A Retrospective...........

All Aboard HMS PrickleFingers.........

Hi all. We arrived in Sydney on Thurs 28th Oct so we've now been in Oz for just over 3 weeks. We stayed with Nina's uni friend, Christel, for the first couple of nights. It was great to see Christel, it had been over 5 years since Nina last saw her. Christel lives in Coogee which is south of the city centre and a couple of bays down from Bondi. It's got a great beach on which we ate our lunch when we arrived.

We did the Sydney harbour bridge climb, even though it was damn expensive (turns out everything in Oz is now!) we had to do it, couldn't come to Sydney for a second time and still not get up there!

After a couple of days with Christel we picked up our home for the next month, the campervan. For one reason and another we ended up with something a little different to what we had planned. We've christened it 'HMS PrickleFingers' because its roughly the size of an aircraft carrier and has a slightly worse turning circle.  It's a six birth with leather seats, flatscreen tv, dvd player, stereo with internal and external speakers, hob, oven, grill, microwave, air con, electric awning, toilet, shower and fridge! They must have needed it back in Cairns or something because we didn't pay the full price, just what we were going to pay for a smaller one.

Christel and Adam - Coogee Beach

Our first night camping was actually still in Sydney because we went for dinner at the house of a friend i used to work with, James, from London who now lives in Oz. James and his wife Isabelle served up a cracking meal on their balcony which has a view over the whole of Syndey, the lucky buggers.

From Sydney we travelled north, ending up in the Lower Hunter Valley after a couple of days. There's only one real reason to come to visit the Hunter Valley and thats for the wine. The local speciality is semillon and they do good shiraz also. We went on a wine tasting tour, with drinking starting at about 10am! To be fair they make a big point of drinking water between each glass and it was by no means a p!ss-up. It was a good day out, we bought a couple of bottles and also saw our first wild Kangaroos.

Before we left Hunter we popped into the McGuigan wines cellar door and picked up a couple of bottles, had to eh, no discount tho, surely i'm family or something?!

From Hunter we left for Byron Bay with a lunch stop planned in Port McQuarrie. It was a long lunch......3 days long actually. We stumbled across a campsite on the waters edge whilst walking off lunch and decided it looked like a good place to stay, so we booked in and took the camper round.  There was a boardwalk that went along the coast around the headland and we used this for the first runs of the trip, which hurt a bit...

We left Port McQuarrie and drove 400km upto Byron Bay which immediately felt like the coastal australia we were hoping for. Byron Bay is awesome, it has a great beach, good food and bars, nice people and a general relaxed atmosphere. We took a surfing lesson on the second day.... i stood up first go...ahem.....Nina did great too. The Aussie lad instructor was a good guy, properly living the surfing life, the day before our lesson Kelly Slater won his 10th world title so all morning all he kept shouting was 'Kelly Slater Day!!! Wooooooo'. The 3 times surfing world champ Andy Irons had died a few days earlier also, on his own in a hotel in Texas of all places, so the surfer dudes were all talking about it.

Byron also has a great coastal walk up to a lighthouse (the biggest on the east coast apparently) and includes a section which is the most easterly point in Australia. On the walk we saw migrating humpback whales and tons of dolphins which was a bit special.   

From Byron we moved up to Brisbane and in the process crossed from New South Wales into Queensland, we didn't stay long, just enough to see the city for a day. Walking back to the camper in the campsite on the second night, Nina felt something on her foot and looked down to find a tiny 'snake'! She kicked it off and it wriggled away, it was only about 10 inches long and we weren't able to find out exactly what it was, but it defo looked like a small snake!

North of Brisbane is the Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise, we didn't visit either of these because, although popular, from what we'd read they are pretty average. We did stop briefly in Coolangatta though so i could take a snap of Kirra and say i'd been there (Neil/Rich - it was no good, small and onshore).

The next overnight stop after Brisbane was Noosa and before we got there we stopped at Australia Zoo (the late Steve 'Crikey' Irwin's zoo).

We went straight to the 'Crocosium' (yep, thats what its called!) to see the live show, past all the free roaming lizards and other creatures on the paths. The zoo was good, perhaps not quite as good as we were expecting but still worth the visit. Rather than the crocodiles it was the birds which were perhaps the most impressive, they had some huge eagles as well as a lot of other fairly large tropical birds. 

Our next stop was Noosa. Noosa is a bit different to the other places we'd been to on east coast as it's a bit flashy and upmarket. It has lots of waterways with houses backing onto them with boats moored and i guess you could say it's a bit like the Miami of the east coast. It's a got a great main beach, and another spectacular coastal path around the headland where we saw planty of dolphins, turtles and a manta ray.

We did a day trip to Fraser Island from Noosa in a 4x4, it's an island just off the south Queensland coast and is entirely made of sand. The weather wasn't great but it was still a good day out. We swam in Lake McKenzie which is apparently the purest water you'll find pretty much anywhere. Driving along the waters edge on the beach at 100Kms was pretty good also. We came across a turtle on the beach and so stopped to check it out, turns out it had got itself tangled in some fishing line and one of it's front flippers was completely missing with just a stump of bone where it used to be, poor little fella. The driver did what he could, cutting off the line and calling it in to the national parks people who came out to get it.

After Noosa we headed to a much smaller place called Town of 1770, named coz that's the year us British landed there.  We managed to get a spot in a campsite right on the beach, which was great as in the evenings loads of people set up fires on the beach.  There was a big backpacker community here and so we tried to blend in, as much as we could being at least half their age again!

We did the scooteroo tour which was a good laugh, the bikes are choppers with big monkey bar handlebars and you get given the leather jacket, helmets and tats if you want them.  Covered about 65k on them touring around checking out the wild kangas & wallabies.  Bikes get up to about 80Kms if pushed, with head between handlebars!  Didn't like the whippersnappers passing me - turned into a right kid. 

That night we decided to go to the surf club party, which was interesting to say the least!  Lots and lots of very young people, all competing in limbo competitions and other, lets just say 'different' party games consisting of little clothing... in order to win a whistsunday trip - all just part of being young, but Nina & I did not partake in such frivolity!!  At least we managed to hang out with some of the guys from the scooteroo tour and we had a good chat and few beers into the night.


We hit the road then to Airlie Beach which was a good solid driving session covering a bit over 700K, and arrived to be greeted with rain and pretty much rain ever since we have been here..  Now heading off to the Whitsunday islands to sail around them for the next 2 days, weather looking a bit better but hoping for a bit more sun for the scuba diving so the water is nice and clear......

Will update on this on our return... 

Bali: Beaches, Bikes, Bonkers Driving and Bintang Bogans

I'm lying in the back of the camper we've hired for our time in Oz, reminiscing about our 10 days in Bali and it seemed liked a good time to post an update on our trip. We left Hong Kong on Monday 17th Oct, a day after J&D because we couldn't get on the same flights. On arriving we were met by Melissa, a friend we know through Jen who lives on the island and she had kindly offered to take us to the hotel in her car. This is when we first encountered the bonkers driving.

The rule of the road in Bali seems to be that you can do whatever you like, and no-one can get annoyed or angry with you for doing it. If you need to pull out on to a main road, don't bother waiting for a gap in the traffic, you just pull out and expect everyone else to get out of your way, which they do. In the end i came to the conclusion that it's actually pretty effective and it keeps the traffic moving on all the roads. This approach applies to both cars and motorbikes alike.........

Motorbikes (or mopeds mostly) are everywhere and usually not where you expect them to be. I'm sure the Balinese moped rider has developed a riding technique that actually defies the laws of physics, they can fit a moped through gap that is actually smaller than the moped itself and can do this whilst travelling at 50mph and with up to 5 (yes five) people on board. The standard, no door family moped in Bali has a seating configuration of mother on the back holding a baby, father driving and up to two small children standing in the footwell between fathers legs, one of them can even be asleep on handlebars!. No crash helmets required. Mental.

We got to our hotel in Sanur on the west coast of Bali at about 3pm and met up with J&D again. The hotel had screwed up their booking slightly and had given them a twin room instead of a double, not ideal considering this holiday was effectively their honeymoon......

In case you didn't know, because of it's location Bali is the Aussie equivalent of Spain and therefore the vast majority of tourist are from Australia. Sanur is smaller and quieter than Kuta (the main tourist resort) and therefore has far less Aussie's and therefore hardly any 'Bogans'. A Bogan is pretty much an Aussie chav and they can be spotted easily enough by their holiday attire which pretty much consists exclusively of a Bintang (The local Bali lager) vest or 'wife-beater'.

For the six days we were in Sanur we relaxed at the hotel, soaked up the sun, had massages and went out for a few meals. Mel's boyfriend, Jasper, manages a bar in Seminyak on the opposite side of Bali (just above Kuta) called Ku De Ta which is seriously cool so we went there a couple of times. Alcohol in Bali has had a huge rise in tax recently and now attracts about 4-500% in duty meaning it's damn expensive to go out for a night in bars and restaurants - travel budget firmly lobbed out of the window.......

After J&D left to go back to HK we moved over to Seminyak to sample a few other areas of Bali. We hired a moped from Mel and Jasper's neighbours. I say 'hired', it was more like we borrowed it for a few days. No forms to sign, no driving license shown, just a few notes handed over in exchange for the keys and a couple of lose fitting helmets. Having experienced the Bali roads only in a 'Taksi' up to that point, it took a couple of runs to get fully comfortable but we were soon getting around easily enough and it was actually great fun.

A big thing in Bali is going for cocktails/drinks to watch the sunset on the west coast. After walking Mel's dog, London - a lab/rottweiler cross, along the beach for half an hour or so we stopped at a little beach shack bar. The bar itself was actually a trailer that arrives and leaves each day and sits next to a wooden frame under which the tables and chairs are set-up. A couple of beers and cocktails later and we were treated to a great sunset over the waves.

We hired a chap with a car the next day and did a quick tour of some inland areas: the Water Temple, Ubud, views of Mt Agung and Lake Batur, Monkey Forest (more of a Monkey Footpath in truth) and some rice paddies.

The Water Temple had some interesting 'fertility' souvenirs on the way out.......

The rice paddies were pretty spectacular, we didn't see them in full wet season but they were still an awesome sight. We sat at a little bar on the hill and had a bintang each taking in the view......

We left for Oz on Wed 24th and that's where we are now.........