Last report, we'd spent 3 weeks in Western Australia and by now we were starting to form some opinions about the place, as you might expect if you've read any of the preceding reports. We were also meeting people coming the other way around Australia who confirmed our view that there's a few small places of interest with huge areas of identical, boring stuff in between. As such, this part of the report will be rather concise - not because we're bored of writing but because there's nothing really here! If you're only interested in reading about the diving on this leg of the trip, you can go straight to it.
The flight from Perth to Darwin takes 3.5 hours. For the entirety of that flight, there is nothing to see but sand. This is unsurprising, as we were crossing the "Great Sandy Desert", but it's still rather dull. That makes approx... 2500 miles of sand. OK for a beach, but not much in the scenery stakes really.
Darwin comes as quite a relief - mind you, after all that sand, so would most places. It sits on a rather nice bay and is pleasingly small. It is, however, overrun by drunken lads from Yorkshire (present company excluded, of course). It seems that every student on his/her gap year spends a little time getting drunk in Darwin. Partly it seems that, after 3 days in a truck coming up from Alice Springs, they feel they've earned the right to party; but mainly it seems it's part of the "going native" thing. The locals seem to be permanently slaughtered, so why shouldn't the tourists do the same? It's not as though there's any particularly good bars to go in, or beaches to sit on, or even beer to drink - it's just the done thing.
We stayed in the YHA in Darwin, which seems to have about 6000 beds (all of them occupied). It also has a pleasant rooftop veranda overlooking the pool. That's right, it has a swimming pool, and popular it is too. It's somewhere to drink all that beer after all. How many YHAs in the UK can boast a pool or roof top veranda?
Not being into the "sink a load of tinnies" mentality [honest], we were quite keen to get out of town so, after hastily booking a day's diving for when we got back, we hired yet another car and headed for Kakadu National Park. Megan initially refused to drive this car as it was an automatic and they're only for lazy Americans [apparently].
Kakadu is Aboriginal land, which is "leased" by the government. We're not even going to comment on what this implies for the indigenous population. What it implies for us tourists is that we have to pay A$16.25 to get in!! The park has some unique and very beautiful wetland areas; though if you come here in the dry season as we did, they're more like "dampland" areas. We tried hard to visualise the whole landscape submerged, as it would be in The Wet. Quite difficult.
What you do get for your A$16 is some very informative talks by the ranger staff, who seem to be everywhere. They'll tell you about the cave paintings, the termites and whether it's safe to swim in the water holes [it's not!]. And when your campsite fills with smoke of an evening, they reassure you that it's only half of Arnhem Land that's on fire and that you'll be safe until morning. Great!
There's a whole bunch of animals living in Kakadu. The only one people really want to see, however, is the saltwater crocodile. The rangers will tell you all about these creatures - partly as an education to save lives, tourists not crocs! Apparently the way to beat a croc is to sit on its back and jam your thumbs in its eyes. After you've learned all about them, it's recommended that you go see some by taking a boat trip down errr... Alligator River. It's called that coz the first explorers here got to name the place and they couldn't tell their crocs from their 'gators.
Anyway, we took the boat trip and we saw the crocs - lots of them. Because it's "The Dry" right now and there's not much water around, they congregate in the rivers, which is good for croc watching but not so good for swimming. Unfortunately, these dudes don't actually do anything. They just lie in the mud and imitate logs.
We also saw a bunch of birds and some fish.
Nothing very newsworthy seems to happen here in Aus, but you may just have heard that some crazy local was running round Litchfield National Park shooting at German tourists. Well, we were there, but we didn't manage to see that particular variety of wildlife and we're not German anyway!
A diving friend of ours had been planning to visit Aus to do some diving and it just happened that he arrived in Darwin (fresh of the red-eye from London) whilst we were there. It was strange to meet up with Jason having spent so long not seeing anyone we knew. It was good to catch up with what we'd been missing in the UK - from a diving perspective anyway. We sank a few cold ones together then Jason was off to Alice and we were heading for Cairns.
After Darwin, Cairns was a positive metropolis, it had shops and everything! We only spent a couple of days there doing things you couldn't do in Darwin; such as buying soap and drinking something other than beer. After that we went out diving the Great Barrier Reef.
Post diving, we met up with Jason again. He'd been out to Ayers Rock with a bunch of 18 year old German backpackers whilst we'd been basking in the Coral sea. Of course we gloated! The Coral Sea was like the proverbial fridge door when we were out, but wind and rain arrived as Jason's trip approached. We later heard his trip was curtailed so we had been very lucky. We now had a spanking new hire car and raced around the Atherton Tablelands looking at cows and waterfalls. The Tablelands is an upland area, West of Cairns, which is described as similar to the English West Country. The landscape is actually very reminiscent of England - green rolling hills, rivers, rain, cows, rain, waterfalls, rain. Actually, they get 4m of rain per year around here, which makes the West Country seem like the Gobi! Still, it's a beautiful bit of countryside and not a bit like the rest of Aus we'd seen. Almost somewhere you could live.
The Johnson River Crocodile Farm provided an amusing alternative to waterfalls and cows. Here, the owner shows off some 1500 crocs, which are bred, in the main, for their meat and skins. Apparently, crocs are on the increase these days (18000 are born each year in the Northern Territories) and they are no longer protected, so it's possible to rear them for commercial purposes. They still kill people too, which adds to the frisson of poking your fingers through the fence, but also means the croc farm people get called in as trapping experts when one takes up residence in the town pond. We got to taste croc meat and they didn't get to taste us, despite Megan's stroking them through the fence with abandon. No, croc doesn't taste like chicken - more like swordfish. We also got to "cuddle" a baby croc - hmmm, a live handbag! We sat and chatted with the owner for a while. He had some interesting holes in his body where his passion for crocs had got the better of him, but his favourite tale was about the "adopt a kangaroo" scheme whereby American tourists would pay him to save a kangaroo. He would claim that they were fed to the crocs and that only US dollars could save them from this fate. Apparently any tourist would do although Americans were the easiest to con and Scottish were the hardest.
As if all those animal antics were not enough, upon arriving in Townsville (good name eh?), we headed off to the Billabong Sanctuary where Megan was able to fulfil a [newly discovered] lifelong ambition to cuddle koalas and do something beginning with 'w' to wombats. Verdict? Koalas smell, wombats don't. Mind you, wombat skins used to be used as door mats - wombat, door mat - almost sounds like they were made for the job!
Wombats not withstanding, the real reason for coming to Townsville was, you guessed it, to dive. We had heard that the wreck of the Yongala was the best wreck dive in Australia, so thought we'd give it a look. You can read about the diving if you wish. We'd also heard that the backpacker circuit involves trekking up the coast from Sydney to Cairns via Brisbane and all beaches in between and we didn't want to do this. We'd had a quick look at Mission Beach, which is supposed to be backpacker paradise but actually turns out to be junk. We think we must have spoiled ourselves for beaches already so, having done the diving, we skipped the whole shebang and took a Virgin flight to Sydney.
Even the taxi driver who took us into town from Sydney airport commented that it must have been an "interesting" landing due to the gale-force winds - it was!
It's just about Spring here in Sydney which is weird for us as it's been sunny now since we went to Tibet at the end of May - that's about 4 months' relentless sunshine. For the Sydneysiders, it's just getting nice now. Clear blue skies and mid 20s, so very pleasant. It was a rather awesome experience seeing the Sydney harbour for the first time although Megan thought the Opera House "rather silly". Not really much to report here. We managed to negotiate some reasonable accommodation in the Kings Cross area (which is not dissimilar from it's London namesake unfortunately, i.e. grotty). The only downside is that they emptied the bins outside our room twice a day - 8am and 10pm! We spent an enjoyable week or so "doing the sights". Like visiting the Paddington area, strolling down Liverpool St to Hyde Park, taking the bus to Oxford St. You know, stuff you have to come half way around the World to do! We didn't do the famous harbour bridge climb. It's A$140 and you can't even take a camera, nor can you see the bridge from there! We've said we'll not let cost stop us doing what we want but that's just a rip-off!
Having done Sydney to death and, with a week left before our flight, we hired yet another car and zipped off to the Blue Mountains. Actually, they're not really mountains, they're canyons but they do look blue so that's OK. The colour is due to evaporating eucalyptus oil. The YHA here in Katoomba is a restored, art deco cabaret club. It has 200 beds and a ballroom. It seems to have 200 occupants too as it's school holidays now.
Unlike the rest of Aus (see below), there's a huge amount of top quality walking to be done here. We walked for 5 days and saw a good part of what's on offer. As it's gorge country, most walks start with a steep descent (often steps) through fern lined gullies and past waterfalls down into the forest in the bottom where you walk beside rivers and clamber through smaller gorges before exiting the canyon up similarly steep steps. So, you get a long walk with the "up bit" at the end, which can be tough! The maps of this area are rubbish - misleading and inaccurate, but we think the canyons are about 800m deep. The tracks running along the canyon rims provide some spectacular views over the blue haze of the forest to the opposing sheer sandstone cliffs.
We left the Blue Mountains with sore legs, but had done some excellent walking - the best on the whole trip to date. We'd also celebrated being away for 6 months now so we're half way through the trip. You can read our thoughts on this.
Well, that's Australia done. We saw what we wanted and, with the possible exception of Melbourne and Adelaide (too cold), most of what there is to see. There's surprisingly little here for a country of this size. We sort of knew this but Steve had still wanted to come and see the vastness. It's very like North America but with the religious zeal replaced by beer. Plus, we made sure we did most of the diving you're supposed to do so there's no real reason to come back.
Now we're off to New Zealand where we should be able to get in some proper walking and make use of all that Goretex we've been carrying since we left England so long ago.
There's something strange occurring on the walking front down under. Most people know that Australia is a large country and quite a few know that it's actually a massive country. We've been doing a bit of hiking around the place and have found that it's quite difficult to find anywhere to do a decent walk. Most places that we've been to (including many of the national parks) boast of their hiking potential, but usually when you arrive there's a couple of dusty tracks leading to a cliff-edge look out right next to the car park. The parks agencies lovingly craft their signeage in green and yellow indicating walks, distances and times. Trouble is, you'll see something like this: "Woollooggoonnoo Lookout, 0.5km, 45 min return". So, you get something 500m away and they claim it'll take 45 min!!! This is common all over Australia. Why, in a country this large, do they need to try and mislead us as to how far away places are? The distances are always correct, it's the times which are woefully inaccurate. Perhaps, if you were 120 years old with just one leg and completely blind it might take 45 min! Why can't they just say that the only walk on offer takes about 5 min and then you can go home? Perhaps it's because you've just driven 50 squillion km to get there on the strength of the national parks brochure. Now, don't misunderstand us. The parks are awesome, and there's loads of these mini-hikes to do and you do get to see loads of good stuff but it's a shame the longer walks are so few and far between. Also, the nature of the outback is such that you can't just march off on your own - it's impenetrable wilderness and you pretty soon get stuck - we tried! With masses of prickly stuff and relentless desert sun, it's hard going. Plus, miles and miles of it is absolutely identical so perhaps the park rangers are just saving us from a relentless trudge through repetitive outback scrub.
Australians can't spell! The grocer's apostrophe appears whenever there's a plural to be found, e.g. Caution, kangaroo's crossing, or House's for sale, or Free pizza topping's, or Cheap Banana's. Eventually we figured out where all these apostrophes are coming from. The contraction "you're" is never used, Aus prefers "your", so they end up with a bunch of spare apostrophes - qed. This is not just us being picky, this is newspapers, road signs, adverts, the lot! We're not the only ones to notice this and it appears to be more than just poor English. That's how the language has evolved here; it's correct usage now! Hmmm. An interesting side-effect of this is that you do get some new words such as "yous" being the plural of "you" - quite handy that one.
Hidden extras are big here. You never really know how much something is going to cost until you get your change back (or not, as the case may be). There's generally an assortment of taxes to be added and quite often you need to hire things like bed linen or cooking utensils (the YHA in Cooinda even made us pay a deposit for a saucepan). Then, when you finally think you know how much it is, they just go ahead and round up the price; purely to save change. To be fair, there is occasional rounding down too, but it does seem much less frequent. Of course, this ritual fleecing happened all over Asia too, but at least there the final price was still next to nothing. Here, well, stuff is expensive to start with.
Most of the people we met who were travelling around seem to be spending most of their time on the beaches of the East coast. They're missing out on what we thing is the essence of Australia; the big, open, outback vistas and spectacular desert scenery. Still, the quintessential Aus image is the beer sodden beach bum so maybe they've got it right after all. It leaves the good stuff relatively "backpacker free" which is better for us! Also, most people don't seem to be going anywhere other than Aus and maybe New Zealand. A few adventurous ones seem to stop off in Thailand on the way home. Maybe they some beer and beaches after all that time in Aus!