Kangaroo Island

There’s a definite animal theme going on here - we just got back from a 2-day trip to Kangaroo Island just off the coast near Adelaide which we had been told by other travelers was worth a visit (and, yes, there are lots of kangaroos there). Thousands of years ago, it was part of Australia, but the ice caps melted, sea levels rose (does this ring a bell?) and Kangaroo Island was separated from the mainland by about 18 km (which we crossed by ferry). It’s about 150 km by 55 km, so quite large. There were only 14 of us on the first day of the tour, so it wasn’t too hectic and we had a lovely driver/tour guide called Richard who knew the most amazing amount about the island - history, geography, flora, fauna etc. The pictures are of a hairy frog-mouth (fascinating bird that is a master of disguise - he catches insects in his froggy-type beak), some sealions on the beach and a chicken with a really bad hair-day. No particular reason for the chicken picture except he caught my fancy! John took lots of pictures of the New Zealand fur seals that we saw on the rocks (different from the ones on the beach), but we were quite far away and it’s hard to tell from most of the pictures which are rocks and which are seals.
We started out at a eucalyptus oil distillery (there are large number of eucalyptus trees on the island - I can’t remember how many types there are, but well over 100). It was interesting to see how they distilled the leaves into oil and of course there was a gift shop where you could buy all kinds of soaps, oils etc. The lady who gave us the tour had a huge long list of the things that eucalyptus oil can do for you - she reminded John of the old snake-oil salesmen at the Ex, and her patter definitely worked as I think we all bought something!
Next stop was a birds of prey free flight show. John and I had seen a really good show in Alice Springs, but this one was different in that we got to see the birds up really close. (That’s where we saw the hairy frog-mouth.)
Then off to Seal Bay where we went down on the beach and could get quite close to the sealions. There wasn’t much action for quite a while - if sealions aren’t out hunting, they are snoozing to regain their energy so they can go out hunting again. There were a few pups which were pretty cute, but it was very quiet. Just as we were about to leave, we saw some adults in the water - I figured they were young adult males as they were surfing in on the waves, and then swimming out again so they could ride another wave! Just having a blast! That was fun to watch. It’s amazing to compare how they move on land and how graceful and fast they are in the water.
We went to a pretty ho-hum animal park and then onto a sheep dairy, where we watched “the girls’ getting milked! It is a small cottage industry but very successful. They make the most amazing cheeses and yogurts from the milk which we sampled, but couldn’t buy as we had no way of keeping things cool.
In the evening, we went to see the fairy penguins come in from their day’s hunting. Unfortunately, about 79 other people also turned up much to the amazement of the people running the show. Se we were divided into 4 groups, but the beach is pretty small and 80 or so people clumping around probably had quite an impact on the number of penguins we saw! We did see some though, mostly chicks waiting for mom and dad to bring them their dinner. They are very small and of course, being penguins, terminally cute.
The next day, we were joined by 3 ladies (mom and 2 daughters and 2 year old grandson). Question: why would people think that a 2 year old would be likely to be happy to be dragged around in and out of buses all day, visiting places where you are supposed to be quiet and listen to a commentary? We’ve had a couple of instances (one at the Opera and two at Jenolan Caves) where it has been almost impossible to hear/concentrate because of a screaming kid. NOT the kid’s fault, but you have to wonder where the parents’ heads are to take a small person along. OK - now I’ve got that out of my system (!), on with the blog. We went to a honey farm (quite an industry on the island as the bees are a pure strain which is unlikely to be contaminated as the island is far enough from the mainland to keep foreigners out). Then on to some caves - we thought we were caved-out (or caved-in) having already seen the Capricorn and Jenolan Caves, but the screaming kid didn’t come, so we went along and it was a really good tour. The guide obviously loved his job and knew the caves extremely well, so it was a great success. The caves weren’t as spectacular as Jenolan, but impressive all the same.
After lunch we went to see the Remarkable Rocks which really are! They are a cluster of huge granite boulders right on the ocean, sculpted by the weather and the sea. Close by was Admiral’s Arch where we saw the New Zealand fur seals. The coast is very rugged at this point, and you wonder how the seals don’t get bashed to pieces on the rocks as they try to land on the rocks as the waves crash around them. The Arch was an amazing formation in the rocks which looked, remarkably enough, like an arch!
Last stop was to watch a flock of pelicans being fed - they are much larger than our birds in Saskatchewan and the same guy feeds them every day at the same time, so they know exactly what to expect. He comes along with a huge box of fish and at one point, he hoists armfuls of fish into the middle of the flock of pelicans. One bird caught the most enormous amount in his bill (I would guess about 4-5 lb) which we watched in fascination/anguish as he tried to swallow it. Bad case of indigestion later, I would imagine.
So it was a pretty full 2 days, and John swears he won’t get on another bus for the next lifetime, but it was a good trip.
Coincidence - we sat next to an English couple (who were also on the trip) for lunch one day and I asked the universal traveler’s question, “Where are you from?” The wife replied that they were from England (she obviously hadn’t picked up on my accent!) When I asked where from, she replied, “Guildford” which happens to be where I was born! When I told her that, she said that actually they were from a small town near Guildford called Godalming - where my mate Jane lives! Small world - which we also found in Edinburgh when we were sitting in a pub one night and John got chatting to the guy next to him who turned out to be a blacksmith. When he heard that we were from Canada, he said that a blacksmith from Canada had just been working with his forge in Scotland. John asked if that had happened to be Craig (a blacksmith friend of John’s) and, of course, it was!
My blog is morphing into something more than just our travels - little pieces of trivia are making their way into the story which I don’t seem to be able to do anything about. They present themselves as we are on the road, I write them down and then can’t resist adding them in! So there we are.
We are now in Adelaide with Reg and Ruby who we met about 3 years ago when we were on a tour in Greece. We spent about 10 days with them (on a bus!) and really enjoyed their company. We’ve kept in touch since then and when we told them that we were coming to Australia, they invited us to come and stay with them. When it looked like we would hit Adelaide in mid-December, they immediately invited us for Christmas. I sent them a very carefully-worded e-mail saying that we would love to drop in on them for a day or two, but they insisted that we spend our whole 2 weeks with them, which I thought was incredibly generous (and possibly insane!) They have been most wonderfully hospitable and we are having a wonderful time, living in a real house, eating real food, snoozing when we want to and generally re-charging our travel-weary batteries. This little island of calm has come at about the ½ way point for us and is very welcome.

Opera

Just had to put a quick blog up after the Opera! It was a blast - it was the annual Opera House Christmas show with some of the well-known opera singers (but not known to us), Opera Australia Christmas Choir and Orchestra. It was in the Concert Hall which is huge (seats about 2,500). The seating is amazing - every seat has a fantastic view of the stage. It is quite something to sit in the Sydney Opera House and hear beautifully produced Christmas carols (and yes, they did do Six White Boomers and it was hilarious!) The set was gorgeous - beautifully decorated Christmas trees and fabulous costumes - lots of red and green and sparkles. When we went on our tour of the Opera House, our guide told us about the huge organ in the Concert Hall - it took 7 years to build and 2 years to tune - kind of takes your breath away! We both really enjoyed our afternoon.
Since this is so short and sweet, I thought I’d put in some absolutely useless information as filler - but first, a message to “Anonymous” who put the following message on our blog: “Yes, the hat is DREADFUL!” I would like Anonymous to know that I plan to have the hat embalmed and I will leave it to her in my will (you know who you are!)
Useless information:
So far we have spent $54 on laundry (NOT including our expensive lesson learned in Edinburgh regarding the difference between dry cleaning and laundry!)
We have sent 2 parcels of “stuff” home already, totaling about 20lb. John actually agreed to part company with his emergency kit which weighed a ton!
We have lost a cell phone, a post card that I had written (but not posted) to my ex-in-laws and a bra (HOW do you lose one of those?!)
Merry Christmas!
John and Ginnie

Sydney 2

I still haven’t figured out how to get the pictures in order, so I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which - shouldn’t be too hard! There should be one of the Chinese Garden of Friendship, a close-up of the Sydney Opera House tiles and a lovely sign that we couldn’t resist with Bondi Beach in the background!
Now the details - The Chinese Garden of Friendship was really lovely - quite large with a huge pool in the middle with about 4 different waterfalls. Paths took you through the gardens, up “mountains” to reach the pagodas which were beautifully carved inside. Of course all the trees and flowers were quite stunning, and there are carefully spaced spaces through which you get different perspectives on the views. We had some Chinese tea - Shaimei, which translates as “old man’s eyebrows” - how could we resist! The Garden is in Darling Harbour which is also where the IMAX movie theatre is, so we dropped in for a 3D movie “Under the Sea” which was good, but the memorable event was that I lost my wallet in the theatre! It must have dropped out of my pocket when we sat down and luckily I realized what had happened before we left the building. But we had to wait through the next movie (they run every hour) to get back in to look for it. You can imagine what was going through my head as EVERYTHING (except my passport) was in the wallet - credit cards, driver’s license, Seniors card(!) etc. etc. John and I are 3 really helpful assistants went in with flashlights and high hopes - of course the theatre is huge and they kept asking me where we had been sitting, and although I had a rough idea, I couldn’t identify the exact row. However, I found it ……
Big event the next day was a hair cut! Heather will understand when I say that it had been 2 months since I had my hair cut and it was feeling terrible! It’s always a bit of a gamble when you walk in off the street, but I found a lovely girl from Bulgaria who had only been in Sydney for 4 months (yes, she had been a hairdresser before she came!) I was amazed at her English which she had none of when she arrived - and you know how much talking a woman’s hairdresser normally does! So that was a great success. To celebrate my new-found (or lost) tresses, we did a tour of the Sydney Opera House - very interesting as we got to go into some of the theatres (there are 5 or 6 venues) and saw some interesting videos on how it came into being, as well as learning about the structure. The reason for putting up the picture of the tiles is that people think that the “sails” are white, but they are actually made up of some incredible number of ceramic tiles in two colours, cream and beige, (white would apparently have been too glaring in this strong sun) and they are specially treated so that they self-clean when it rains (which it hasn’t done in quite a while - big drought problems all over Australia and fires are burning outside Sydney as I write). After lunch, I took off to climb one of the 4 Bridge pylons. John elected not to come as his knee is a bit wonky, so I left him with a chocolate milk shake and up I went. It actually wasn’t too much of a climb (I didn’t do the actual bridge climb which takes you right to the top of the bridge and costs several hundred dollars), but there were very good views from the top of the pylon, and I thought I should finish up by walking across the bridge and back, just so I could say that I had done it!
Next day took us to Bondi Beach. We thought we needed a rest day and the weather forecast was good, so we hopped on a bus and went to where all the beautiful people go (apparently!) It is actually not a very big beach, and there wasn’t much wind so no real surfing to watch, but of course there were a bevy of lovely girls which John appreciated. We really did do nothing except read, swim, snooze and eat fish and chips - good day at the beach (and now we’ve been to Bondi!)
Today we went to the ANZAC memorial (Australia/New Zealand Army Corps) which is very moving. The building houses a small museum and the memorial hall has a vaulted roof covered in stars, each one representing a New South Wales soldier who lost his/her life in war. John is always interested in war memorials given his time in the military as a youth, and he was very impressed. We walked through Hyde Park (so many English names here!) to the Opera House and I bought tickets to the Christmas Show with the Opera Australia Orchestra and Choir tomorrow. We really wanted to go to something at the Opera House, and this should put us in the Christmas spirit, especially as the program promises “all your favourites including Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful, Hark and Herald Angels Sing and ……. Six White Boomers (I’m SERIOUS!) Should be an interesting experience! We’re off to Adelaide for Christmas on Saturday, so not sure when I’ll be able to blog again, so hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and New Year, and we’ll think of you while we’re having the barbie on the beach!

Sydney 1

So here we are in Sydney. We’re staying in a neighbourhood called Newtown, in a hostel quaintly called the Billabong Gardens. It has the loudest guests we’ve come across so far. It’s not up to the standard of the Youth Hostel we stayed in in Cairns, but it’s OK (we even have a fridge and TV in our room!) However the kitchen is little medieval and there is nowhere to sit and relax except in our room. Newtown is best described as “edgy” - both by the guidebooks and by me! It’s definitely an alternative place with some extremely colorful inhabitants. We had supper tonight next to a church which evidently welcomed all and sundry and amongst the interesting congregation who we saw go in were a black drag queen and a tall, gangly elderly man covered in tattoos (face and all) with ground-length dreadlocks. There are literally hundreds of restaurants in a 4-5 block area near our hostel (and I thought Saskatoon was well-stocked!) - many of them Thai. So far\ we’ve eaten Thai ( at the Thai-tanic), Nepalese and African food - all delicious! We have figured out the transport system and have bought a week pass that lets us go pretty much wherever we want by bus, train and/or ferry. Of course our first stop was at Circular Quay where both the Bridge and the Opera House are. We did a tour of the Harbour by boat to get our bearings. It’s the most amazing place - there are many, many arms of the Harbour (each with its own sailing club as far as we could see!) and the skyline is incredible. We also put our noses into the Botanic Gardens (will definitely go back) and were amused with the welcome signs: “Please walk on the grass. We also invite you to smell the roses, hug the trees, talk to the birds and picnic on the lawns.” We’ll go back to do a tour of the Opera House and climb one of the pylons of the bridge. There isn’t anything on at the Opera House that we would both enjoy, and I discovered that afternoon tea there with operatic entertainment was $200, so the tour will have to do!
Day 2 took us by ferry to the Maritime Museum (guess how many photos were taken!) There is an extremely good replica of Cook’s Endeavour which we went through (note Mrs. Hartley without a hat for the benefit of her daughter! The hat is DREADFUL, I agree, but it does keep the sun off) as well as a re-furbished barque called the James Craig which we also went through (a somewhat Twilight Zone-ish experience!) Our guide was an East Indian gentleman who was very enthusiastic about the ship, but had a fairly strong accent which we had to work hard to understand. When we got below decks, there were a number of very scantily-clad young women running around being pursued by men with cameras (including John!) They had apparently rented the ship from 9-11 that morning, but had failed to turn up until about noon, so had to put up with tourists running through their attempts to film underwear ads!
Day 3 - ferry to Manly which is a northern neighbourhood which you can get to by ferry. There are amazing views of the Sydney landmarks from the ferry and we had a nice relaxing day there. We walked up to the surf beach which was jam-packed with people, so we opted to sit on the gentle side of the headland where we could doze and read and eat ice cream and watch the sail boats racing in the harbour. We couldn’t resist asking a friendly lady to take our Christmas photo with the Christmas tree and the palm trees in the background (sorry to rub it in, guys!) It is very weird to think it’s Christmas when it’s so hot and everyone is talking about “summer” - can’t quite get our heads around it!

Blue Mountains

We are now in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and my goodness, they are blue and they are spectacular! We had a somewhat interesting time getting here; after leaving Zoe’s friends, we tried to buy a new cell phone which took a while and then we tried to navigate the Sydney toll payment system. Our campervan people had made it sound so simple - they gave us a list of places (gas stations, convenience stores) that we could go to and just buy what we needed. The reality was somewhat different. We went to a couple of gas stations and they looked at us as if we had 3 heads - no idea what we were talking about. And although we were now the proud owners of a new cell phone, it had to be charged up and activated before we could actually use it. Eventually we found our way to the vehicle registration office and the lady there told us we could just call the phone number that we saw as we entered the toll road and that would take care of things. Being suspicious souls, we double-checked that, once our cell phone was working, by calling a toll-free number (bad joke!) where I spoke to the most wonderful man who took my credit card number, vehicle registration # and told me that all would be well. So we’ll see …… The system certainly is not set up for tourists, a lot of whom don’t speak very good English. We were parked next to a young Dutch couple the night before we came to the mountains and we asked them what they had done about paying the tolls. The husband hadn’t really understood the piece of paper that he had been given, so he had just thrown it away! They were very grateful that we had talked to them about it, as if you go through without paying, there is a hefty fine which is sent to your rental car company who then ding you on top of the fine.
Anyway, we are here now and again, it is very hot and windy. We drove into Katoomba which is the tourist hub for the Blue Mountains. The thing that everyone wants to see is Echo Point which is an amazing lookout over fantastic rock outcrops (see photo). We also “did” the Three Sisters which is close by, but we couldn’t take anymore tourists (!) so we drove about 15 km out of Katoomba to a nice quiet camp site where we stayed for a couple of nights.
Day 2 in the mountains saw us driving further west to the Jenolan Caves (thanks Andrea!). The drive itself is quite an adventure - amazing views on the winding way up, up, up and then an extremely narrow, windy road (even by my English standards!) for about 8 km to the caves themselves. Luckily we didn’t meet anyone coming the other way, You actually drive through a cave to get to the parking lot at Jenolan! We did a very well produced self-guided tour of the Devil’s Coach House and Nettles Cave. You had a little telephone-thing that told you about the different things as you went, with extra commentary if you wanted it. There are hundreds of caves, but only a few are open to guided tours. We chose to do an easy one in the morning, the Imperial Cave, which took us down to a subterranean river. There were some beautiful formations, but nothing like the tour we did in the afternoon to the Orient Cave. The stalgmites and tites there were quite fantastic. You run out of superlatives to describe some of the enormous chambers just full of incredible shapes and colours. One photo is of “Lot’s wife” and the other is the famous elephant head-dress which is the logo for Jenolan caves.
On our way back from the caves, we stopped at the historic village of Hartley (how could we miss it?!) There was a little tourist place which had a “Closed” sign on the door. Opening hours were given as 10 - 12 and 1 - 4:20 (?!) My watch said 4:19! Anyway, the lady must have heard us as she opened the door, thrust a pamphlet in my hand and slammed the door again! Hartley used to be quite the up and coming place - there were 2 churches, a Court House, a hotel and a service station. People used to stay there on their way to the caves from Sydney (a journey that now takes about 1 ½ hours). We wandered around and John took lots of pictures of the old buildings. We also went to the graveyard, but not a Hartley was to be seen. All the names were very Irish, but we couldn’t find anything that told us why the village had been called Hartley in the first place. It was a nice little side-bar!
And now we have to give the campervan back. I’m not sure how we would have managed without Mabel (John has christened our GPS lady). She was endlessly patient with us when we changed our minds and only once did she put us in not quite the right place (the landfill when we had asked for the old airport!) I chose to disagree with her once when we were driving down the coast, heading for the beaches. It looked to me as though we could do a nice “detour” off the main highway through the town of Newcastle. Unfortunately, the map that I had wasn’t very accurate, and we found ourselves on a peninsula with nowhere else to go except out to sea. So we switched Mabel on and she took us her best route which just happened to coincide with the annual bikers toy run (for the uninitiated, every year at Christmas, local motorcycle clubs collect toys for kids and do a “run” on their bikes). There had to be several thousand bikes and suitably dressed (Santa hats, tinsel on the bikes) tatooed and mustachioed bikers and chicks! So we joined them for a while (of course John took pictures!)
We’ll spend the next week in Sydney and there is SO much to see and do! John is quite exhausted just listening to me go on about what we’re going to do befo

Beaches

We’ve had a few days at the beach! After Brisbane, we drove to Sapphire Beach which was another one of our “little dots on the map”. It was very quiet but unfortunately the weather wasn’t great - quite cloudy and it actually poured with rain one day. The beach was near a small town called Coffs Harbour which was beautifully protected (lots of boats for John to look at!) and an almost-attached island (Muttonbird Island) which we walked over. It was incredibly windy - one of those bend your head into the wind and push winds - but worth the effort. The waves breaking on the rocks were quite spectacular, but very difficult to get a photo of! You wait and wait for the right wave to come along, and by the time it comes, you’ve looked off to the left and you’ve missed it again. Muttonbirds are apparently shearwaters which nest on the island in their thousands (but not at this time of year!)
After getting rather damp at Sapphire Beach, we drove further down the coast to Jimmy’s Beach (another “dot”). Jimmy’s Beach was very sheltered and shallow - great for kids but not much good for surfing. We managed to find a place that rented us boogie boards so we could go to the other side of the headland where there was much better surf and we had a couple of really nice days there. It was picture-perfect with miles of white sand, blue sea and sky and hardly any people. Anyone that we did meet was really friendly.
Our last beach day was with Zoe’s friends, Arnie and Brent who had just arrived from England when we landed on their doorstep at Umina Beach (about 100 km north of Sydney). I thought it was pretty brave of them to have us to stay as they’d only just got there, but we had a really nice 24 hours with them - more surfing and enjoying the gorgeous weather (which we showed Zoe on a Skype phone call - not sure how impressed she was sitting in cold and snowy Saskatoon!).
We’ve had a small frustration in that our cell phone has gone AWOL and we cannot find it, despite pulling the van apart about 5 times. It’s quite ridiculous how you keep looking in the same places - you know you’ve looked there before, but somehow you think it’s worth trying again. Of course we lost it in one of our “dot” places, so there was no chance to get another one in a hurry. We really need it to navigate through Sydney as there are lots of toll roads and you have to phone a different number for each toll road that you use so they can charge you. It seems a really complicated system, especially for rather nerve-racked tourists who don’t know where they’re going anyway, We are off to the Blue Mountains tomorrow (new cell phone in hand) so hope we can figure out how to make things work. We are nearly at the end of our campervan time - it’s been a really good experience and thank heavens we are used to living together in small places (boat and camper at home) as it is pretty cosy!