Time to catch up with the blog again. And so much to write… had a truly wonderful time in Australia. Absolutely amazing!!! Will post the “new” stories on or around their original dates, so please follow these links to read them:

- My first play [What can I say - 27-07-2006]
- A taste of Africa [Ethiopian food; one big pleasant surprise! - 26-07-2006]
- Tossing the coin [How we ended up in Mallacoota - 14-07-2006]
- Amazing bushwalking [Tidbinbilla and Orroral valley - 03-07-2006]
- Not a hole at all [Canberra, the bush capital - 30-06-2006]
- Keep left, keep left, keep left, keep left! [Cycling in Australia - 28-06-2006]
- Snorkelling with the turtles and fishies [So much fun!!! - 23-06-2006]
- Breath in, breath out… [Diving in the Great Barrier Reef - 21-06-2006]

Posted in Personal, Australia | 6 Comments »

The last weekend before going back to Holland Sally and I stayed in a hotel on Manly Beach in Sydney. A lovely location and with the ferry from Manly just a short and nice “ride” to the city centre, ending at Circular Quay, right between the Harbour Bridge and the Opera house. Easy as anything.

On Friday evening we ended up having dinner at a grill restaurant (can’t remember the name… “Something” Grill…) at the waterside with a view on the Harbour Bridge on the left and the Opera house on the right. Lovely spot for a nice dinner. And a nice dinner it was! I finally got to try some Kangaroo and Crocodile! After trying a barramundi in Port Douglas (really, really nice fish!!) those to were left on the list to try and didn’t think I would do so before leaving but when the opportunity came by at the grill restaurant I had to make a stand! Kangaroo and Crocodile it would be! :-)

And I did not get disappointed at all! They were both jammie. The Kangaroo very nice and tender, the croc … well… like a weird tasted chicken… :-) but nice as well! Still enjoying the moment a guy appeared on the terrace we were sitting, with a little flute and started playing a birthday song for the table next to us. We just smiled and thought the guy belonged to the restaurant and was just being funny on request… little did we know! Moments later he appeared at our table playing some annoying song! Leaving us feeling quite uncomfortable, but luckily after he played a bit a waiter came and asked the man to please leave the restaurant terrace…

And little we knew indeed! Because when the guy left and we saw that there were people with camera’s, Sal figured out the guy was from a ABC TV show called “The chaser’s war on everything“, and was just recording a little bit for next weeks show… And yes! We made the show! *LOL* well… made it… click here to see our 7 seconds of fame! (7.9 MB, © ABC TV). And you have to look carefully, because I am hard to spot, but Sal is quite obviously looking away in disgust! ;-)

[Ok, I will help a bit… it’s us between 0:57 and 1:04!]

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How to get to Mallacoota? Fairly easy, just toss a coin! :-) Well, that is what we did when we had a weekend to spare, wanted to get out of Canberra and didn’t know where to go. We would let the coin decide where to take us. So we looked on the map and decided to either go North or South and then toss the coin and every big split of the highway to determine our further course. Worse case we would toss ourselves in a circle and end up in Canberra again, but what were the odds of that happening?

First toss of the coin was at home in Canberra. Heads for North, tails for South. Toss. Tail. South it was. Next toss was a the first mayor split of the highway at Cooma. Here the road went West or East, and so our next toss was there! This way we tossed our way through Australia and finally ended up in the most South-Eastern corner of Australia, in Mallacoota.

The drive down there was a lot of fun because of the tossing and not knowing where we would end up, but also the endless quiet roads surrounded by the emptiness of the land, made it quite impressive. The last stretch of the trip turned out a bit stressful though. Because even though there is not many cars, there is a lot of kangaroo’s! Especially around dawn… And judging by the number of dead kangaroo’s we saw on our journey along the roads, that wasn’t something we would like to experience… But we nearly did…

To get to Mallacoota we had to turn off the Princess Highway and follow a smaller, quite bendy road for 25km to get to Mallacoota. The bush was quite close to the road and dawn was there so we had to be very sharp on possible kangaroo’s sitting on the side, or just right on the middle of the road. And so it happened. Little hill. Soft right turn. “KANGAROO!”. Breaking. Kangaroo hopping onto the road, probably scared by the sound or lights of the car. More breaking. Peeping tires and a sliding car. Relief. The car stopped about 5 cm in front of the kangaroo. I looked him straight in his scared eyes and off he went, hopping back very quickly into the bush! Pfffff… we got lucky! Thanks to some amazing breaking and car handling from Sal, we avoided impact and let the kangaroo, which after close eye contact turned out to actually be a wallaby, live to fight another day. Adrenaline was pumping and with our hearts in our throats we continued the last bit of the trip. Luckily we didn’t have any more of those close encounters…

The toss that let us to our accommodation in Mallacoota turned out to be a brilliant one! The toss brought us to the Karbeethong Lodge. A very cute little B&B in an old wooden house, with a great view on the bay and run by very friendly people. Breakfast included and with very reasonable rates. A clean and nice room, and a lovely big fireplace in the common area to drink wine and play Stratego at! :-) Definitely worth a visit!

Besides the weather, the weekend turned out to be great! Even the rainy days didn’t bother us so much. Went up the coast for a drive to Eden, a walk and a nice lunch. Furthermore we just relaxed and enjoyed our weekend. The drive back was long and it turned out nearly impossible to find a place for lunch, but we had fun as well. Although I do promise not to scare Sally anymore with my improvised car-haka when she starts overtaking! ;-)

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Oi, keeping update with the blog is very difficult when you are having a great time and not often near a computer… And even this post won’t be the novel I have in mind to tell you all about my experiences from Down Under. So a short summary will have to do for now.

First amazing thing for the journey was the jet-lag. Or actually lack off… Amazingly enough the jet-lag didn’t seem to bother me at all! Very strange… I remember last time I flew over here I was exhausted and felt tired for at least 2 to 3 days… but this time… nothing!

After I arrived Sally and I went up “north” to Cairns and Port Douglas. Amazing 2 weeks! First with snorkling at Green Island and seeing so many pretty fishies and other underwater life that when we arrived in Port Douglas we decided to do a dive course to see even more of the underwater world! After a very nervous second day in the pool (first day was just in the classroom) with panicing under water at a number of occasions and swallowing quite some pool water, day 3 out on the Great Barrier Reef proofed to be challeging, but after every dive (we did 6 in total) we got more and more confident. At the last 2 dives I was finally able to relex a bit more and really enjoy the underwater experience! So even with the stress of the first days, it was more then worth it!! And now I am a PADI open water diver! Already looking forward to my next dive! :-)

Right now I am enjoying life in Canberra where I fill my time with sightseeing, bit of cycling, bushwalking, great food and enjoying myself very much! Quite sure I will have a great time for the time that is left! :-)

Will try to catch up with the blog soon again! So much more to tell… Until then, take a look at some of the photos I took and posted on flickr, see the Australia set.

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Last time I was in Australia I did some little bushwalking, loved it a lot, but it was nothing like I did this time. Now I can say I truly enjoyed an Australian bushwalk! :-) Ok, wasn’t going far in the unknown outback, where no man has gone before, we just stayed in a Nature Reserve and National Park, but still, amazing bushwalking!

The bush is beautiful. Just gorgeous. Quiet as can be. So quiet it’s hard to imagine, coming from such a densely populated country as Holland, it can really be that quiet! Well, it can! It’s an amazing feeling. Just stop walking for a second, stand still and listen. Nothing. Maybe some birds, the wind through the trees… but besides that: nothing.

First real bushwalking we did was in Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. Home of Lucky the Koala, who was the only Koala to survive the devastation at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve during the 2003 bushfires. I guess that’s lucky… but when all your Koala relatives, Koala friends, Koala children (??) and Koala neighbours die, can you call that lucky? Either way, Lucky is famous, but we didn’t go see Lucky. She was on the initial plan, but first we went for a walk up to the Gibraltar rocks.

Gibraltar rocks is a large rock formation on the top of a hill with a great view on the surroundings. Turned out to be a great, but hard and steep, walk up and even harder (due to the steepness) walk down. Took us 2 and a half hours, but it was more then worth it! Lot’s of kangaroo’s, extraordinary vegetation, huge boulders and amazing views!

After the walk we decided to skip Lucky, we didn’t wanne push her luck! ;-), and go see the platypussy’s. Well, they are not on display, in the wild and unbelievable shy, so we didn’t see any… A bit disappointing, but the big black swans we came across and were followed by a couple of little ones made up for a lot!

Second big bushwalking adventure was done close to Canberra as well. In the Orroral valley in Namadgi National Park. Sally had a book full of bushwalking trails in that Park. The book was written by an old handicapped man with a great love for rocks, who drove the tracks in his early version Jeep Grand Cherokee, somewhere in the 1950ies. What I am trying to say, things had changed quite dramatically ever since he wrote the book. The first half of the trail we chose was on a dirt road with no view to the left, nor to the right. A lot of trees along the dirt road had been chopped down, there was a lot of young 2 or 3 meter high vegetation, probably all results from the bushfires in 2003, but it didn’t make the first half to the trial as enjoyable as promised in the book…

But! The second part lived up to all expectations!!! The way back was through the Orroral valley and was just an amazing walk! Hundreds and hundreds of kangaroo’s all over the place!! Great views on the endless grassland in the valley and hills surrounding them. We stopped many times on the walk back just to enjoy the view, kangaroo’s and the silence. Did lost the track a couple of times though… even had to struggle through a swamp and when we finally reached the other side of the swamp we had to smile when we saw we completely missed the boardwalk along the swamp! :-)

We couldn’t have been more happy when we finally reached the car after a good 4 and a half hours of walking… Tired, hungry, sore muscles and feet but all that with a big smile on our face! :-)

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For this story we have to go back to Barcelona. January 23rd, welcome dinner of the language course. By pure coincidence I am seated next to a girl from Australia. I started smiling as my thoughts took me back to the wonderful backpacking trip I did in Australia around the millennium. Visited great places along the east coast all the way down to Melbourne, and talking about it was making me very excited! She explained she was from Canberra.

Canberra. Even though I didn’t visit that place, my first thought and words about that place let no room for discussion: “Canberra? That’s a hole!”. Ok, have to explain something here, as even though I had not personally been there, I met many other people during my trip that explained Canberra was not the most fun place to be. So in the backpacker “scene” Canberra was in my opinion regarded to be a hole. Someplace you pass, or maybe have a small look, but leave quickly again onwards to better places. She clearly didn’t agree and wondered how I could judge the place without even having been there myself!

Well, I clearly was very wrong. After having stayed in Canberra for 5 weeks, I must admit it’s quite a nice place. The bush capital is very spacious, quiet (apart form some screaming cockatoos), great for biking, bush walking nearby and a number of lovely places to visit. For example the Australian War Memorial is very impressive. And very special for me to see was the “Allies in adversity“-exhibition there, focusing on the Dutch–Australian experience of the war in the Pacific, 1941–45.

Other nice things are going for a bike-ride along the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. It’s fun seeing the Old Parliament House and especially the National Portrait Gallery. Great views from Mount Ainslie (and great ride up on the bike). Brilliant bush walking close by at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and Namadgi National Park. And the wine-tasting we did on the edge of the city was great fun!

You will need a car though to get around easily, as public transportation ain’t superb (and full of freaks!) and won’t take you very far out of the city. And as it’s a very spacious city, distances between things can be big. Although the centre of town is still quite compact and most tourist attractions are in walk able distance (if you don’t mind a good walk that is). So in general it’s quite a nice place. Definitely not a hole. Sorry Sal! :-)

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After the amazing diving experience we thought we had enough. We could have added an extra day to the dive course to get our Advanced Open Water certificate, but choose not to do that and just relax the last day in Port Douglas before going home. Well… that was the plan… As the Australian football team was playing the Thursday evening, what made it our Friday early morning at 0500 and we got up to watch them qualify for the next round, we were wide awake at 0700 and wondered what to do with the day.

The Low Isles had been mentioned before, because one of Sally’s friends (I think it was Robyn, the girl wonder) had recommended that place to us. So after a very short debate and a concluding “yeah, why not!” we booked a spot on a catamaran at 10 to take us to the Low Isles! And even though it might not have been planned, it still turned out to be quite a relax day.

The boat ride to the Low Isles was just a short one (about 45 minutes or so?) and the Low Isles appeared to be 2 small islands. One with mainly mangrove and the other a cute little one with a little lighthouse. As proper tourist-cattle we followed the big herd to the island which looked a lot different when covered with people in full blue body suits (to protect them from the sun, coral and hungry fishies).

Low Isles smurf

We brought our snorkelling gear and were excited to give it a go, as we were told there should be a lot of sea turtles around the Low Isles! And the stories were right!! We had to swim quite a bit out from the shore, but all of a sudden Sally spotted something weird in the water! A closer look proved it to be what we were looking and hoping for! A big turtle!!! Truly amazing experience! Ok… we were not allowed to swim with the turtles, follow them or get close… but I had to do all those things to get the following (fuzzy) picture:

Beautiful turtle!

But one little bit scared turtle was worth it! :-) Especially I looked like a big fishy myself underwater with my big eyes which looked even bigger through the mask! After seeing 2 more turtles we were getting cold and made our way back to shore, relaxed a bit more in the sun and took the boat back to Port Douglas in the afternoon. Because of the crowded beach and water the snorkelling wasn’t the best (again fuzzy water like in the busy section on Green Island) but definitely worth the trip! :-)

Low Isles	Lighthouse	Lighthouse again	Gorgeous view

Posted in Diving, Australia | No Comments »