On the road in Australia: Part I

Waiting for the train to Circular Quay: Sydney airport railway station, brand new and shiny. 

The little Boeing 737 that carried me across the Tasman sea made the smoothest landing I've ever experienced at Sydney airport, it was still mid-morning and the journey to the city was quiet and highly uncomplicated. Incredibly easy in fact. Wendy and Paolo were waiting for me outside the city center in the suburb of Manly, so I made my way there by train to Circular Quay (oooh, look, a gyros stand!) and a ferry across the famous harbour.

Views from the ferry.

Tourist photo cliche.

It was a very painless and simple journey, the ferry proved to be a popular tourist route in order to get a cheap look (relative to the tourist cruises I presume) at the sights of Sydney harbour. I joined in with the photo taking of course, so here are a few more pictures of Sydney, because I anticipated where the best views would be from the ferry and took a seat accordingly I got swamped (nearly smothered) by tourists who caught on a bit later and inadvertently must appear in thousands of other peoples' holiday photographs as the big dumb hairy giant blocking out half of the harbour bridge with his big dumb hairy head.

At times like that I'm reminded of and quite miss the difficulty of traveling in a land where the people, language and customs are unfamiliar to me (a travel snobs idea of 'real' travel perhaps), I crave the challenge of getting about and often I crave the craziness in some deep seated need for escalating challenge. I'm worried I'm becoming lazy too. As in lazy in the act of exploring by riding in cars around the place, not having to do any serious preparation because buses, trains and other public transport are over half a year away now and I'm psychologically a few thousand miles away from the multi-layered gargantuan chaos of Istanbul Ottogar, the mindset I need to get beat it, and for that matter enjoy it.

Getting swamped by picture-mad tourists

Holding the camera wonky on the ferry to Manly.

I had pretty much agreed to jump straight into another road trip, I crammed my stuff into the already full Toyota Corolla and we set off northwards.
There was barely enough room for three people in among our combined things. The boot was full of 'stuff' and pretty much out of bounds meaning two backpacks, a large suitcase (the wheely type), boxes of food, numerous smaller bags, a full size acoustic guitar, several pairs of shoes, books, assorted coats and outdoor clothing, one large pillow, numerous electronic leads and charging devices, several hats and a Djembe had to go in the passenger compartment. We had to get into the clutter to ride in the vehicle with the standard boarding sequence being passengers getting in between large items and then having things placed upon them. Wendy, being the littlest one had to go in the back. Me being the biggest one generally got into the front with Paolo driving on then first day and the rest of us having turns afterwards. Somehow along the way we found space for a big box of booze from Dan Murphy's as well as things we found on the beach, souvenirs and the like.

Suburbia began to thin away to... Good grief! We were in the Aussie bush! Tall gum trees and their dappled shade, square yellow warning signs, kangaroo nets the roadside, young green grass and dusty old soil everywhere, I was in Australia for the first time and having a sensory feast. We headed up the coast of New South Wales towards Newcastle and Port Macquarie. The thing I'm learning about Australia is it's towns and cities are more like home (bizarrely) than the ones in New Zealand. They're just a bit bigger, the buildings are made of (bricks) masonry and they tend to be a bit older (specifically this bit of NSW) and then there's the people who all look so... familiar.

At the Koala hospital.

Port Macquarie was our first overnight stop. Unsurprisingly this part of the country looks a lot like the typical coastal Australia you see in photographs, most probably because somebody took a picture of this coast and we've all seen it somewhere. Soft cream-coloured sands, seas of the deepest blue, strikingly verdant foliage (this time of year I guess) full of strange and colourful creatures. It's all here. Hundreds of miles after hundreds of miles of it. There was a charming little Koala hospital to visit there where most of the patients were slowly being nursed back to health while others were long term inmates. The hostel was not far from the coast though by the time we arrived it was dark, it did have some friendly animal inhabitants to cheer up the weary traveler and a Domino's Pizza nearby where I was first introduced to the infamous $5 pizza deal.

Main entrance!

One Sickly Koala

Paolo and our new friend Cheeky the lorikeet. Port Macquarie YHA.

After a few stop-offs along the road, we spent the next nights at Yamba, because we set off late and the distances involved in any Australian trip are massive we arrived at night just before everything in the town shut. As soon as we had taken care of our hungry bellies we found that the hostel that we were staying in was another important node on the East coast Australia backpackers trail with lots of other travelers from around the world competing for that one decent saucepan in the kitchen. Although most of the guests were very young (think 18-24) this was no Goon palace as I'd feared, although there were some travelers who seemed never to go out and pretty much everyone drank in the basement car park at night, there was a large surfer contingent who I guess made the place alright. The toilets and communal areas was generally not filthy and covered in puke. However the hostel dog did have fun pooping everywhere the cleaners had just been on the morning we left!

Paolo made fast friends with another Italian from roughly his own area and within hours they had decided to make loads of delicious food together and sell portions on a cost-covering basis. While they were out shopping Wendy and I went for a walk to explore the bays, beaches and headlands of Yamba, until it rained anyway. It's good to take a walk in Australia, we spotted some pelicans!

Yamba sea views.

The only other picture I took in Yamba...

We headed generally north towards where Paolo wanted to sell his car in Brisbane via various stop offs and points of interest. As I had actually done no research on Australia at this point (and still haven't really) I decided to adopt the 'go along and see what happens' philosophy. And so I found myself going to Nimbin. The area has an interesting recent history as counter-cultural capital of Australia (well, maybe NSW) which remains largely unknown to me due to a fire that destroyed the towns cultural museum a little while ago. The town hosted a music festival in 1974, which in its high tide of peace, love and optimism, stranded quite a lot of debris and more than a few castaways. Some of the raggedy survivors settled down, opened a business and made a living for themselves in the town. Others still haunt the covered sidewalks, living the free life as they've always wanted to. Perhaps they are in fact the prisoners of the drugs they came here to take in order to free their minds. Many castaways sit all day outside the row of little shops, some seemingly still in the same tattered clothes they were washed up in, covered in ash and dirt, trying to hustle tourists into buying hash cookies from them at a 150% mark-up. 
Nimbin sure is an interesting place.

Nimbin Main street

A groovy park in Nimbin

A map, I love maps.

Covered sidewalks, crazy cats just about visible.

We stayed in a YHA hostel on the outskirts of Nimbin, the hostel fell in to the 'alternative' category with tipis, tents and yurts all being used as accommodation. Wendy and I stayed in the 'yurt' (more like a permanent tent, no yak hair being evident) and apart from the day we arrived being on the wet 'n' windy side making it bad for moving around to the toilet and suchlike in the dark along muddy paths, it looked like a good place to stay. 

I noticed an odd musty smell when we put our bags inside the yurt that afternoon (I'm learning to trust my nose more and more on this trip) that I later realised was rodent urine soaked into the untreated plywood floor. When we went to bed later that night there were rodent-sized (marsupial?)  droppings on the pillows but we cleaned them up and got ready to sleep. As soon as the lights went off the creatures of the night began to stir. 

Now I've had mice dance a little jig on my back whist I was trying to sleep on an Indian sleeper train and not minded too much, I've squatted over a hole-in-the-floor toilet with large cockroaches scuttling out from the septic tank and not particularly cared (well, perhaps a little), but here the activity was much too intense and frequent to let me sleep. Dim rat shaped shadows darted over the outside of the yurt's inner netting, tiny thuds of things bumping into the outer cover could be heard, strange scratching noises came from beneath the bed, occasionally loud thumps of something jumping around on the plywood floor caused me to spring up and turn the light on to see what was happening around us. Each time the noise fell away instantly. I could visualise dozens of rats or mice frozen in their stride as if playing the children's game 'statues'. Each time there was nothing to see, and to be honest I didn't want to look too hard.
Then after what could have been hours of this I heard the unmistakable sound of tearing fabric from the end of the bed.

The yurt from the outside, daytime.

I quickly sat up and in the thin light from the path light outside, saw something hanging on to the side of my backpack, in the dim light it looked like a long light-grey rat. 

It was gnawing.

I shouted "Oi!" at it, of all things (like discovering a kid spraying paint on your front door I guess) and the creature detached itself from the bag and vanished through the unsecured gap between the door flap and the floor. When we turned on the light I saw shredded pieces of plastic bag on the floor with more shredded bag poking through a rough hole in the top of my backpack. It turned out I had forgotten a half un-toasted bagel in the top compartment of my rucksack when I left the hostel in Auckland early one morning several days before and the frantic wildlife activity was inspired by the odour of delicious oily bread coming from inside the bag.

We got out of there pretty quickly and camped out on the TV area sofas while we finally got someone to fetch the hostel night manager out of bed to open up a dorm for us to sleep in. At first I was a little pissed off about my bag and the way that no-one at the hostel had warned us about the very active wildlife. The night manager who turned out to be the receptionist from earlier was also a little pissy about being dragged out of his camper van in the early hours of the morning. However by the next morning after a good nights rest in a bunk bed we were all seeing the funny side. To this day I still have no idea what chewed the hole in my bag. The animals running over the yurt's interior net were mice, but the thing I saw on the bag was rat sized. Later that night I saw a Potoroo hopping around outside, it could have been some of those instead of rats. I suppose I'll never know.

Jamming Paolo

After a pleasant morning playing pool and relaxing in the sunshine we got back into the trusty Corolla and headed out through the spectacular bush below Nimbin rocks and headed back towards the coast, on the way out we saw a little piece of rural interior Australia; it was all very charming and beautiful, of course I didn't take any photographs.

The beach at Byron Bay, nice waves!

Arriving in Byron Bay we drove around a while searching for a place to stay and almost inevitably we wound up all sharing a small four-bed dorm room at the YHA. It's not like we planned the trip that way, it's just when you're tired, hungry and looking for a place to rest a while, you tend to look around a few places and go for the comfiest one. 

Cape Byron is the most easterly point of Australia and a popular node on the backpacking/road-tripping trail as a result, additionally like Raglan in New Zealand it is a surfing Mecca. We only stayed a couple of nights before pushing on northwards so I didn't take advantage of the surf straight away, instead resolving to come back another time. In hindsight I wished I had rented a board for those few days as the conditions were perfect.

Cape Byron Lighthouse.

Every Monday afternoon the hostel put on a free walking tour. Notice I didn't write 'guided tour', one of the hostel employees walked and we followed, there was no guiding particularly other than 'this is the beach' and 'you can get free internet here'. You know, the important stuff. So we walked to the Cape Byron Lighthouse in a loose group followed up by the guide who seemed to be on some kind of schedule and didn't want us stopping anywhere for too long.
Along the way we passed through some woods and out onto the headland after a short climb. Wendy thought she saw a whale off in the distance, I couldn't see any, though the word was that the migration routes for several species of whale follow the coast and pass close the the cape.

Out to sea, spot the whale?

Don't get excited, this isn't 'round the twist.

Das icebucket challenge, Ja.

I hope I'm not sounding facetious when I write this, but the best part of the walk was the home stretch along the beach towards Byron Bay town. The sun was setting to the northwest and the guide had gone back to the hostel so we could amble along, relax and take in the sunset.

Regretfully we loaded up the car again and pootled north towards the border of Queensland along long, long highways hemmed in on both sides by now-familiar gum trees. At this point I still hadn't seen a Kangaroo, but lots of fences designed to keep them off the road.

The border between NSW and Queensland runs through a town called Coolangatta there was even a big marker where the two states had their demarcation line. Interestingly although Coolangatta was on the Queensland side of the border the river mouth, headlands and harbour that would have been the early town seaport were on the other side of the red line in New South Wales. Paolo had brought us here in the quest to sell his car to a friend, she seemed impressed by the tatty but reliable Toyota but didn't make an offer to buy it straight away. Instead we sat on her balcony and hung out for the evening. Coolangatta is a beautiful little corner of the world so we stayed the night there in a weird hostel in a former motel before moving on the next day.

The state border marker.

Although it was technically winter when I visited, the times I spent outdoors were very pleasant indeed. The afternoon we spent in Coolangatta would be described as a mild summer day in the UK for instance. Comfortable warm temperatures and bright blue skies surrounded us on the way to Queensland, heaven knows what it's like here in the summer, I dread to think.

Coolangatta skies.

Say no to pugs

The Gold Coast as seen from the beach at Coolangata.

On the way to Brisbane we stopped off for lunch and to meet up with a friend of Wendy and Paolo. The rendezvous was at the Gold Coast which is surprisingly a big skyscraper filled city and not the lazy, chilled out beach paradise that the name suggests. Most of the development is relatively recent and lo and behold there was a fine beach between the millionaire's row skyscrapers and ocean. The city is becoming famous for its eponymous 'Geordie Shore'-type programme, I saw some fancy cars driving around but nothing too ostentatious, maybe it wasn't the right time of the day for that kind of thing.

We had lunch in a shopping mall food court and took a short drive through the concrete and glass lined streets (all very fancy) to the beach for a little walk. I didn't take any photographs of The Gold Coast, nothing interested me enough to dig my camera out of the compacted luggage.

Wendy pulled off quite a coup in Brisbane; a stay in a hostel for a week in the CBD would have been very expensive and not at all relaxing (see goon palace), so she used her Chinese language skills to book a couple of rooms in a privately let house for ten days direct from the landlady. The catch was the landlady only let rooms to Asian people, usually students, considering this she took it quite well when two big hairy Europeans got out of the car when she went to meet her new tenants. We stayed in Brisbane while Paolo arranged to sell his car, and as soon as he lined up his buyer. A little over a week of downtime was good for the body and mind, we still had time to do loads of things around the city including a day of touristy activities in the city center. 

I like Brisbane, It's bright even when it is raining it's not too modern except it's pretty modern. The people are nice, not too much either way, it's baby bears porridge in city form. The arts quarter of the city -'South Brisbane' is unmissable, built on some land last used for industrial purposes since the 19th century and repurposed at roughly the same time as (most of) London's south bank using roughly the same architectural styles and materials. The big difference is the setting; the arts quarter is set in gardens and has been well maintained unlike the fits and spurts of care the London equivalent has received over the years. It was the site of the World Expo in 1988.

Inside the Queensland art gallery.

Crossing the bridge from the CBD to the South Bank

Brisbane.

No, actually this is the Brisbane I will remember.

During that week we unwound, cooked, drank a little bit, got to know our temporary housemates a little, did laundry and rested. Wendy and I prepared our stuff for more foot/bus/train travel after a long time moving about in cars, we were worried that it would be hard without the luxury of a lockable motorised box to throw our junk in. Wendy sent two big boxes to Singapore (edit: they took 4 months to arrive going everywhere else in the process) and slimmed down her kit to a couple of bags. I had acquired such luxuries as salt, spices and basic kitchen equipment that we got down to one box. 
Apart from the stress of wondering what to do with the 'stuff' we had a very relaxing week in the suburbs of Brisbane in our little student house. Annoyingly I seem to have taken no photographs of the place or the charming little suburb with the park that we played our instruments in one day as the sun set.

The city at night.

Paolo was due to fly back to Italy, his year visa in Australia expiring that week, I helped him empty his car of weeks of road trip stuff and investigate the electrical fault that appeared, according to Murphy's law a couple of days before he was due to fly out. We thought we had it fixed by moving some fuses around, but it turned out in the end to be that the gadget that makes the indicators flash had blown. He had it replaced the morning of his flight.

Paolo was also 'thinning down' his kit and was throwing/giving away most other things beside the car. It's a strange, melancholic feeling to wind up (perhaps it's wind down?) a period in your life that way. Some people never have to, their relatives sifting through their belongings after they kick the bucket. I've done it before, I wrote about it at the start of this blog. Bizarrely now I'm not so attached to things and possessions as I was when I first set off. I've lost things, ruined clothes, broken stuff, replaced some of it along the way and picked up other items that have in turn got lost or broken. I suppose traveling is, in its way life on fast forward; we go through possessions much faster than usual so that their transitory nature is much clearer. Similarly and sadly we meet and say goodbye to many wonderful human beings along the way too, and although their time as fellow travelers is limited, a part of them in the memory of the experiences we shared together remain with you much longer than a pair of Jandals.

With heavy hearts we said goodbye to Paolo at Brisbane airport and drove back to the house. He made it back to Italy in time for his father's birthday, surprising him in a furry kangaroo suit he bought in a mall on our day in the CBD. 

I think this makes a convenient point to divide my travels in Australia, part two will follow.

Sometime.