New Zealand: North Island

Hello!
How are you? I hope this finds you well although as I write this I hear that a giant volcanic eruption in Iceland has left the UK covered in ash. I actually happen to be in Chiang Mai, a city in Northern Thailand now, following a 12 hour bus journey, a 14 hour wait and another 16 hour train journey! All that has brought me to, among other things, cheap internet, so here I am!

I arrived in Auckland, NZ, on the 20th Feb some annoying time in the middle of the night. In the early hours I opted to stay in a terrible multi-storey hostel and as a result decided to leave town as fast as possible! I used the same system that I had to find a car in WA, which was to take a look on gum tree and indeed I found a french Dr with a van looking for a crew. She was joined eventually by myself and 2 Dutch girls, all of us recently graduated psychologists.

So with this new team and our shiney convertible toyota car/ van thing we headed off north up into Northland (ie. the land north of Auckland) and first of all to the bay of islands. In the bay of islands we took a boat trip in th hope of spotting some dolphins and swimming with them, but this did not come off and the consolation world's-smallest-penguin was not quite so impressive. Still, not to put the place down, Bay of Islands is a very scenic spot, with many similarities to the west coast of Scotland, or Ireland, but with better weather, and some say more dolphins.

From the Bay of Islands we continued North to Cape Reinga, the sacred Maori place where you look across breath taking cliff tops to sea the waves crash in mid-ocean as the Tasman and Pacific seas meet with a light skirmish against each other. The spot is also marked by the epic sand boarding that you can do on the nearby 'giant sand dunes' which did yurn out to be fairly mountainous and were alot of fun. Sandboarding is really a cross between sledging and body boarding on sand, but faster, and with the occasional highlight of some lads boardshorts being ripped straight off as they went for an over-ambitious jump.

From Cape Reinga we decided to make a bee-line to Rotorua, the centre of strange and wonderful thermal/ volcanic things. However unfortunately we had badly misjudged the small matter of distances and by near midnight we had not even got back to Auckland. However this cloud did luckily come with a silver lining as we found oursleves parking up in the coolest campsite in the world. It was actually part campsite, part reconstructed 19th centuary NZ and part fun park full of more free games and activities than you could do in a week, but we settled for spending a few hours on the trampoline. It was here that my 22nd Birthday began and many hours later (after taking a picninc lunch in Cambridge) in a hot spring in Rotorua.

summary...

hey guys,

If you have been trying to follow this blog at all then you will see that I got bit distracted as things got hectic and not staying with people anymore made internet an expensive pass time!

Here is a summary of what I have been up to since christmas...

1. New Year's spent in Sydney, camping all day to watch the fire works at midnight, great fun!
   
2. My parents came out to visit, after a few days in Sydney we flew back up to the Whitsunday Islands where we chartered a boat and sailed and snorkelled our way wound the picturesque set of islands. We were most lucky with the weather in what is actually rainy season!
   
3. Headed back down the coast to Sydney where I took a flight over to Perth on the West Coast.
   
4. A friend from the Cambridge WIndsurf Club picked me up at Perth and I stayed with him a couple of nights while exploring the city and going windsurfing on the Swan River!! fantastic!
   
5. Moved outof central Perth to hip Fremantle, where I enjoyed some west coast beaches and the Australia Day fireworks!
   
6. The day after Australia Day left Perth to travel North up the coast to Broome in a classic old volvo with 3 Germans (quickly dropped to 2)
   
7. First stop was the Pinnacles Dessert, followed by camping near the beach for a beautiful sea sunset (now we were on the west coast). Then onwards up to the seaside town of Geraldton where we spent a memorable (/no memory at all) with some Irish lads in the campsite.
   
8. Camped a couple of nights in the stunning Kalbarri national park where we trekked through a red dirt gorge in in the burning sun and also dropped in for some daily pelican feeding!
9. Carried on northward up to Exmouth where the Ningaloo reef lurks just offshore. Snorkelling from Turquoise Bay we saw reef sharks, turtles, corals, starfish and lots of cool stuff!
10. From Exmouth we headed inland to Karujini National Park, a small but impressive national park at the meeting point of 4 gorges. We clambered our way down gorges and through caves to leap into private water holes framed by giant red cliffs, an awesome very Australian feeling experience! On the down side the infamous outback flies drove us nearly insane.
11. We arrived in Broome after camping one more night by the road side to cover the distance. The hottest place I have ever been! Even the swimming pools felt too hot here in the wet season. On the bright side though we got a persnal tour from a friend we had met down in Fremantle and spent the night doing a pool crawl (driving between different resort pools and jumping in at night when no one was looking! :) )
12. Flew back down to Perth with Charlotte (one of the germans I drove up with) and we spent a day cycling and snorkelling around Rottnest Island. just off the coast of Perth. The jet boat style ferry to the idyllic island made our day!
13. After a bit of debate about how to spend my lat week in Aus I decided to fly first back to Sydney to see some friends their one last time, take a bus up to Byron Bay for one lats time and then fly out of Brisbane airport. A great end to a great 3.5 months in this sunny country!
    

Chrisso

With Sydney still a little further away than expected we decided to hit the happening sea-side town of Byron Bay for Christmas. We though we would celebrate the occasion by staying a whole 3 mights in one place! Although due to the collapse of our $5 charity tent after night 2 we did end up moving from one side of the campsite to the other so take refuge a hug tent owned by a couple of Dutch girls.

We arrived much later than planned on Christams Eve (partly due to the bizarre 1 hour time differnce when you cross the, err, North/ South divide between New SouthWales and Queensland and I set up camp while Jonno got down top the important task of brewing the mulled wine. We thought we had purchased a good 5 litres of red goon for the purpose but it turned out to be white. Luckily white mulled wine was an absolute triumph and som of th best I have ever tasted. After a lie in on Christmas morning we exchanged ou not-so-secret sant presents and christmas cards and then headed down to the beach where we lounged for most of the day, apart from when we were getting angry waiting 2 hours for a bit a bbq space to cook our traditional backpacker christmas stir fry.

We had planned to spend the evening partying down on the beach, which was a fine idea. Sadly having got totlly lost walking back to our campsite and spending a few gazzillion hours wandering around instead of 30 minutes we didn't quite have the energy left to go back into town and instead whiled the night away playing cards with a group of 3 dutch we met at the campsite (whose tent we would later retreat to). We had a little more success the next day by driving into town and back to our campsite in their car (so we didnt have the chance to get lost) and after a valiant effort at surfing we just about managed to party in the evening before all crashing out early and needing to go to bed.

Back down again...

So they say what goes up must come down...and so it was that having reached the most northerly point of my travels I must start to head south again to Sydney away from the tropics and back to the cosmopolitan with just 2 weeks until Christmas and 3 until my parents were arriving in Sydney coming to see Australia for themselves, and to check I was still alive etc.

Our first stop was Airlie beach, gateway to the Whitsundays, a group of small picturesque islands off the Queensland Coast ideally suited to cruising about in a yacht over a few days, awash with snorkel spots and silica beaches. Sadly despite being a big backpacker destination it is also a fairly exclusive and expensive place full of posh island resorts. I was also wary of much here first time around as I knew I would be back for a week with my parents the following month. Having almost decided that it was too expensive to do anything here we took a last walk into the tour agents to ask about deals and settled on a standby rate for and inclusive resort on nearby Long Island. We raced to catch the earliest ferry we could and once on the island determinedly worked our way through kayaking, tennis, bush walking, swimming, crazy golfing, snorkeling (again in silly stinger suits) and eating (and stashing) as much as we could from the buffet, oh and picnicking with a giant monitor lizard!

Refreshed from our break in Airlie Beach the next spot we aimed for was Hervey Bay where we stayed a day before joining a group of 7 other backpackers in a landrover to explore Fraser Island. The biggest sand barrier island in the world.For the trip we got an extensive briefing on 4wd driving as there are no roads on Fraser, just sand tracks, beaches and alot of dingos (wild dogs!). The first obstacle though was to meet at 7am in the morning with a bunch of other backpackers and try to decide what and how much food to buy for 3 days for 9 people (not a calculation any of us had done often) let alone how much alcohol we would also require! Luckily we still j

ust about made it intime for the 9o'clock ferry and were happily pushing landrovers out of sandpits by mid morning.

It was an awesome few days of powering up and down beaches, jumping in crystal clear rain water lakes and camping out under the stars. At night the sand would sparkle if you moved it due to tiny phosphorescent particles that released light when activated by movement, a surreal addition to the beautiful landscape!


Sadly though the trip did wind to an end, and as we caught the ferry back tothe mainland a thunder storm ripped across the skies. We returned to Hervey Bay just inorder to make our way down to the nearby Rainbow Beach, the first place on our journey south not covered by the Great Barrier Reef (which is flipping huge!) and therefore the first place with waves! Rainbow was a small and quiet town, relaxing after the major backpacker hotspots we had been in before, we liked it so much we turned our 1 day trip into a 2.5 day stay and happily spent our timetrying to learn to surf...and kind of succeeding, standing up pretty regularly on a big board with small waves and thinking we looked much cooler than we really did! Surf wasn't the only thing Rainbow had going for it though, as a short walk out of town there was an enourmous sand blow (a huge area of sand, a bit like a dune but further inland and much larger area) on top of a cliff which gave fantastic views out to sea and round the coast on the one side and inland over miles of bush and rivers on the other. Accompanied by the harmonica, and a few litres of good lemonade we waited there until darkness and a massive thunder storm came in before making a run for it down the dune, through town and back to our tent. We paid the guy who rented out surf boards one 6 pack of beer for 2 night camping in his backyard and in return he gave us the consolation leaving gift of fresh mackerel, caught by himself that morning that we took down to the beach a barbequed straight away.

By now Christmas was fast approaching and we had decided that when it came Byron Bay was where we wanted to be. There was just one place left in mind to reach before then and that was Noosa, a busy beach town another short hop down the coast from Rainbow. Noosa was a large town compared to most paces we had been so far and the 24 hours or so we were there weren't enough to really do it justice apart from for a couple of walks I took through its Nature Reserve on a search for koalas which I finally did spot (very cute picture to follow!) on my way home from the second walk having pretty much given up.

Up Top

At Cairns, while enjoying some time relaxing by the lagoon and planning our next few days we met a new friend, Jono, who I've now been travelling with for several weeks. Sitting on a wall by the sea we discovered that we had both just graduated in science degrees, were starting teach first next year taking a gap year on the way and had both just done the same trek in
Nepal. It was enough coincidences to keep us chatting long enough to decide to hire a car together along with Sarah and drive on up to Cape Tribulation, the most northerly you can go on the East Coast on sealed roads, after that its a 4wd adventure.

Having arrived in Cairns on a sunday we spent monday chilling out and getting organised and then headed up on the tuesday. It was a meagre 1.5 hours up the coats first to a place called mossman to swim in their famous gorge full of rapids that turned out to make a pretty bumpy waterslide! We also bumped into a bunch of 4 kiwi guys who had been in our hostel the night before and we seemed to have the same sorts of plans. From Mossman we carried on up to the cape stopping only for some freshly made icecream from local fruits (including the 'chocolate pudding plant') and then on to our campsite. The receptionist happily told us happily that even though the area is renowned for its killer saltwater crocs and literally lethal jelly fish (including a close relative of the portuguese man of war) she regularly runs in and out of the water and we ought to give it a go! She also let us know that the legendry cassowary had been seen about our camp, a bird the sixe of an ostrich with black and blue plumage we had been looking out for all day! Unfortunately we didn't spot a cassowary but on the other hand nothing ate us or stung us to death so overall I think we came off well. The afternoon was spent wondering through boardwalks in the rainforest and the the evening was spent making camp fires with the kiwis and the star gazing on a stunning deserted tropical beach, it was a moment when you have to pinch yourself that its still real.

After the cape myself and Jono dropped Sarah back in town as she was on a quest to Tasmania to refind her true love whom she had met 2500km further south and headed into the Atherton Tablelands. It is an area of high ground inland of Cairns full of picturesque lakes, waterfalls and wild life. The first night as we drove around the lake looking for a campsite a stunning crimson sunset was followed up by what looked like a trail of lava across he hill. It took a moment to realise that what we could see was several mile of forest fires!

Although we did eventually find an open campsite the peace did not last long as I woke up half way through the night with an eye so swollen I could hardly open it! In the morning we delayed our trip to the Tablelands to go via Atherton hospital where we sat in the waiting room and ate cereal with long life milk out of plastic bowls with 2 of the jokers from a pack of cards as we had forgotten our spoons. It was I think perhaps my most quintessential backpacker moment so far. The mystery of the swollen eye was solved after the long ditherings of a plump junior doctor by a House like figure who strode in trailed by all the female stud

ent doctors in the hospital (not a big place) and gave a decisive run down of possibilities, problems and solutions, deemed a certain prescription suitable and swooshed out again.

We set off to explore, first stop the "Giant Curtain Fig Tree" of which we were both seriously cycical and both extremely impressed as a growth that Tolkein himself would have been gutted to have missed out of Lord of the Rings, had he got the chance to see it. This followed up by a series of giant waterfalls, some deep ethical discussions, a few tyre skids and the decision that this was quite fun and

we might aswell carry on travelling together so we booked back into the same youth hostel and got excited about diving on the Great barrier Reef the next day.

Diving was particularly exciting for me since I had only dived 6 time before (4 on my Open Water course) so although I was qualified I was far from experienced and these promised to be my first ever unguided dives. The reef is actually a couple of hours by boat off the coast of Cairns (or at least the good diving is) and so we settled in for our boat trip on deck, trying to tan on the waay to our first

dive site "labyrinth". I was guided afterall for this die as a group of us less experienced ones buddied up with each other and were led by a Dive Master incase any of us had forgotten the basics, and after diving we were allowed as long as we wanted snorkelling off the back, clad in the extremely sexy 'stinger suite', an all in one lycra creation designed to defend one against the tentacles of killer jellyfish which unfortunately roam these waters along with the killer crocodiles and killer sharks. I did have fun though playing with myunderwaater camera (see opposite) and the reef was often shallow and good for snorkelling too. It was at the second site though that I really had fun! Now allowed to roam free of a guide, I buddied up with Jono and his previous dive partner and we reeled about, somersaulting and exploring tunnels and crevices in the coral. It was like escaping the teacher on a school trip, except for...underwater, and in Australia.

Road Trip!!!

Right! Ok, so after the hippie music festival I headed further north to the so-called "gold coast" in a car with Ammon and Sarah. The Gold Coat is an infamous sport for surfing and partying, the epicentre of which is ata place called "Surfer's Paradise", it used to be called Elkton or something but when it didn't bring in enough tourists it changed its name to be called after the nearest hotel, Surfer's Paradise, and has never looked back! It is now the Miami equivalent here with high rise buildings, malls, bars and many ways to part with cash. Oh and a big gold beach with surf. Thats what I hear at least because we stayed just down the coast from surfers in a very sophisticated apartment of a friend of Sarah's who doe something well payed in supermarkets and while she started work at a new job we fully took advantage of her new pool and beach location :)

We used the time on the gold coast there (Palm Beach to be specific) to decide on our routes onwards. I had left Sydney with the aim of seeing what turned up, Ammon had a car to return to Sydney (as he was weirdly uninsured to drive in a different state! Which incidently also has an hours time difference despite being on the same longitude) and Sarah had a one-way bus ticket to Cairns. My dilemma was that I wanted to go North but was wary of getting stuck in Cairns, 4000km from Sydney with only very expensive routes back! I decided to sign up for a car relocation for the hire company Apollo who needed a car delivered to Cairns in 4 days and would pay up to $250 of fuel and give me the car for free to do it! Luckily Sarah took pity and decided to accompany me and so we set off for Brisbane the next day to pick up the car.

After taking the wrong turn out of the train station 3 times on the way to the hire place we finally picked up our car (named WOU after a distinctive number plate) and invested $10 per day for a sat nav that we named Berty, who was not always on the ball and certainly easily confused but I'm sure meant well. The car was a shiney air conditioned automatic Toyota with cruise control, by far the slickest number I have ever driven and it certainly felt like backpacking in style! We took along our tent and provisions and stopped off first at the Galss House Mountains. Tese are a very distinctive land formation that look not much like mountains but are names after the glass houses in Kent apparently. They rise with vertical sides out of a completely flat plane and are apparently volcanic plugs in old tectonic hotspots which thousands of years ago were the same height as the land around them but now that land has sunk they remain like great volcanic posts on the landscape.

That nigh we set up camp in Bundaberg, a small sea-side town infamous here as the brand name for a large percentage of the nations alcoholic beverages. Howver we were more interested in the loggerhead turtles who lay there eggs on its beaches and once it was dark we went over to sign up for a $10 trip down to watch. It was an incredible sight to see the huge (100kg) turtle lay its eggs, then thoroughly bury them and return to the sea (it all took about an hour and she laid over 100 eggs) although we did share the experience with about 40 other keen spectators!

In the morning we headed off early with great ambitions to arrive at Eungella National Park, inland from the Whitsundays, another 600km or so up the coast. We also took our lunch break at Rockhampton where we visited our firts Aboriginal Cultural centre where apart from having a good chat with some aboriginees we were given a personal didgereedoo recital and taught to throw a boomerang! (Well at least made a start). From there we went on up to some well-regarded caves where we were given a tour round by someone clearly just out of the girl guides and learnt about how some people get married in the caves there which could only summon Miss Havisham style imagery! The cherry on top though was that walking out I saw my first wild kangaroos and wallabies (smaller kangaroos) which was very exciting!

The next 350km up to Eungella certainly felt long, and unfortunately Sarah's driving liscence had expired leaving me to cover all the miles with a steady supply of coke and cheese straws for focus. After a very unfortunate hour detour due to missing a sign post we arrived at the Platypus Bushcamp an enchanting little campsite in the middle of the forest! Unfortunately despite our 80km detour the platypus that we got up at 5.30am to look for did not appear...possibly because a barramundi fish presented itself instead but we just cant be sure! Still, with less mileage to do the next day we chilled out in rubber rings at the water hole there for a happy while before hitting the road again this time aiming for Townsville, the capital of Far North Queensland, for no more particular reason than being in the right place. We arrived and found fpr the first time we were not the only campers and actually had to share the site with others! It is strange thing here that actually there are so many amazing things in Australia that there never seem to be many people at each one...they are simply too spread out! After a very long walk into town the main highlight was a race up a giant spiders wed climbing frame on the beach there and a very nice esplanade!

On our final day we set out at 8am giving us time to visit Mission Beach before returning the car to Cairns. The beach was a beautiful secluded spot and on getting out our lovely AC car we realised we had finally reached the tropics! Palm trees and rainforest surrounded us and we also enjoyed some thai noodles from a little local market. We delivered the car just about on time and after a whistle stop tour of the coats and alot of fun had arrived at our destination!