I hope you don't mind sand in everything...

Now, let’s see…where did this intrepis traveler last leave you…Ahh, yes, Coolangatta. Well, it’s been an eventful couple of days, kids, so pull up a chair and a pack of your favorite Tim Tams-I’m currently munching on the Tim Tam Crush, which might just be my favorite so far.
From Coolangatta we mercifully left the main highway and headed inland to explore Springbrook National Park. For my Canadian friends, the national parks here aren’t like they are in Canada. They’re tiny and numerous. Very tiny. Like, you can drive from one end of Springbrook to the other in about 15 minutes, and that’s going between 40-50 km/h. We went because the Lonely Planet guidebook promised us waterfalls and pretty views. And we weren’t disappointed. In fact, it’s probably been one of the best detours so far. I was determined to do at least a little hiking, and no amount of complaining from Glen could change my mind. On the way to the trail we decided to hike, we saw some pretty amazing views from the lookouts-we were quite far inland, and from some you could see clear to the coast. Finally something to look at other than endless fields of sugar cane. The hike we picked was a mere 4 km, but ended up taking us about 2 ½ hours to do. Why? Well, we had to stop and take pictures of the pretty waterfalls. There were three of them, if I remember right, and 2 of them you got to walk behind, which was awesome. There were also several caves/crevasses/cracks in the rock that we got to walk through and fiddle around in. So naturally some fun was had puttering around in them, seeing how far we could wedge ourselves up the walls. The rest of the hike was through rainforest, which was cool and looks pretty much like you’d expect rainforest to be. At one point we stumbled across some green birds with bright-and I mean vibrantly bright-red bodies that were hanging out in a couple of trees eating the leaves. They were the kind of birds that you’d see selling for a couple hundred bucks in a pet store in Canada. Overall it was an excellent day, and a welcome deviation from the major highways.
We spent the night just south of the hippie/surfing Mecca of Byron Bay, on a beach called Broken Head. This morning we were picked up by Krazy Kat’s surfing and plunged into the Pacific for a lesson. And it was excellent. They showed us how to get up on the board in a way that’s much, much easier than the way I was taught in the last lesson I took-which was eons ago in Tofino. We puttered around in the water for probably 2 hours, and I actually managed to get standing-and I mean fully standing, feet on the board, actually riding the wave-several times. Oh, if only we had more time, and we could stick around for a few days… But the nomadic life is calling.
We spent the afternoon wandering the patchouli-smelling streets of Byron Bay, checking out various shops and munching on some delicious doner kebabs-they’re actually just donairs, I don’t know why they call them kebabs if they’re not on a stick. Doner kebabs, by they way, are my new favorite food. They’re delicious, and have just enough vegetables that I can delude myself into believing they’re healthy.
Tonight we make camp-or park the hippie campervan-in a fantabulous caravan park just north of Ballina. Seriously, it’s the nicest caravan park yet. The showers have shower curtains, and they’re spotless! Cue angelic cherubs here…
Anyways, I should probably get to sleep now, as I believe we have some craziness with macadamia nuts and perhaps cliff diving planned for tomorrow.
Please forgive any weird formatting that might occur on this trip. For some reason Blogger doesn't seem to like Oz too much.

Crikey!

Well, we’re on our own now, driving down the east coast of Oz, hanging out in Caravan parks and pretty much just takin’ it easy. I last left you all while I was in Cairns, I believe, just after having acquired my “sea legs”. Well, it’s now been 4 days and if I close my eyes and stand still, sometimes it still feels like we’re still on the boat. Ahh, equilibrium.

Anyways, from Cairns we motored south, and our first stop happened to be at Murdering Point Winery. No, that’s the actual name, I’m not making that up. They make “exotic fruit” wines, like mango and lychee-the lychee one is actually pretty good, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t generally like wine. So we bought a few bottles. Combine that with the rum we got in Bundaberg and I’m pretty sure we’re already over our duty-free liquor limit for bringing back to Canada. Oh, well. It’ll be worth it if we have to pay a little extra. Then we kept going down that road and stopped at a lovely little beach for lunch. We called it a night fairly early in Townsville, so we could actually cook dinner without having to use a flashlight-or a torch, as the locals call them.

The next morning we hiked up Castle Hill, which seemed a little like the Grouse Grind of Townsville. It was about 1 km up uphill with stairs built into the hill, and yes, there were people headed up and down in their workout clothes. At the top there’s a pretty good view 360 degree view of Townsville and the surrounding area. You can actually drive to the top of it, but we decided (well actually, Glen decided) that hiking up it would be better. Especially since we just spent the better part of a week sitting around. It was kinda nice to get out of the van and get some exercise. After that we stopped just south of Townsville at the Billabong Wildlife Sanctuary. I have no idea if they’re affiliated with the clothing company or not. They have all manner of Aussie wildlife there, including reptiles, koalas, and Cassowarys. But they pretty much started as a place to bring wayward crocodiles. And they have a lot of them, both salt and freshwater. We sat in on a couple of the talks, and especially like the one about the wombats and koalas. Have you ever heard that koalas are endangered? Yes? Well it’s a lie. There’s tons of them in Oz, and they have no known natural predators, save for cars and trucks. Wombats, on the other hand, are disappearing like crazy. There’s one species here that has only 128 actual animals left. That means that if I ever decided to have kids, and they wanted to take a trip like this, there’s a good chance there wouldn’t be any of that particular species of wombat left. That, my friends, is really sad. While we opted not to actually cuddle a koala, since we’d already done that in Kuranda, we got to pet one instead. They have one big, old dude named Ray Charles that you can pet and have your picture taken with, you just can’t pick him up. He’s got a pretty sad story, actually. He was found as a baby when his mother was hit by a car, then released back into the wild. Then he was attacked by a dog and blinded, so now he can’t be released back into the wild, which is why he’s at the sanctuary. Oh, one other interesting tidbit we learned. Every wildlife place pretty much has koalas you can cuddle, but apparently the government regulates how much cuddling the little guys can do. They’re literally only allowed to “work” for 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week. That’s a work week I could get behind. It has a lot to do with their diet, which consists solely of eucalyptus leaves, which have virtually no nutritional value. So they spend most of their days sleeping or eating. We also got a good look at some crocodiles, and I got a good snicker out of watching Glen as we listened to the reptile talk. Apparently they have something like 22 of the top 24 most venomous snakes in the world in Australia. Sure makes you want to head out for a bushwalk, doesn’t it?

From there we headed south-stopping at a couple fruit stands, of course-and ended up in Arlie Beach. Yesterday morning we rented some camping gear and hopped a boat out to South Molle Island in the Whitsunday group of islands, to hike the island and camp for a night on an almost private beach. The hiking was pretty tame-it was basically just a path mown through the grass at a very gradual incline up a hill-but we managed to get in about 14km of actual hiking. We pretty much covered the entire area of the island itself, and even checked out the resort on the other side. At one point, Glen asked what these weird trees were, ‘cause they looked like a tree trunk with grass growing out the top. The next info sign we saw said they were called grasstrees, so he guessed pretty close. The beach we were staying on wasn’t particularly sandy, because it was made up mostly of broken little pieces of coral that had washed up on shore. I think the Whitsundays pretty much mark the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, so that makes sense. We had a pretty good sleep that night, with the exception of listening to the wild cockatoos screeching and squawking overhead as they chased each other around. Noisy little buggers they are. Coincidentally, they island would be a wicked good place to birdwatch if you brought your binoculars, ‘cause we saw tons of different types of birds-most that we couldn’t identify.

This morning the boat picked us up and we came back to the mainland, and pretty much just wandered around Arlie Beach for the rest of the day. Actually, we did fit some laundry and grocery shopping in there (one simply cannot run out of Tim Tams, after all).

Well, I’ve no idea when this is going to get posted, so in all likelihood another chunk of writing will end up being attached to this one before I manage to get it online.

Well, shockingly, we didn’t get to an internet connection before this is going to get posted, so there’s more to add. From Arlie Beach we ended up in Yeppoon for the night, which was literally right on the beach. A really wide beach. Glen and I actually got the running shoes out and went for a little jog when we got there, because it was fairly early still, and we managed to jog back to the caravan park along the beach. It was pretty cool, I’ve gotta say.

The next morning we motored into nearby Rockhampton to check out the Dreamtime Heritage Center, which is sortof the aboriginal museum in the area. They have some excellent displays, and the tour was quite good, if a little spotty and short on actual information. You kinda got the sense that the “tour guides” were really grad students who were forced to volunteer there as part of their grad work, so they seemed a little disorganized at times. The facility itself, however, is fantastic, and the tour is not boring in any way. Near the end one of the guides played the digeridoo for us, which is a talent I will never acquire. My sister can play a little, but this guy definitely put her to shame. Sorry, Jana, but when you can do a Kookaburra call, then I’ll be impressed. Then came the highlight of the day, they showed us how to throw a boomerang, and then let us try. Glen and I actually did rather well, as compared to everyone else in our group. It’s a bit of wrist action, and you have to basically hold the boomerang vertical, which is completely counterintuitive. But it worked pretty well. Interesting fact, the returning boomerang actually has no practical significance. There’s no purpose for it, other that just as something to play with. There are countless types of boomerangs, for hunting and various other things, but the returning boomerang really doesn’t do anything other than come back if you throw it right. Now I’m starting to think all the things I thought about Australia were wrong…

From there we ended up in Agnes Water for the night, but we got there too late to try surfing-they’re pretty much the most northerly beach for surfing on the east coast. For some reason, all the caravan parks in the area were full, so we ended up at a backpacker’s hostel called “Cool Bananas”. That’s right, Slacker and Jana, it’s real. Cool Bananas is a real place! It’s a pretty nice hostel, but it ended up being a bit crowded because all the other campervanners who couldn’t find a site spent the night there as well. There’s something to be said for not having to wait an hour to cook dinner because there’s no burners left in the kitchen for you to do your cooking on. We ended up getting up fairly early and heading south anyways.

Our final destination was Brisbane, but we stopped in Maryborough for a bit on the way. Originally we were just going for the Bond Store, which was some history about sugar cane (more ranting about the sugar cane when I get a proper-sized keyboard) and the liquor industry. But then I was thumbing through Liz the GPS unit-she’s got a British accent so we named her after the Queen-and discovered that there’s a statue of Mary Poppins there! Apparently the guy that created her came from Maryborough. So naturally we had to find the statue. From Maryborough we headed to the Australia Zoo, home of the late Steve Irwin and family. It’s actually an amazing zoo for someone who doesn’t live in Oz, because it has all the native animals in it, and you can interact with a lot of them-you can pet koalas, feed kangaroos, hold snakes, and lots more. They had some animals we hadn’t seen yet, like some little hedgehog dudes and Tasmanian devils. Yes! Tasmanian devils! Which are actually quite small. Think slightly larger than a Chihuahua. They ain’t real big. But you wouldn’t want to mess with them if you saw their teeth…

In a nutshell, the zoo was awesome. And the merchandizing was pretty amazing, too. You could get Steve Irwin wrestling a crocodile keychains. Seriously, they were huge. Though something a lot of North Americans probably don’t know is that the guy was a very active conservationist, and he did a lot of amazing things in that area. Which makes a lot more sense that they basically named a zoo after him. It’s sorta nice to know that he wasn’t just the guy that wrestled crocodiles and said “crikey” a lot.

From the zoo we took a circuitous route to Bonnie and Sabz place-Liz didn’t know about the new bridge in Brisbane, so we got lost for a bit. But we did eventually find our way, and got to consume one too many beer sitting on their verandah, with our beer nestled in some lovely beer cozies they provided. This morning we took the train into the downtown area of Brisbane and wandered around on foot for a couple hours, checking out the parks and a little market we stumbled on. The ladies weren’t home when we got back so we left them a note and headed south again, and were nearly an hour away before we realized we had absconded with their tourbooks. Hopefully they’ll be okay without them until we get a chance to post them back. We didn’t make it too far-just to Coolangatta, and we don’t have many plans for the next couple days, though Glen’s currently combing through the Lonely Planet guidebook looking for surfing beaches, so you can guess what that means.

I don’t know when I’ll be posting next, but I know you’ll all be at the edge of your seats, dying of anticipation.

Now, about those "sea legs"...

Well, it’s definitely time for an update, I think. I last left you in Bargara, a lovely little seaside town near Bundaberg. Well, we chose that location because of the rum distillery. That’s right, we got to tour the Bundaberg Rum Distillery. And it was awesome. And yes, they do give you samples at the end of the tour. Apparently, many moons ago, there was a huge excess of molasses due to the processing of all the sugarcane they grow and refine in the area. What did they decide to do with this excess molasses? Well, make rum, of course! And all it takes, other than molasses, is yeast (Sacchromyces cervisiae, to be exact), water, and time. One part of the tour was the aging vats, where the rum sits and ages for at least 2 years. We weren’t allowed cameras on the tour because they could potentially cause a spark, and the alcohol content of the air in that building could cause a massive explosion. And, quite frankly, that would be a huge waste of rum. And, ooh, did that room smell delicious. We were allowed to sample almost all the products they make there at the end of the tour (including the rum liquer they make where they mix rum, chocolate and coffee-oh, yes, we bought a bottle of that), and we did. Though Glen did most of the drinking and I restricted myself to sips so one of us could drive. Possibly the best tour ever.

After that we made a quick stop at the “mystery craters”, which are craters made from rock that no one has any idea as to how they formed. Glen and I agreed they’re probably volcanic, given what they looked like. Then we basically just drove the rest of that day and the entire next day to get to Cairns. Yesterday we drove up through the rainforest to the “mountain” town of Kuranda. It’s a little Banff/Jasper-esque town with plenty of souvenier shops and a couple attractions. Like the Koala ???, where I did, in fact, get to hold a koala. Princess-the one I got to hold-was pretty sleepy at the time, but she didn’t try to rip my eyes out, so that was pretty cool. And yes, they are even cuter in person. Then we got to feed some kangaroos and wallabies-which are like miniature kangaroos. You’d be surprised how soft kangaroo fur is.

Then we stopped at the bird sanctuary, where the residents are far too friendly in some cases. One particular parrot tried very hard to steal Glen’s glasses, so much so that he actually had to almost fight the bird to get them back. There was another one that wouldn’t get off my shoulder, and yet another that tried to take a chunk out of my finger. Little buggers. We also stopped by the butterfly house, which had butterflies. For lunch we found a place selling authentic Aussie meat pies, so Glen got a Kangaroo one. So yes, we have now tried kangaroo. It’s a bit chewy and gamey, and I can’t say I really like the taste of it too much. But when in Rome, one must at least try the kangaroo meat.

This particular post is being typed while on a boat hovering over the Great Barrier Reef, somewhere east of Cairns. It wasn’t particularly fun getting here, because despite a copious dose of gravol and wristbands and all manner of staring at the horizon, I couldn’t keep my breakfast down. Seasickness rears it’s ugly head. It takes 2 hours of rolling waves to get to the reef, so you can imagine there’s plenty of opportunity in there for things to go horribly wrong. Sadly, I think I may have been the only one who actually ralphed. Well, that shall be my claim to fame, then. I’m the girl that barfed.

Well, it’s now been 3 days since I started this post, because my loving husband forgot to bring the plug converter along on the boat, so I was running on battery, which was low to start with. Now I’m not sure when this’ll get posted, but I’m hoping for soon. The dive trip went well. We survived, which is something considering it consisted of 11 dives (4 the first and second days, and three on the third). Neither of us got the bends, and after about half a day my stomach finally calmed down enough that I felt like eating. Which was good considering the sheer amount of food that was available. You actually burn a ton of calories while SCUBA diving, due to the fact that you’re in the water fighting current and swimming around, but it also takes quite a bit of extra energy to breathe bottled air at depth. So we’d dive, then eat, then dive, then eat, and so on. And we never had to cook or do dishes at all. It was awesome. Well, until we had to dive again, and then there was the whole trying-to-put-on-a-freezing-cold-wetsuit thing. Miserable, that was. But once you got the thing on it wasn’t so bad. The water was around 23 degrees Celsius, which apparently is really cold for the Great Barrier Reef, but awesome if you’re from Canada and the water temp of your last dive was 9 degrees. My wetsuit didn’t fit at all. Again. I’ve accepted now that I’ll never find a standard wetsuit that will fit me, but this one was particularly bad. First, they tried to give me one that was about 3 sizes too small. Then one that I couldn’t get my thighs into. Finally I got one that I could get up my legs, but when I put the top on there was a good 2 inches of loose material around my arms. Super. Thankfully I brought a rashie that I wore under it to keep me at least a little bit warmer. Oh, and the material on the outside of the suits was so abrasive that I ripped open the knuckles on 3 fingers trying to get into one on the first day. Then I had to dive for 3 days with seriously abraded knuckles. This is in addition to my aviary attacked finger. I feel really bad for my hands right now.

We did see tons of fish, big and small, and even more different kinds of coral and anemones. It really is a very diverse reef. We did 2 night dives and managed to see a few sharks, which we were told many times were harmless-and really, they were fairly small, so I think we could’ve taken them if we’d really needed to. On the way out we saw a pod of dolphins, and on the way back we stopped for a good 10 minutes for a bunch of whales-I think they were Minke whales, but don’t quote me on that. The diving itself was excellent, once you managed to get your gear on and actually get in the water.

Living on a boat was a whole new thing, though. It pitches and rolls literally all the time-and we were out on what the crew said was relatively calm seas. We’re talking, like, a good 4-6 feet of up and down all the time. Ugh, I’m getting ill just thinking about it. It made sleeping pretty interesting. And going to the bathroom. And showering. Yes, they had showers on the boat, with a seemingly endless supply of hot water-I still can’t figure out how they stored that much fresh water on the boat. But showering when the floor keeps rising and dropping the entire time is pretty weird. Somehow we managed, and acquired what one of the crew called our “sea legs”. Which explains why, now that we’re on dry land, the ground still feels like it’s moving. I wonder how long that’s going to last…

Now I think it’s time to leave you, as we should be getting on the road and heading south for more adventure.

So it Begins...

Greeting from Down Under! I admit it has been rather a long time since my last update, so I figured it was time for another adventure. And what better than a wicked road trip through one of the most scenic and interesting countries in the world? So here we are, in Australia. I’ll do my best to start at the beginning and see if I can get you all updated on the past few days. This may end up being a few days old by the time I post it, because internet coverage is likely to get spotty in the caravan parks, but I’ll do my best to update when the rates for WiFi aren’t too bad.

We flew in on July 1,^, or June 30 for those of you who were still in Canada at the time. Australia, you see, is a day ahead of Canada as it is on the other side of the international date line. It’s fun when you get to explain that very fact to your cell phone provider when you call to arrange for a plan while you’re travelling. We flew from Vancouver to Los Angeles on Alaska Airlines, then from there to Sydney on V Australia (part of Virgin Airlines). Then we transferred to Quantas and flew to Brisbane, where we picked up our sweet, sweet campervan and drove to Surfer’s Paradise (yes, that is actually the name of the town). V Australia was actually a very nice airline, and they have silly little stories on all their branded stuff, like the sugar packets and the boarding passes. It was quite amusing, and I amused Glen even more with how amused I was with it. All told, we spent about 40 consecutive hours getting from Vancouver to our final destination. Yes, you read that right, 40 hours. That’s a mere 8 hours shy of 2 straight days. That is a long time to go without an actual bed, shower, or any of the other comforts most of us are used to. Needless to say, when we finally got to Surfer’s Paradise, we were exhausted and disgusting. Waiting for our Quantas flight in Sydney, Glen was so tired he literally couldn’t keep his eyes open. I had to keep waking him up every few minutes because we were boarding soon.

Australians drive on the opposite side of the road to North America. This might not seem like a big deal, except that the driver sits on the opposite side as well. Both Glen and I can tell you that this screws with your head in a big way. For instance, turning left is turning left from the left side of the road to the left side of the road, while sitting on the right side of the car. It takes some concentration. Now try doing that when your rental vehicle is a campervan with manual transmission and the seats sitting on top of the engine, so far forward that the pivot point of the wheels is actually behind the driver. Now you get the picture. So far, though, neither of us had gotten into or caused any accidents. Though Glen has only driven for about an hour and a half so far.

We started our trip in Surfer’s Paradise because that’s where the Gold Coast Marathon is. Glen suggested we try to catch a race while we were here, and who was I to disagree? Somehow I even managed to finagle him into signing up for the half marathon too, though I think that’s a decision he might be regretting at the moment. When we got in on Friday, after 40 hours of planes, trains, and automobiles (or campervans, in our case), I suggested we go for a quick run. In my experience, running makes you feel better regardless of what you just came from, and it worked. It also felt really, really good after doing nothing but sitting for 40 straight hours. Saturday we picked up our race kits and wandered around town and walked down the beach quite a ways. It wasn’t too warm out because of the wind, but it was sunny.

This morning we were literally up at 4:30am for a 6:00am half marathon start. It’s not a good idea to start too late ‘cause it can get pretty hot when the sun comes up here. The first thing we noticed was the lack of restrooms at the race precinct. There were over 24,000 people registered for the various events this weekend, but in total I think there may have been around 20 women’s restrooms. The lines were so long that I didn’t have time to go before the race, and I was too impatient to wait in line after. I think if I had waited I might still be there, standing in line. The course itself was the flattest I’ve ever run. Not a hill in sight, and as such, it was fast. Really fast. Like, nearly personal best fast. I’d have to check my time again, but it was something like 1:56:58, which is less than a minute off the PB I set in May in Vancouver. Sweet. Glen ran a 2:28, which is pretty impressive considering he did very little training. Though to hear him whine the rest of the day, I’m not sure it was worth it. I would also like to point out that I ran this race “naked”, or without any electronic accoutrement. That’s right, I was iPod, watch, Garmin-free this morning. And you know what, it didn’t totally suck. This was especially surprising given that there was zero in the way of on course entertainment. Seriously, I’m not sure there was even one booth along the route playing music. Oranges and water. That was the post-race food. Oranges and water. Seriously? I just ran 21.1km! Couldn’t you at least throw out a bagel or two? Maybe a little tub of pudding? Honestly, if I’d done the full marathon I’d be seriously pissed about finding only water and oranges. As an international participant I paid $100 AUD to run this race, and they give me oranges and water. They also apparently thought it was adequate enough space to try and squeeze almost 20,000 people through one lane of a road and call it a race route. Uhh, no. Three lanes, perhaps, but not one. Not by a long shot. I do realize I’m complaining a lot, but there really were a lot of places where they could have improved this race. Overall, we didn’t have a totally bad experience, but it definitely could’ve been better with just a few simple tweaks.

After the race it was into the van, headed north. The van, by the way, is a 2-person campervan, set up with a sink and electric cooler in the back, a portable stove and stocked with cookware and sleeping linens. There are benches and a table behind the front seats that fold down to a double bed. To our dismay, it doesn’t have cruise control, but the CD player does work, and we’re slowly getting the hang of shifting with our left hands. If you’re dying to know more (or see a picture of the sweet, sweet paint job-which is fabulous) go to hippiecamper.com-and yes, that is really the name of the company that rents them, and those are real pictures on the website.

Tonight we find ourselves in Bargera, a little seaside town not far from Bundaberg. We can see the ocean from our campsite, and right now we’re currently listening to a huge flock of parrotlets screaming in a nearby palm tree. It’s our first night in the Hippie Camper, and I predict some serious fighting occurring over the covers tonight.