Australia East Coast Jan 17th To Feb 25th 08 4600 Km
We planned to do the 5500 km of the East Coast using the Greyhound buses, but 2 days before we were due to leave Melbourne, we made the cost comparison Hostels/greyhound and hiring a Campervan and the Van was cheaper! It is a brilliant little van with a big double bed and all the accessories needed for the next 6 weeks on the road.. except the signage on the side, bonnet and boot!! There is no escaping what we are! Check out the photos
Lydia dropped us off to pick our new home up and said goodbye to my little Sister… more tears! It’s horrible having to say goodbye time and time again, then we hit the Pacific highway Sydney bound only 850 km to go! We were feeling quite adventurous on our first day thinking that it would be no bother to drive for 9 hours straight but we soon gave up on that idea and stopped 3 hours short of Sydney in a little place called Yass. Not much going on here just a typical little outback Aussie town with a butchers, bakers and a Harvey Normans (electrical store-they are everywhere) we sat in their park and had dinner and found a quiet little grassy road to spend the night which turned out to have a similar amount of traffic as the M6 in the middle of the night! Must have been a Road Train short cut to the freeway!
The following morning we completed the remaining 300 km via Goldburn with the most enormous sheep statue (it looms over the petrol station.. yes its bigger than the petrol station…and you can walk inside it! Check out the pictures) called The Big Marino and arrived in Sydney by midday, I was desperate to go straight to Bondi Beach as this was my home for 17 months in 2001/2002! It was peeing it down as we arrived and wasn’t the picture I was hoping to show Andy, one of my favourite places in Australia - the place he has heard me rave on about for so long now ;( The next few nights we stayed at our friends Kirsty’s (who we met in Montreal) who has a place just in between Bondi junction and the beach. Our first night out was spent in Woolloomooloo (did you get that!) an incredibly smart bar owned by Russell Crowe a vast twin leveled converted warehouse on the docks with chic secluded trellised booths lit by candlelit and a glass lift taking you up to the 2nd floor! Such a funky bar! We then headed to Kings Cross to a club where everyone was drinking from quaint little teapots with straws?
500 km further along the Pacific we hit Port Maquarie where I had family to visit Jenny (my granddads sister) and her husband Bill who are both 93 years old and a miracle they are both doing incredibly for their great ages still walking with no help and have better memories than me and Andy could ever have! Obviously living in such a beautiful place as Port M is keeping them fit and healthy! Port Macquarie was witnessing the onslaught of a cyclone which never materialized with waves so big you would imagine a Tsunami was on its way! one of the beaches - Lighthouse beach was closed because of this and as we walked down to the beach you could see why! we could barely get on the beach to walk down it as the waves were nearly hitting the grass verges of the car park…The sea can sometimes be a scary thing.. check out the Video – probably doesn’t give it justice.
We continued up the coast and visited Byron Bay, Surfers Paradise, Brisbane, Harvey Bay, Fraser Island, Town of 1770 (where Captain Cook fist came aground in Australia) and Airlie Beach. This is where we headed off on our 2 night 3 day boat trip of the Whitsunday Islands! The final night on the boat we witnessed some pretty horrid weather! Rain isn’t nice when the humidity is high and your stuck on a little boat with no fans, not being able to open a window due to the rain and 12 people! We couldn’t wait to get off! The following 24 hours after we left the boat it continued to rain very hard, I cant explain how hard as I definitely hadn’t experienced anything like it..if you stepped into it a second later you looked like you had taken a bath fully clothed. The following morning the town next door to Airlie beach called Mackay had completely flooded. All greyhound buses had been cancelled for the following 24 hours going North and South! Luckily we have our little van even though we were warned we probably wouldn’t get very far due the roads being swamped with water. We wanted to get out of Airlie as it was becoming very overcrowded due to nobody being able to leave not that we would have been able to find accommodation as apparently all the hotels/hotels had waiting lists due to the amount of travelers stranded in this little town. Two of our friends Clare & Neil that were on our boat were also wanting to move on so we all pile into the van and set off North towards Townsville. We got 100km up the road and a river had burst its banks so we found a campsite in Bowen, two days later we were still in Bowen! Yeh day three we managed to escape… Townsville here we come.
We spent a couple of nights on Magnetic Island with Clare & Neil, Magnetic looked like it had been turned upside and not put back on its feet again. There were luxury boats washed up on the beach with their masts stuck in trees (check out the photos) it looked like a Film setup from Universal Studios (The Tsunami) all kinds of other stuff washed up trees, big wooden boxes etc etc. Anyway the next two days .. guess what - it rained!
We continued north for the next week Visiting Mission Beach (rain) Innisfail (rain) where we went to a crocodile farm! Cairns (rain) and then over the on the ferry to Cape Tribulation we loved the Cape and actually experienced a couple of nice, sunny days. We then made our way back to Cairns where we flew out to New Zealand.
Jean & ken