The Last Bit - Part 1

Hello!

As you may have noticed, I've not updated this for a while and I don't have a very good excuse beyond being too lazy to do it. But I'm being punished because I now have to write loads in order to bring this thing up to date and so I'll be sitting at a keyboard for a while. I'm being sensible though and splitting it into separate posts so that I can do it in installments and write something manageable rather than an epic novel.

However, I have just updates my flickr site although the observant amongst you will see that it only consists of New Zealand and no Australia. The reason for that is that I managed to lose my camera just before I stepped onto the plane to New Zealand and unfortunately I lost all my pictures from Australia as well. I contacted all the places I thought it could be but to no avail so I can only assume that some dishonest Aussie has found it and kept it for themselves. As you can imagine, I wasn't in the best mood for a few days after that but I treated myself to a new camera which is bigger and has more buttons so that cheered me up.

Blimey, where do I start? Well, last time I blogged I was about to go to Adelaide so that sounds like a sensible place to start. It's a pretty cool place to visit. It's quite a small city but it has lots of nice parks and it's a great city to just wander around. I was a bit geeky too and walked some of the old Formula 1 track (Adelaide held a race in the streets until 1996 when Melbourne pinched it - I walked the Melbourne track too, but now I'm painting myself in a bad light so I'll stop there!). Having said that, there's not too much to do there so I only spent a couple of days there before flying to Alice Springs and booking myself onto a tour to see Uluru (or Ayers Rock as it used to be known).

I was a little apprehensive because I didn't expect to be overly impressed by what is essentially a big rock, but it was actually very impressive and we spent ages wandering around it and examining it from different angles. A few facts, courtesy of the Lonely Planet (just about everything I know about Australia comes from Bill Bryson or the Lonely Planet): it is 3.6km long, 348m high (and it is thought that 2/3 of the rock remains underground) and a walk around the circumference of the rock is 10km long. So yes, it's a big rock but it's a fantastic sight and well worth seeing. There is the option to climb the rock but I didn't do it because the Aborigines consider it to be a sacred site and don't want tourists running about all over it. That didn't stop a couple of people in my group climbing it so I fired suitably scathing looks in their direction when they got off the bus and had a good chuckle at the woman who could barely climb the first few metres without falling over. I was hoping that she would comically roll down the hill cartoon-like but I was bitterly disappointed.

After travelling around the rock, we hung around and had a BBQ while we waited for the sun to go down since the rock is meant to change colour as the sun slowly descends in the evening. And it did - it was very cool. Not quite the spiritual experience that you'd be led to believe it is from speaking to some people but definitely worth seeing and there were a few "Wow" moments as we saw the rock from different angles.

Once the sun had gone down we headed back to Alice Springs (a mere 400km away) and I was back by midnight - but very tired since they picked me up at a very chilly 7am that morning. It was strange because the days were baking hot but as soon as the sun went down it was freezing cold - especially in my accommodation which was reminiscent of one of the pre-fabricated huts that passed for my classroom when I was 8 years old. There wasn't much else to see in Alice Springs - it's a pretty nasty tourist town with no charm or character and which seemed to consist of tourists, people employed by the tourist industry or some seriously beaten up aborigine people. I won't even try to explain anything about the Australian Aborigine situation (and no least because I know next to nothing about it) except that to say that it's a big problem. While I was visiting an Adelaide church I was talking with a gentle elderly man who worked in the gift shop and his entire demeanor changed and frosted over when I mentioned I was going to Alice Springs. He told me that the Aborigines were a massive problem there and they like to take money from Australians but like to live by their own rules. It was an experience almost spookily identical to one that Bill Bryson had in "Down Under". On the other hand, you're told not to judge Aborigines by the ones you see in Alice Springs or Darwin who generally have drink problems. To be honest, I didn't see enough to even form an opinion except that the ones in Alice Springs could benefit from a good wash now and again...

Anyway, I visited the Royal Flying Doctor museum which was quite interesting, a kangaroo rescue centre where I held a few baby kangaroos and also visited the Alice Spring reptile centre which was extremely scary. There really are far too many innocuous looking but lethal animals in Australia and most of them were on show here (thankfully behind glass windows). There were newspaper cutouts of men missing various crucial and significant limbs thanks to spiders biting them or stumbling over a small wormlike snake or something. I vowed to keep to the pavement at all times from that moment onwards.

After exhausting the 3 things worth seeing in Alice Springs I decided, in some misguided attempt at "seeing the real Australia" that the best way to go to Darwin (for that was my next destination) would be to travel by bus for 21 hours through miles and miles of desert and road. Clearly I'd been out in the sun too long but the man at the bus station gladly sold me a ticket and I climbed onto the bus. 21 hours later I emerged only slightly deranged and found a hostel right next to the bus station which had a pool and which sounded nice and lively. As I was checking in I noticed a party of Irishmen who'd clearly been sitting next to the pool all day liberally pouring vast quantities of Aussie beer down their throats. I then observed (somewhat wide-eyed) them pounce on a frail young backpacker who had the misfortune of passing them at the wrong time be picked up fully clothed and launched into the pool to the accompaniment of cheers and shouts. Not wishing to suffer the same fate I tanked it past them to my room before they even had a chance to notice I was there. When I left the hostel for dinner that night it all seemed to be getting a bit out of hand so I was glad to be out of it. A few days later I saw a couple of the same lads being loaded into the back of a police van outside a pub on the main street so I had a good laugh at them.

Darwin had loads to do and was totally geared for the tourist but it was just totally full of English, Irish and German kids (well, about 18 or 19 or something) and I felt a bit out of place really. They'd obviously just parked themselves in Darwin for the summer and it's what I would imagine a Southern Hemisphere Ibiza to be like. But I'd come to Darwin for a reason and that was to go on the jumping crocodile tour!

A guy in Melbourne had told me about this and it basically consists of taking a boat trip down a crocodile infested river and hanging a bit of meat out over the side for the croc to come and eat. Except the piece of meat is hung quite high up on a stick and the croc has to jump out of the water to get it. What's more is that there is a guy holding the stick and he lifts it up just as the croc jumps for it, much like teasing a dog so that the croc has to jump a couple of times to get it. But crocs can be quick when they want and frequently they would snatch the meat before the guy had a chance to react. It was fantastic to see - these crocs were ridiculously big and absolutely terrifying to look at and they were launching themselves out of the water and tearing the meat apart. You could hear the bones being crunched by the crocs and you realised that you had pretty much no chance if they got their mouth round you. The tour also included a trip to a crocodile farm where they bred crocs for meat and skin (I declined the crocodile meat in the cafe) but you could get up close to the crocs and try to stare them out. I wanted to wrestle a few of them because I reckoned I could take them all on but the people who owned the place wouldn't let me, obviously fearful for the lives of their crocs... Party-poopers.

I also visited a wildlife park which was set in hectares of open bushland and which you could wander around pretty freely. It was massive and took all of the morning to get around but was well worth it as you could go see the kangaroos, visit the nocturnal house, aviary, aquarium and see a bird of prey show (although that finished early as they were scared that some of the smaller birds might get eaten by some wild birds that were flying around). Wandering around the bush, I was a bit worried about getting eaten by a wild snake or a spider and my jumpy mood wasn't helped by thousands of blackfly buzzing around me. At one point a butterfly flew towards me and not quite able to tell what it was I started frantically waving my hands around, much like someone having a fight with fresh air before I realised what it was. After regaining my composure and nervously checking that no one had seen me I went back to swatting blackfly. I was quite glad when I got back to the bus without any obvious snake-inflicted injuries.

After visiting a fantastic museum (which detailed a typhoon that virtually tore the town apart in the 70's) I was done with Darwin and ready to head back to Sydney to meet Cath who was flying out to see me. After my experience with the bus journey I decided to fly to Sydney since air travel is pretty cheap in Oz and the distances are too great for any sane person to consider driving. However my only option was to fly from Darwin at 1am via Brisbane, getting to Sydney at 6am that morning. For some bizarre reason all the flights from Darwin seemed to leave at some obscene hour and so it was that I was sitting in Brisbane airport amongst screaming kids and irritating Aussies at 4am trying to convince myself that this was fun and that I was enjoying myself.

Back in Sydney I found a hostel and had a couple of hours sleep which perked me up a bit before heading out for a wander in Sydney. It was nice to be back in a city that I knew and I just spent some time poking around the shops since I was too tired and the afternoon was too short to do any serious activities. The next day it was pouring with rain so I went to the Maritime museum which was excellent and then to the Powerhouse museum which is probably my most favourite museum ever. The Australians certainly know how to make a good museum and I spent a very cultured day poking around and playing with the exhibits, turfing annoying schoolkids off the toys that I wanted to play with - little brats.

Finally Cath arrived, no thanks to a last minute slight panic due to a typhoon in Hong Kong cancelling her flight from London. Despite her jetlag we climbed Sydney Harbour Bridge (on an organised tour of course - not just by jumping up there or anything). It was a tad pricey but it was totally worth it and definitely something to remember. We were pretty lucky with the weather too so the views were good. Sadly you're not allowed to take cameras or anything but you get a photo as part of the cost so it's not too bad. That evening we went to Sydney aquarium where Cath educated me on loads of animals about which I didn't have a clue. I confidently educated her on the crocodile that was there before reading the sign and realising that it was a totally different type of crocodile. Ah well, I've found that as long as you can be confident in what you say then it often doesn't matter if you're right or wrong - I commend this approach to you all...

And that was pretty much all of Australia. We left the hotel and went to the airport and at some point I carelessly lost my camera. Too late to do anything we boarded the flight to New Zealand as planned and you'll have to wait until the next installment of this blog to find out if we landed in one piece or if we crashed as a gigantic fireball into the ocean.

Until the next time.....be good.