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...