So... I've been in Oz for 10 days now (yes, I know - ANOTHER continent) and managed to travel a fair chunk of the East Coast already! Infact I'm sat writing this in Airlie Beach, about to set off on a sail around the Whitsunday Islands in a few hours time. But that won't mean a great deal just yet, so I'll get on to telling you about my journey here.
In the broadest sense said journey started with a body clock (and soul) destroying combination of flights with the wonderful Etihad airlines - for the first time they sat me next to someone my own age who spoke English, so I had an enjoyable flight accross to Abu Dhabi chatting to a primary school teacher who was doing a 2 year placement in Bangkok, before having coffees at the airport's Costa (who I'm convinced are slowly but surely taking over the world - second only to Walmart & Tesco) in the early hours of the morning. After a couple hours waiting I was back on an Etihad plane, this time for 16 hours - although they have the best in-flight entertainment I've come across so far (and with nearly thirty flights under my belt in the last 12 months, I'm becoming something of an expert) there will never be enough CSI episodes or newly released films to stop you going just a little crazy after that amount of time in the air. However I arrived in Sydney still clutching some of my marbles, and after being scared half to death by posters threatening loss of money, life or limb if you bought something containing seeds or god forbid, milk, in to the country, was officially allowed to enter Australia. Hurrah!
I should probably admit my guilty secret now, which is that I now own one of the geekiest things of my adult life so far - a YHA membership card. It offers, amongst many other exciting things, a 10% discount at Milletts! It also gets me 10% off at YHA hostels, which as I was staying at the extraordinarily expensive Central Sydney YHA (although worth every penny, due to the lack of bed bugs) seemed like a good idea - that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I arrived at the YHA's doors looking like someone who'd spent the last two evenings sleeping on planes and hadn't seen a shower in a while, and was lucky enough to be let in to my room a few hours early to try and sleep it off a little. The rest of Sunday passed in a blur of buying sensible things - like industrial strength sunglasses and sunscreen (the stuff I have now is 30+ and produced by the Cancer Council - I figured as their main aim in life is to stop people getting skin cancer, they probably made pretty good sunscreen) - and sleeping, a lot. Come Monday I was slightly more in the land of the living, and set off to explore Sydney - within 5 minutes it had dawned on me how much easier it is traveling in a country that speaks your language (obvious, yes, but it's been 6 months since I have); you can read signs! People understand you when you ask questions! You understand how much things cost when people tell you! So after a joyful monorail ride - where I could buy my ticket from a machine without hastle, and find the right platform without getting lost - I found myself at Circular Quay, where I stepped off the Monorail to see Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House for the first time; they really are pretty impressive. I collected my ticket from the Opera House for the evening performance I was going to and then wandered around the Botanical Gardens for a few hours. As soon as I saw the sign at the entrance:
"Welcome to the Royal Botanical Gardens & The Domain. Please walk on the grass. We also invite you to smell the roses, hug the trees, talk to the birds and picnic on the lawns"
I pretty much fell in love with Sydney and the Aussie way of doing things. So I spent a fun afternoon wandering around, reading my book and enjoying the sunshine, and seeing various things the botanical gardens have to offer - including Mrs Macquaries Chair (a seat engraved inthe rock which used to be a favourite point of the Governors wife back when the gardens were provate property, and Andrew "Boy" Charlton pool, a saltwater pool on the side of the harbour where the 1920's swimmer of the same name (he was pretty good by the sounds of it - 3 olympics and 5 world records) did a lot of his training. Although he died of a heart attach in his 60's, so maybe all that exercise isn't good for you after all... After taking a lot of pictures I headed back to the hostel to make myself presentable before going to the opera house, and headed back there to see "Le Grand Cirque" - I'd booked tickets back when I was living in Cusco and to be honest had no idea what it was, just that it was the only things showing on the 5th of January, but it turned out to be the world premier of an acrobatic show along the same sort of lines as Cirque de Soleil (which I saw for the first time last year in Vegas and absolutely loved). Needless to say the show was great - people flinging themselves through hoops, and building elaborate human pyramids (before getting on a bicycle and whizzing 12 gymnasts piled on top of one another around a teeny tiny stage) - and the views of a huge docked cruise ship and the Harbour bridge at sunset that you get from the drinks reception area were breathtaking.
The next morning I headed to Cairns - a very uneventful flight, unless you count the nail scissors I lost to airport security - the most recent in a long line of beauty tools I've had confiscated... The nail scissors I can just about undertand, but why they insist on taking my eyebrow tweezers any time I accidently forget and leave them in my make up bag I do not know. What am I going to do, pluck people to death?! Anyway, after 3 hours on yet another plane and another time zone alteration (Queensland is only 10 hours ahead of the UK - New South Wales is 11) I got in to Cairns airport, and it was evident within about three seconds that we were now inthe tropics. Sydney had been a nice temperature - mid to high twenties, with a a bit of a breeze - but Cairns was mid 30s, no breeze, and at least 90% humidity; the kind of heat you're not sure you can breathe in, and where your whole body is constantly covered in sweat that refuses to evaporate so every wandering round has a distinctly shiny appearance. I stayed at a lovely sociable little place called Dreamtime, and spent my evening out on the town with two British guys (one called Tim - remember him, he crops up a lot!). The next day I headed out early to get a boat to the reef - ie The Great Barrier Reef (home of Nemo) - donned my highly attractive full body lycra stinger suit, and spent a few hours snorkelling round various dive sites (February's dive-induced perforated ear drum has unfortunately ruled out scuba for the forseeable future). Although it wasn't quite as colourful or inundated with fish as I've been led to believe - although that may be as I'm using Disney Pixar as a reference point - it was certainly like nothing I'd ever seen before. At the first site I came face to face with a jellyfish as soon as I got in the water, which was something of a shock, but then it turned out there were hundreds of the little guys floating around and they barely stung (my hands and face were still exposed, so I got a few little stings) - the sneaky thing was they were only about the size of a fist and almost clear, with just a little bit of a pink tinge, so half the time you only realised there was one when you felt a twinge and realised it had stung you. The second reef we snorkelled was by far the most impressive - I got another face to face encounter the second I got in the water, but this time with a huge grey fish (wide and flat from the side, but very narrow face on - it sort of looked like someone had taken a normal fish and squashed it!) that was about as big as my torso - I may have screamed. Just a little. In addition to the hundreds of smaller fish I got to see giant clams which were about the same size as me, a terrifying big silver fish that wasn't much smaller, and a shark! But sadly I still didn't see Nemo...
The next day in Cairns was spent doing boring and sensible things - sorting out job applications (I got in to the area I wanted, South Thames - it basically covers South London and everything below it, down to the coast), bus tickets and hostels. I am now the proud ownder of a Greyhound bus pass to get me from Cairns to Syndey for the bargain price of $314. So using that I got myself on a bus to Townsville the next day, six very odd hours with Colin, the weirdest bus driver in the world - he had a stange habit of making sound effects to illustrate every point he made. For example, telling us about the service station we were about to drop in to: "You might want to get a snack 'munch, munch, munch' or a drink 'slurrrrrrrrrrrrp', but make sure you're back here by 5 or you'll miss the bus 'OH NOOOO!!!'" Very, very strange. Townsville was just a stop over night before heading over to magnetic island - I was hoping to catch up with a few of the girls I'd met in peru but the combined effect of my still debilitating jetlag, and thie hospital ball, meant I was already passed out by the time they made it in to town! So the next mornign I got up early and got the Sunshine ferry (awwww, what a cute name) over to the island and got myself checked in to my luxury hostel. I spent the rest of the day lounging by the pool and reading - it turns out Magnetic Island is all about relaxing! - before spending the night playing games in the bar and chatting with my new roommates over dinner and a few drinks. The next day I headed out to see the island and swim at one of the beaches with stinger nets - it's basically a very pretty, chilled out place with some nice beaches and wild koalas. Although I could hear the marsupials (they sound a bit like pigs grunting!) I didn't get to see any - OR any kangaroos. I thought Australia would be dripping with them! Anyway, that evening I bumped in to Tim - I told you he'd crop up again - and spent the night with a bunch of travellers he'd met, and ended up having a really nice barbeque at the hostel with them. Australia has definitely been the most sociable place in terms of travellers - I've met different people everywhere I've been, and spent most of my time eating out and exploring the town with them,
The next morning, as I was due to check out and get a bus on the mainland down to Airlie beach, I woke up to the sound of terrantial rain and gale force winds, which in this part of the world means only one thing; a cyclone! Now you don't have to worry, as clearly if I'm writing this I'm completely OK, but I'll try and make it sound as dramatic as it was then when I didn't actually know if I'd be fine or not. So anyway, I opened the door to our little wooden hut to be greeted by grey sky, rain cutting horizontally across the door, and palm trees bending over backwards with the wind - being the expert seaman that I am, I figured I should probably go and check if the ferries were going to be running back to mainland in this sort of weather, and found out that this mornings had been cancelled but they were hoping to start running again from 11 (the time I wanted to head back). Slightly more reassured I got ready and packed up my stuff, only to discover that most of our things were soaking as out little wooden hut evidently was not cyclone proof - so after placing everything in to plastic bags and covering myself and my belongings in their appropriate waterproof layers (the luminous kag in a bag was back!) I went and had a bacon sandwich with my new friend Tim, sheltering from the rain and watching the boats struggling across the water. After a very soggy bus ride we made it to the terminal just in time to get the ferry, and spent the next twenty minutes lurching violently from side to side whilst people hid in the toilets being ill (never have I been so glad not to suffer from sea sickness) and the boats various fixtures and fitting shuffled themselves from one side of the seating area to the other; when we arrived in to the mainland ferry terminal, we heard them cancel all ferries until the weather improved. When the Greyhound bus turned up a few hours later we were made to sign disclaimers stating that we were aware that roads were flooded, and that if the bus became stuck we accepted that we would take on the financial responsibility of getting ourselves to our destinations; I say made, because when you can't get back to the island and you're stuck in terrential rain at a terminal outside of town, you don't really have much of a choice but to sign! So we got on the bus, all soaked through, and within an hours driving the weather had luckily cleared up - and after another 5 hours of a decidedly more normal bus journey with a much more mentally stable bus driver, we made it to Airlie Beach.
Here I've been staying out of town a little, so I spent the evening with my roommates watching the TV for weather updates (it turns out the cyclone has started heading down the East coast, although seemed to be going out to sea as well) before crashing out after a pretty stressful day. I had a day to waste the next day as my boat for sailing the Whitsundays wasn't booked until today - I didn't like the look of any of the boats leaving on Tuesday, which turned out to be a pretty lucky thing as by Tuesday morning the tail end of the cyclone had also hit Airlie beach. So I spent another wet and grey dat milling around, reading, shopping and trying to find out more about the 28 hospitals in the South Thames area. We were all in the same boat (or not, as all boats due to sail yesterday had to be cancelled) so we spent a lot of time in our little wooden dowm cabin hanging out, chatting, reading magazines and watching Friends - not the worst way to spend a cyclone, anyway. Then today I woke up to blue sky - a huge relief, having almost forgotten what sunshine looks like - and checked out of the hostel before heading to the boats office to check in.... only to find out that in the 30 minutes it took me to get from my hostel to the office the boat had been declared unfit to sail due to storm damage it received whilst anchored in the harbour, and had been cancelled! I asked if there were any other places left on boats departing today and discovered that there was one, on a boat called Freight Train - I actually already knew about this boat... because Tim had mentioned he was on it! So I was lucky enough to be able to swap to Freight Train rather than being stranded in Airlie beach for the next two night and missing out on sailing the Whitsundays (although am slightly scared this man is going to think I'm stalking him...) and now I'm such sat in an internet cafe passing the time until we sail, which is in about 2 hours.
So, that's what I've been up to so far! I'm getting an overnight bus from here in a few days to go to Bundaberg, home of the famous Australian rum and also a beach with nesting turtles, who I'm hoping to see when I go on a night tour, and from there on to Hervey beach to go on a tour of Fraser Island. Despite the frightening amount of organisation involved it all seems to be going well so far (cyclones aside) so hopefully it will continue that way... fingers crossed. Take care of yourselves and let me know what's happening back home!
Lots of Love,
Kat
xxx
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