the street. Luckily just as I was starting to collect newspapers for us to sleep under we stumbled across a gem of a B&B called Lollypopcorn. Our first stop though was a cool flashpacker hostel in town, which was nice but a tad over our flimsy budget, so after a couple of nights we booked ourselves in to Lolllypopcorn for the rest of our stay. Although it has a ridiculous name it was a wicked place. Basically it’s just a flat in a huge block in an urban area of Singapore city called Ang Mo Kio. They have just 3 guest rooms, with the others being for the family who still live there, mum and dad in one room, one of the sisters in another and the maid, who sleeps in the broom cupboard! It’s a tight space, but very homely. From the flat we had a quick bus ride to the brilliant Singapore Zoo where you can get very, very close to the animals and the Night Safari next door, which has the same animals, but in the dark. The zoo has 85 scarily intelligent Baboons, who have realised that if they entertain us they will get thrown more bananas than they would do if they just sat there begging for them. So they’ve taught themselves to do handstands and summersaults, cartwheels and star jumps and a load of other things to catch the attention of the banana wielding tourists.

Back in town we went to some Galleries and Museums, like the Asian Civilisation Museum, which I think is one of the best museums in the world. We also dragged our heels around the Financial District and the Quays, which reminded us very much of Canary Wharf…we even sat outside a mock Victorian pub and had a pint of Speckled Hen. We also did the obligatory waltz down Orchard Road to look in all the shops and buy some clothes. One thing about Singapore is how unbelievably clean it all is. You expect it to be clean, because that’s what you’ve been told, but it’s still pretty impressive. Although in a city where they’ve banned Chewing Gum, 5 minutes after turning up Rachel still manages to tread in some. This didn’t really surprise us too much though as she’s done that in every other country so far, I guess it’s now become a tradition. On our last day we went down to the Orchard Road and to celebrate sticking to our 4 month budget we needlessly blew a huge amount of money on a laptop and that’s what I am writing this on now.

The Southeast Asian leg was over as we boarded a plane heading for Brisbane. One thing that puzzled me on the flight was why they gave us a plastic knife but a metal fork with our dinner?!? That’ll foil any terrorist hijack attempt don’t you think?…just as long as they don’t realise you can still stab pretty good with a fork.

On a side note, Australian passport control are brilliant, they even wash your shoe’s for you! I think it’s something to do with bringing foreign flora in to the country and effecting the fragile eco system, but as a bonus they do make them look nice and shinny. Just don’t say that out to them because I don’t think they like doing it very much. We have been in Australia for ages now. We’ve walked on the largest sand island, snorkelled on the great barrier reef and driven from Darwin all the way down to Perth, but I‘ll leave all those adventures for the next blog entry.

Photo’s at:
http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/

See you all soon.

Your sincerely,

Joe n Rachel.xx