Goodbye Sydney, Australia, Southern Hemisphere

Our last couple of weeks in Sydney were a festival of eating and drinking, eating and drinking, and then saying goodbye. Hayley and Meg, our hostesses in Auckland a year ago at the start of our trip, were out in Sydney for a week for Hayley's birthday, so that was even more excuse for eating and drinking. (Yes, we're both in need of some stomach bugs in Asia to get back down to fighting weight.)

Unable to move after eating the skin of five pigs at Pilu


Not a bad spot for a cocktail eh? Enjoying a free meal at Cafe Sydney courtesy of Faye's friends in the south. Thanks!

Our second visit to Hannibal's for Lebanese cuisine and a couple of hookahs to share

If you like meat, and you're in Australia, go to Hurricane's in Bondi.

And that's it for Australia! Cheerio. I haven't been totally won over by the place, as you might have gathered in this blog, but here are some of the highlights:

Kangaroos in the wild (especially when they hop across the highway in front of you)

Scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef

Surfing, when there's a blue moon and I get it right

Tinkerbell, the comfiest van in the West

Travelling in an elderly Japanese van convoy from Darwin down to Perth with Rich, Rach, Jon and Louise - together with the 1978 Nissan E20, known as Team Ernie

Broome, especially the outdoor cinema and the colour of the sea after weeks of red dust

The Ningaloo Reef on the West Coast - amazing snorkelling just yards from the beach

Eating out in Sydney [burp]

(And I have to mention it - winning the first match in the one-day final series of the cricket, on our last night in Australia! If only I'd had more time to enjoy it.)

So that's that for this blog. Head over to brockersinasia.blogspot.com for more...

The Return Of The Red Dust

And the flies, oh my god the flies...

As neither of us are sure we'll be coming down this way again, we thought we'd better see Ayers Rock before we left Australia. Back in September, we had toyed with the idea of driving up to the Red Centre in the van, from the Nullarbor highway between Perth and Adelaide. But at that time, having spent over two months covered in dust, the cities of the south east were far more appealing than yet more desert and deserted highways.

So an organised trip from Sydney it was to be, and we'd had one particular tour (Wayoutback, in case you're going) recommended to us by several very reliable sources. This one involves three days exploring Ayers Rock (or should I say Uluru, to be politically correct), the Olgas (Kata Tjuta) and Kings Canyon (erm, Watarrka or something), and what makes this tour different, sleeping under the stars in swag bags having eaten around a camp fire. We knew from experience of outback Australia that even if, like me, you're not that interested in the constellations, the sheer number of stars in the night sky can't help but leave an impression.

Unfortunately, stupidly you might say, I sprained my ankle three days before going on the trip. I was starting to think that wave sports (surfing, bodyboarding) were not for me anyway. So I thought I'd try skimming, which you see lots of kids in Australia doing. It involves running along in the millimetre or so of water left when a wave pulls back from the beach, throwing down a thin wooden board, and jumping on it, sliding impressively far in a surfing stance. However I tried this with my 30-year-old, currently very well-fed frame and a thick foam bodyboard. It didn't work; my foot got stuck in the sand, and I went over on my ankle. Good thing it was in millimetre-deep water.

Still, it wasn't too bad - with some decent strapping and my hiking boots I was confident I could get round short walks. Luckily on the first day, around Uluru, there was the choice of a 4km and an 8km walk. And by the end of the third day it was pretty sore but I hadn't made it any worse, so I guess I was lucky.

Obligatory shot of Uluru. It definitely looks better from a bit of a distance, and with the sun on it. It was a bit cloudy at sunset so we didn't see it go bright red. Ah well.

As always Faye was impeccably prepared. The fly nets may have looked stupid but these flies are evil. They target every crevice on your face in crack teams of three or four at a time. Those after me had to settle for the sweat on my back. Mwa ha ha ha...

The camps were probably the best thing about the trip. This is the first chilled beer on the second night, and everyone knows how good a cold beer tastes after a day of walking in the sun.

Our guide was a pretty knowledgeable outback survival type, and he managed to find us this delicious witchetty grub in the roots of a (witchetty) tree. We weren't hardcore enough to try it raw...

But even so, four of us trusted the guide's claim that barbecued, they taste like nutty scrambled eggs. And boringly, he was right. It really wasn't that bad - although we each only had a pea-sized chunk.

Kings Canyon was possibly the most beautiful of the three areas we saw. Here's Faye alone in a waterhole, before loads of wrinkly Americans joined her.

The aforementioned canyon.

I'd definitely recommend Wayoutback myself - it was well-paced, the group was nicely varied (not just crusties or pisshead teenage backpackers), the guide was knowledgeable and friendly, and best of all, sleeping under the outback sky at night in just a glorified sleeping bag is superb. Ta for the tip Mum and Liz!

92 Flinders Street: front door key, wardrobe, private bathroom

After five months in a van, and eight months living out of a backpack, those three everyday things represented five-star luxury for us. Even getting up for work didn't seem too much of a chore. Yes, I did finally find employment, though in neither the IT nor the gay entertainment industry. In the end I decided to re-write my CV to emphasise the bar and restaurant jobs I had in France and Germany, and drop it into all the bars and restaurants along Crown Street. Crown Street is the hub of swanky inner suburb Surry Hills, was just round the corner from our house, and is rather less "eclectic" than Oxford Street.

All but one place said no, but luckily that one place was a posh brunch restaurant owned by apparently famous TV chef Bill Granger that specialised in scrambled eggs. I waited tables for breakfast and lunch, about four days a week. You can see it here, via the sorcery of the internet: http://www.bills.com.au/restaurants/surry.htm.
Assorted celebrities? Not an assortment, but I did serve Stan Collymore a Coke. Lucky for him I'm a Forest fan (YOU TREES!) and was never that keen on Gladiators. Friendly service? Of course, although through ever more gritted teeth as the summer of "cricket" progressed.
(NB - the irony of a super-pedant working for a place whose 5-letter name is lacking an apostrophe was not lost on me. But the eggs, but the eggs...)

Sadly, watching the ritual slaughter of English batsmen on TV took up quite a lot of my summertime in Sydney. I must be an optimist - I kept watching session after humiliating session, convinced that England would turn the corner. (Of course they did, only they waited until the Ashes were long gone and I'd left my job - what use is that?)

Mum and Stewart came out to Melbourne for Christmas and as we'd left booking flights too late, we decided to get back behind the wheel and drive the 900km down to Melbourne. We were confident that a speedy modern car could do the journey in half the time we'd taken in the van, i.e. one day not two, and we were just about right. And so far the rental company hasn't taken any money off our credit card for speeding fines, so it's all good.
Melbourne did its best to reinforce my general disappointment in Australia's weather (see below) - it hailed on Christmas Day. So I can't really say what it's like to spend Christmas in summertime. Ah well - I can still tell you that eating out all through Christmas is a good thing.

Most of the rest of the summer was taken up with more eating and drinking. Having voted for Sydney over Melbourne because of the beaches, I must have gone in the sea about three times over the whole summer. Most of that was because of the weather though, to be fair. Until mid-January the weather was barely better than an English summer, and without the two-week heatwave we always get back home. Seriously. As far as I can judge after 9 months, Australia's weather is hugely overrated, especially on the east coast.

No matter - with reliable backup from our housemates Matt and Elena, Faye and I managed to cover an incredible percentage of Sydney's restaurants, and the place doesn't lack for them. There are more details on Faye's blog of course, but the highlights were, in no particular order:
- Huge racks of ribs at Hurricane's in Bondi
- Lebanese food and apple tobacco from hookah pipes at Hannibal's
- Posh Chinese at Billy Kwong (owned by another apparently famous TV chef, Kylie Kwong)
- Cheap-as-chips-but-healthier curries at Home Indian Diner and North Indian Cuisine. Mm, beef vindaloo. Australia does a mint vindaloo. Not literally.
- Roast suckling pig with about a kilo of crackling at Pilu, a swanky place on Freshwater Beach, north of Manly.
- Scrambled eggs at bills, of course. For every five hours I worked I got a free meal, and more often than not that meant the scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. Oh yeaahh... Sounds ordinary but the eggs are made with loads of cream and the toast is about an inch and a half thick. And there's bacon.

Our bedroom


Our balcony


El and the view from her and Matt's room (above our balcony)


That's not even half a rack of ribs at Hurricane's. And that's a steak on my plate. Oh yes.


Dinner and fizzy wine with Mum and Stewart on the beach in St Kilda, Melbourne, on Christmas Eve.


The Boxing Day Test, Melbourne Cricket Ground, Boxing Day. Not all it's cracked up to be folks, when England are scoring at around two runs an over. We did see the fat one's 700th wicket though.


Reflecting on New Year's Eve at Circular Quay. D'oh


Midnight!


On the Manly ferry


Relaxing with a hookah


The piece in my hand is approximately 0.37% of the crackling I ate at Pilu.


One more Aussie blog entry to come, all about our fun- and fly-packed trip to the Red Centre. Then it's over to brockersinasia.blogspot.com for good.

I'm still here!

One or two people have questioned the lack of blog action since, well, a long time ago. I see that as a positive - at least there are people reading it (or trying to).

I'm building up to a big "farewell Australia" entry I swear, but in the meantime I've made a new blog. This one is for 2006 and for Down Under, so is no longer appropriate. So I give you... Disoriented in the Orient. With a little map showing where we think we're going in Asia.

Come on Sydney, I was rooting for you

Hello again. Yes, it's been a while since my last entry. Been trying to sort my life out you see - with varying success.

After leaving Adelaide, we had a few more nights of travellerhood then it was down to the nitty-gritty of (a) deciding where to resume normal life and (b) resuming normal life. (I promise to add another entry later with some pictures from the pretty but very touristy Great Ocean Road between Adelaide and Melbourne.)

So, Melbourne. If you recall, our prejudices were pointing us to different outcomes: Faye was dreaming of Melbourne's gastronomical delights, but I was more keen on Sydney's weather and beaches. I always felt that Sydney was the obvious place to settle down for a while, and that unless Melbourne really charmed the socks off us we'd be daft to live there ahead of shiny Sydney. It got quite close I reckon - the view along the Yarra river on a sunny day gave the lie to my idea that Melbourne wasn't a looker - but there just wasn't enough of a spark for me. The beach suburb of St Kilda, where we stayed for just over a week, reminded us a lot of Brighton, and if it were a bit closer to the action in the centre of the city that might have swung it.

But as it was, after a few days we both came to the same conclusion: Melbourne was pleasant, could be a good place to live, but didn't seem worth missing out on summer in Sydney. So Sydney it was, and here we are...

We've been here about a month now, and of the four things we had to get sorted three are done and dusted, but one glaring task remains. After a few false dawns, including one visit to a local police station to hear a copper tell us in no uncertain terms "DON'T live round here", we found a superb place to live. Continuing the slightly camp theme to our time in Australia - we stayed in the Pink House when we first got here, our van had a fairy name, my surfboard is covered in flowers - our house is just round the corner from the biggest concentration of gay bars in Australia and quite probably the southern hemisphere. Yep, here you go to Oxford Street not to shop but to listen to trannie cabaret singers. Ah well. As is often the case with such places (Brighton back home for one) it's pretty lively and has some really good restaurants and pubs (yes, mixed pubs..). And it's on the bus route to Bondi beach, and you can walk into town, and our room has a balcony and an en-suite. Result. One out of four.

Then it was time to part company with faithful old Tinkerbell. To cut a long story short, we bought the van when it was a buyer's market, and sold it at the start of the summer, so we managed to get back exactly what we paid for it. Another result, especially as there was some work needed on the old dear. Still, it was sad to see her go, she'd served us so well and brought us so far. And I still think that's the most comfortable bed in Australia.


So, on to tasks three and four: jobs for the two of us. Well I suppose it was inevitable for Faye - she's never been employed as an adult by any company other than Kimberly-Clark, so why change the habit of a lifetime? Especially when they're based just the other side of the harbour, and Faye's got an ex-pat mate on the inside. So with immaculate timing, Faye was offered a job a few Fridays ago, went back to England for 2 weeks the next day, got back on Saturday just gone, and started work on Monday. Jetlag and all. What an example.

What a shame I'm finding it so hard to follow it then. I've been looking for about a month now - guess it's time to accept that even looking to return to my Helpdesk days is too ambitious and that maybe there's a decent dollar to be earned by dressing in a ballgown and singing It's Raining Men.

Only joking Mum.

Adelaide departure

Come on, the painful puns have been few and far between...

Tinkerbell, that redoubtable old chariot, is in need of some repair work, and Mr Ultratune can't fit us in until Thursday. So rather than the two or three days planned, we'll be staying in Adelaide for a week and a half. Not that we've seen a week's worth of the city. Our caravan park is more central than most we've stayed in, but it's still a half-hour walk into town, and frankly, we've had a busy few weeks and we've got a hired telly in the van. So it's been a lazy few days, punctuated by the occasional very pleasant meander along the Torrens river into the city. Australian TV is pretty dire - most evenings' highlights are one of the several million US detective shows, most with tough-sounding initials like CSI or NCIS or, erm, Law and Order. But for the first few days at least, it felt great to slob about watching the box and eating dinner in bed. Now it's starting to drag a bit. Just like Perth really - we loved the creature comforts of that apartment for a few days then the old guilty feelings started to emerge, like shouldn't we be doing better stuff with this time away from home than working out if it was the identical twin who did it.

And so yesterday the news that we'd be here for another three nights was not what we'd hoped for; I was thinking that we'd be in Melbourne by the weekend, and by the following weekend would know where we're going to be living. That decision can't come soon enough, as we're starting to plan stuff for the next few months, yet we can't very well make it without having seen Melbourne.

But what of Adelaide? Well firstly, I wish it would make up its bleeding mind what season it is. It was mid-twenties when we arrived on Tuesday, peaked at 37.9 degrees a couple of days later, then by Sunday evening we were watching The Bourne Identity from under the duvet, wearing fleeces and woolly socks. And today (Tuesday) it's hot again. 37.9 degrees! In mid-spring!
It's a pretty place, with loads of parkland and the aforementioned river surrounding the few blocks in the centre. It's got a big university, some good bars and restaurants. Again, like Perth - it's nice, but it doesn't have that buzz you get walking the streets of proper big cities. If Melbourne doesn't have it either, my vote will be for Sydney, for sure.

Nullarbor: The home straight

I'm using a little artistic licence here - in reality we've got a few crowded chicanes around Melbourne and Sydney to negotiate before our lap of Australia is really done. But the Nullarbor stretch is the final long haul, and it also features the longest section of straight road in Australia - 90-odd miles - which must rank pretty high in the world considering the size of this country. So home straight it is.

I was going to call this entry "Disappointingly Interesting". We'd been led to believe that the road that connects the pocket of civilisation around Perth with the majority of Australia's population in its southeast corner would be the pinnacle of Aussie boredom driving - days of flat, featureless plains, deserted apart from the odd roadhouse here and there. Nullarbor is bad Latin for "no trees", you see. And if you've been paying attention, you'll know that we've already covered several stretches like that. So in a spirit of masochistic challenge-seeking, I was looking forward to our last epic dusty journey being the worst, and therefore in a way the most satisfying, of the lot.


We never saw camels, sadly

But as it turns out, the drive was neither arduously long nor particularly flat or dull. How disappointing! The first day's scenery was mostly pretty featureless, but certainly not treeless. And for the last couple of hours of the day we were driving alongside a distinctly featuresome ridge. Our overnight stop in the middle of the Nullarbor was at Eucla, just short of the border with South Australia. Eucla sits on top of the small ridge we'd been driving alongside, and from the caravan park we could see for miles back along the highway we'd just travelled, and to the left, cliffs and the Great Australian Bight in the distance. The picture at the top is the view back along the highway.

As for the following day, well... I wasn't expecting such excitement. The first thrill was crossing into South Australia, our fifth state in a series of eight. We'd spent exactly two months in Western Australia, so although it is definitely our favourite so far, it was time to move on. And South Australia seemed like an appropriate choice.



Once in South Australia, the highway hugs the coast of the Bight for perhaps 100km. We stopped and walked to the edge of the cliffs for a quick look, and it really felt like you were standing on the edge of the world. And in a sense you are, as looking out to sea, there's nothing but Antarctica ahead of you.



And that was just about that. We arrived at Ceduna, the first town on the eastern side of the Nullarbor, with a couple of hours of daylight to spare. So the infamous Nullarbor odyssey was over in less than two days. We've definitely done hotter, dustier, flatter, more monotonous sections of road in the north of the country. Ah well. It was definitely good news for the van, which has carried us from Broome in the northwest down to Adelaide in the southeast in just 14 days, and is in need of some therapy.

Two days in southwestern Australia

Told you it would be a brief dalliance. We basically spent one day in the wine-producing and generally gastronomically-pleasing Margaret River region, then one day in Tall Timber Country, whose name says it all.

Here's Faye quaffing a 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon at a posh restaurant. The meal was paid for by Faye's 'Boro friends for her 30th. Cheers lasses! Look at that steak...


(See foodie Faye's blog for more of Margaret River)

Lighthouse at Cape Leeuwin, Australia's most southwesterly point.


It's where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. We're heading for the Southern Ocean, but I can't help thinking back to the good times on the Indian Ocean. Hence my stance.


My shadow, on a tree next to the 40m-high platform I'm standing on. This is Tall Timber Country, evidently.


This is one of the many beautiful beaches on the Southern Ocean. Bit too cold for a swim mind.

Australia - the verdict so far

Assuming we'll be here until early next year, we're now roughly halfway through our time in Australia, and we've certainly covered at least half of the distance we intend to. To come, just a brief dalliance with the South West, then it's eastwards across the deadly (or deadly boring) Nullarbor Plain, to Adelaide, then Melbourne, Sydney and hopefully some sort of employment in one of those last two cities. And then Asia...

So I thought now would be a good time to say what I think of the country so far, in case anyone's interested... (I've had more than enough thinking time, driving across endless unchanging dusty plains, with Faye often reading in the back of the van.)

I suppose the first thing to say is that Australia was always going to struggle to live up to its billing, just because I've never known someone come here and not come back raving about the place. And I think that if I'd come over for a few weeks, I'd have been the same. But having been in the country five months now, it's all getting a bit repetitive. I've loved several parts, the West Coast in particular, but now we've done that proper justice with our dash back up to Broome and back, I'm ready to retire (well, sell) the campervan and do some city living and money earning down in the South East. My enthusiasm for visiting more Australian towns (and seeing any more red dust) is seriously on the wane. We're now in Fremantle, and we've got Adelaide and some country towns yet to see before we start looking for jobs, but I can't help feeling I already know pretty much what those places will be like.

I think that's the main problem with spending so long here - there isn't enough variety, especially in the towns, to sustain interest. If you were to spend five months touring Spain, France or Italy for example, I'm pretty sure you'd come across much more in the way of regional variation to keep you keen, despite the smaller area you'd cover. Of course Australia has a much smaller population than those places, so perhaps that's not a fair comparison.

The country is so empty it beggars belief. If you've read Bill Bryson's book about Australia you'll have gathered that fact, but here's a thought he didn't come up with. Via the power of the internet, I've worked out that if Australia had the same population density as England, its population would be almost 3 billion (2,964,887,260 according to my wikipedia-enabled calculations). THREE BILLION AUSSIES!!! Just imagine. The rest of the world would just have to compete in B-leagues in cricket, rugby union, rugby league, swimming and probably even football (the Aussies are adamant they were cheated out of a semi-final berth in the World Cup by the eventual winners, and I'm inclined to agree), while the Aussies played off against each other. And soon proper beer would become a thing of the past (more of that later).

Especially in the North and the West, you drive through dozens of small towns stranded in the middle of nowhere. They all look almost exactly the same - one road, almost as wide as a football pitch, and plenty of dust - and they all beg the same question: why on earth would anyone choose to live here? Many of the locals probably don't have the means to leave, sadly, but there must be some who are happy to call these places home. And yet in most cases it's at least a day's drive even to get to a decent supermarket, let alone anything resembling civilisation.

You also can't help feeling that culture is a bit thin on the ground here. As far as I can tell, most Aussie blokes like fishing, drinking beer and playing with oval balls. I'm not sure there's that much more to find if you scrape the surface - I don't think five months here have given me any deeper insight into the Aussie mentality than I had after a couple of weeks, or possibly even before I came. I'm hoping that spending time in Asian countries will provide more of a feeling of getting to know a place slowly.

Saying all that though, there have been plenty of good points. Almost all Australians we've come across have been extremely friendly and helpful. And the food here is almost always good, even in poky little places where you've no right to expect anything decent. What must Aussies think of Little Chef I wonder... (Although I'm sure Little Chef was haute cuisine when I was younger - whatever happened?)

What the hell is going on with Australian beer though?! Surely in a country where the tinny is god, it shouldn't taste like watery, flat, slightly metallic piss? And the thing is I'm no connoisseur - most lagers you get in English pubs taste pretty much the same to me. But VB, Tooheys, XXXX - strewth mate. There are some beers that actually taste of beer here, but they're usually nearly twice the price of the big-name brands. Strange. (Interestingly, I found New Zealand to be the other way round: loads of tasty beers readily available, but the food was pretty ordinary on the whole. Their national dish, fish and chips (sound familiar?), usually tasted as if it was straight from the local Iceland rather than the Pacific.)

I've made quite an effort with what culture there is. As I said, Aussies love their sport - mostly rugby league (in New South Wales and Queensland) and Aussie Rules or AFL (the rest of the country) - and I've got into both much more than I expected. I watched the three-game State Of Origin rugby league series, where NSW's best players play against Queensland's best, and would have been outraged by some dodgy refereeing decisions if Queensland hadn't come from behind to win the decider. And just this weekend the West Coast Eagles won the AFL Grand Final by 85-84 against the Sydney Swans. As you can imagine, a one-point margin in a game of 160-odd points is a pretty close-run thing, and as the Eagles are based in Perth, the atmosphere in the Fremantle pub we were in was fantastic.

One thing that we've loved about Australia is the wildlife, and here's where it has been an advantage to have spent so much time away from the cities. Seeing genuinely wild kangaroos, for example, is not a particularly common experience - but that makes you feel even more privileged when one boings (because that's what they do) across the highway in front of you, and then disappears off into the bush. Of course that's an experience unique to Australia, and it's definitely something we'll miss. We might not miss seeing countless mutilated, bloated kangaroos lying on or beside the highway though. The poor things have obviously got no road sense. Fortunately (touch wood) we haven't hit any yet. Saying that, there is even an upside to the roadkill, because we wouldn't have seen so many large birds of prey were it not for the abundant drive-thru dining on offer for them. The wedge-tailed eagles, with legs as thick as your forearm, are the best - unless their dinner is directly in your path, they just stand and glare at you as you race past. Must have the camera ready next time...

I also think that if we'd had anything like decent weather in Queensland (no, I didn't know Australia did bad weather either), I'd be singing a different tune about the East Coast. Fraser Island, the Whitsunday Islands, and Cape Tribulation in particular (pictures further down the blog!) I think would have been great in "normal" Australian weather, but we had constant downpours and mad seas to contend with.

Ah diddums, I hear you say, and rightly so. I can't complain. In particular, learning to surf (sort of), scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, travelling across the hot dusty north in a mini-convoy, and snorkelling at Ningaloo were all fantastic experiences, and the East Coast was definitely fun in places. (There's no doubt that the East Coast backpacker trail would be tremendous if you were single and in a gang of lads, but then so would many places that are full of gangs of single ladies.)

Now I'm looking forward to getting settled in either Sydney or Melbourne, and having things like a wardrobe, a bath, a front door key, and yes, even a job. We haven't decided yet which city to live in (what a luxury eh) - it depends on what we think of Melbourne. I'm slightly favouring Sydney at the moment (closer to beaches with surf) but Faye's in Melbourne's corner, mostly because of its gastronomic reputation but also because she says she didn't click with Sydney that much. Only time, and this blog, will tell...