Australia - Tgon's Travels

Weeks 121 & 122: Arriving in Melbourne

Posted on 11/11/2013

Two weeks ago I spent my last weekend in Tasmania before flying back to Melbourne on the Tuesday. I went to stay with two friends in Melbourne, Alessio and Federico, both Italian guys who are working towards their citizenship. I spent some time looking for work and a room to rent, but haven’t found anything yet. I’m planning to work for 2 months here in Melbourne, while I buy and build my bicycle for the Asia trip. Ben left earlier this week, he flew to Bali and will spend some time traveling around South East Asia.

I am trying to get as much advice and information about touring bikes and equipment, so I’ve been visiting bike shops and checking some stuff online. At the moment I am planning to buy a Surly Long Haul Trucker bicycle frame and a Brooks Flyer Special seat, then start building it up from there.

Weeks 119 & 120: Tasmania

Posted on 30/10/2013

For the last two weeks I have been travelling around Tasmania. We had found a group of people who were renting a camper van and decided to join them, so we flew into Hobart as our starting point. Ben and I stayed with a local guy called Eric, who we met through CouchSurfing and then set off with our three new travel buddies, Pierre, Alison and Vanessa. From Hobart, we drove south to Cockle Bay for a short hike on the beach before heading north to the Tahune forest to camp and hike through the forest.

From Tahune we headed back through Hobart to the Tasman Peninsula to camp at one of my favourite spots in Tasmania, Fortescue Bay. The bay is in the national park and has a great camping spot, beach and very tame wallabies. The national park has lots of hiking trails, I bet it’s even better in the summer. The next spot was another great National Park, this time called Freycinet. This part contains one of the most popular tourist spots in Tasmania, Wineglass Bay. Again this park has some really nice hiking trails with great views onto some very beautiful, although cold, beaches. We stayed in the National Park camp ground again but this time we were visited by some possums while we were using the free gas BBQs at night. I was really surprised by how tame the animals in Tasmania were, the wallabies let you go up and stroke them.

The most famous attraction in Tasmania is Cradle mountain, we drove up to the mountain and I was hoping to climb it, but the track we could take involved using some climbing chains, and there was snow on the mountain. I wasn’t really prepared for the weather conditions so couldn’t climb. Over the next few days we drove around the Cradle Mountain National Park, to a pair of lakes in the south of the National Park, Lake King William and Lake Saint Claire. It was cold but we had a great camping spot on the edge of the lake and built a fire in the evening. In the middle of the night part of my tent collapsed, a tent peg had been pulled up, when I opened the door to replace the peg I noticed it had snowed. I attached the guy ropes and went back to bed, keeping my fleece on in my sleeping bag. The next morning was really cold, but it was a beautiful sight, driving through the forest and up to the Lake Saint Claire National Park office. We warmed up by their log fire and admired the views around the lake.

It took us a couple of days to drive through the mountains back to Hobart, stopping to camp in a small village called Hamilton that reminded me of being back in the UK, in the Peak District or even up in Scotland. Most of Tasmania reminded me of the landscapes in the UK, and the weather seemed to be quite British too. But as we got closer to Hobart the weather got milder and we went to see some Tasmanian Devils in a reserve just outside the city. The rest of the group from the campervan flew back to Melbourne while I stayed in Hobart with Ben for another few days. Hobart is a really nice little city, the atmosphere is really laid back and the beer is really good. We stayed with Eric and his housemates, who we had stayed with on our first night in Hobart, they were a really great group of people, we drank and partied with them almost every night.

The main attraction in Hobart is the Mona Art Gallery. It is a mix of old art and modern art which is strange in some way. For example, one of the pieces is a machine which digests food. You feed it and it will eventually defecate. While I thought a lot of the art didn’t make any sense, there were some very interesting pieces to see. Definitely worth seeing if you are in Hobart.

Australia Blog Posts, Blog Posts

Week 118: Adelaide to Melbourne – The ‘Great’ Ocean Road

Posted on 13/10/2013

Last weekend I arrived in Adelaide after a quick dash across Australia, north to south. We were lucky to find a cool place to stay in Adelaide for a few days. Ryan, who I travelled from Carnarvon to Broome with, was still in Broome as I was arriving in Adelaide. He had met a couple who were from Adelaide, so he asked them if they could recommend a place. They suggested that we went to stay in their house because all the housemates were in the process of moving out. We stayed with the remaining housemate, Mazair, an architecture student from Iran, and had frequent visits from Mark who was moving the last of his stuff out and let us stay in his room. We spent the days exploring the city and visiting the beach, then on Friday we picked up our next relocation vehicle.

Our new car was a 2 wheel drive camper-van, we headed out towards Melbourne, along the coast, so that we could check out The ‘Great’ Ocean Road. I didn’t think it was all that great, but the Australian department of tourism had definitely invested a lot of money in creating a view point every 300 meters along the road. It is a beautiful place, but after hearing so much about this stretch of coastline, I was expecting it to be amazing. The main attraction along the road, is a place called The ‘Twelve’ Apostles. As strange as it may seem that these stacks are so popular, the strangest thing is that there isn’t, and never has been, twelve of them. This is because the tourism board started calling them ‘The Apostles’ but people just started calling them ‘The Twelve Apostles. I would say that the coastal road is worth visiting, it has some really beautiful spots, but try not to get too excited about it before you arrive.

I thought that the best part of the road was the last section (coming west to east). The road actually moved away from the coast, and instead took us through some beautiful hills and farmland with lots of cows and forested areas. This part of the road reminded me of places in the UK and Europe. We stopped off at a few rest areas in the forests and saw my first wild Koala. I arrived in Melbourne this afternoon and I’m staying with a friend of the girl who gave me a place to stay in Carnarvon. I will explore the city tomorrow and try to get an impression of the place, as I might be living and working here for the next 3 months (after I get back from Tasmania) to prepare for Asia.

Australia Blog Posts, Blog Posts

Week 117: Darwin to Adelaide

Posted on 09/10/2013

At the start of week 117 I arrived in the last town before the border, leaving Western Australia, Kununurra. We met up with a couple that we had been travelling with through the Kimberley and headed out to camp just outside the town. The next day we spent the day in the library, trying to arrange our separate plans from Kununurra onwards. In the afternoon we dropped Marco off at a hostel and then the five remaining people of the group (me, Ben, Lucie, Jono and Yumi), set out to Lake Argyle. The lake is man made and covers around 1000 square Km. We stayed at the official campsite and watched the sunset from an infinity pool which looked down over the lake.

The next morning me and Ben got on a bus which took us 830Km, over the border into the Northern Territory to Darwin. We were planning to stay in Darwin for a while but would then split, so that Ben would fly to Melbourne and I would travel down the east coast. But the morning after we arrived in Darwin we managed to find a lift from Darwin to Alice Springs (that’s 1,500Km) for just $25 each. So we decided at the last moment to change our plans and got a lift with this guy. That night we stopped at a small town about half way down our route and got very drunk with a friend of Joel (our lift). We had decided to change out plans because it is the school holidays in Australia at the moment, so flights are very expensive. As an alternative to flying Ben was looking into ‘relocations’. This is basically driving a rental car back to a city after someone has finished renting it. It’s a cheap way to travel.

So, when we arrived in Alice Springs, we picked up the relocation vehicle, a 4×4 camper, and drove out towards Uluru. I was expecting Uluru to be rubbish, and in truth it wasn’t really all that good, I know that it is the largest rock in the world and that it also has some interest as an Aboriginal spiritual site, but I don’t really care about seeing the biggest of any specific kind of thing if it’s not interesting in the first place and I visited a lot of areas in the Kimberley which were Aboriginal spiritual sites but were also places of amazing natural beauty. Not that I am saying Uluru isn’t a nice place to visit, but I don’t think it deserves the publicity it gets. But I guess you have to go see it while you are in Australia. I actually thought that Kata Tjuta was better, these are the big hills that are shown on the picture above, they are in the same national park as Uluru so we visited them in the morning and moved on to Uluru for the sunset.

From there we headed the rest of the way south to Adelaide where the relocation needed to be returned to. So this week we travelled 4,500Km, from the top of Australia to the bottom, along a lot of long, straight, dry, hot, desert roads. But now that we are in the south it is starting to become summer and although it is a lot cooler than it had been in the north, it is more comfortable down here. My plan is to work in Melbourne for a couple of months, while I get my bicycle and everything prepared for Asia, then I’ll see the east coast of Australia just before my visa expires and I leave Australia.

Australia Blog Posts, Blog Posts

Weeks 115 & 116: Karijini and The Kimberley

Posted on 30/09/2013

Week 115 started off in Exmouth, on the far north of the west coast of Australia. From there we headed inland to Karijini National Park. The park is on the edge of a town called Tom Price, so we called into town to restock on supplies before heading into the park for a few days. The park is made up of several huge gorges which you can hike through, and waterfalls with cool water in the plunge pools for swimming.

We camped in the park for a few days before we hit the road again to head north, to Broome. Broome is a tourist town on the coast with some really nice beaches, but we didn’t want to hang around on the beach. Instead we wanted to head through one of the best regions in Australia, the Kimberley. Unfortunately the group we met in Carnarvon only had a 2 wheel drive car, and the Kimberley needs a 4 wheel drive, so we checked Gumtree for a ride and luckily enough, we set off the next morning with a new group.

So the new group was made up of Me and Ben, a French girl called Lucie and a German guy called Marco, we set off together at the start of week 116. Before hitting the dirt roads we bought our last cold beers in a town called Derby, and headed into the Kimberley. The Kimberley is a huge region which is mostly unpopulated, other than a few roadhouses and a couple of Aboriginal reserves. There are loads of National Parks along the way that you can visit, with gorges and waterfalls.

Most travellers stick with the Gibb River road which heads straight through the Kimberley, but we wanted to head up to the north to the lesser visited Mitchell Falls, and also visit the Aboriginal reserve, Kalumburu. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what I found when I got there. The town is run by a Catholic Mission, which runs the camp site, the petrol station and the shop. Everything is very expensive because the town is so far away from anywhere else and you have to pay $50 for a permit just to enter the town, the food is twice as expensive as anywhere else and most of it is out of date, as Marco said ‘When they have you by the balls, that’s when they squeeze’.

We stayed in the reserve for a couple of nights before heading back down south to the Gibb River road, and continuing east. We visited more gorges and swimming holes, where I took some cool video with my GoPro, which should be up on Youtube as soon as I get the chance to edit it. Our last stop off in the Kimberley was a place called El Questro, we had heard a lot about this place and were looking forward to it. The main attraction, a thermal spring, wasn’t so good, but El Questro Gorge and Emma Gorge were both amazing. Great walks through the gorges with beautiful pools at the end of them to swim and cool down at the end of the walk.

Now me and Ben are hoping to meet up with Ryan and V (the guys we travelled to Broome with), so that we can continue together up to Darwin. It will be nice to see them again!