From: Julian Edwards
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002
Subject: The latest dirt on the travelling twosome
Hi everyone!
I last emailed you from Brisbane and we've since covered a heck of a lot of 'kays' and are now in Adelaide.
You might recall that we said we were going to Byron Bay after Brisbane, which was still living up to it's reputation of a hippy town. Dave, Jude and Chris will be pleased to know that we stayed in the same hostel as we did three years ago and it's still the same (but Cockatoo Pete is touring Europe, apparently!). The only downer was that some of our clothes got nicked when they were hanging up to dry after we'd washed them, and we were stupid enough not to realise until we'd left Byron.... :(
We ended up spending a couple of days in Sydney before heading off to the Blue Mountains. I dragged Jenny around the exact same walk that I did three years ago and was still stunned by the impressive scenery around there. It more than makes up for the outrageous amount of steps to climb at the end of trail (I lost count - I was too knackered when I got to 1000). Any weight loss incurred on the exhausting walk was soon re-acquired in the pub later that afternoon, however. :)
We then headed off to Canberra, the nation's capital. This is one of those 'designer' cities, a bit like Washington DC in the USA, or the ubiqutous Milton Keynes. Unfortunately, the architect forgot to include character and anything interesting to do there! At least it had an Irish pub, so I forgot about everything during a lovely pint of Guinness.
The trip from there took us to Melbourne, which had just won the award of 'Most Livable City', so the Melbournians seemed to be strutting around a bit. It seemed like a nice place, but I dunno what all the fuss was about.
We decided at this point that we were going to hire a camper van and drive ourselves around the rest of Oz until we got back to Sydney at Christmas. We found an ad for a company in one of the backpacker magazines and fixed ourselves up with a van from 'Wicked Campervans'.
They set their vans apart with some, err, interesting artwork on the vans and ours had a huge frog on each side of it. It would not have looked out of place in Byron Bay, which was unfortunate as we were heading in the other direction ... We soon discovered a whole plethora of faults with the thing, the most embarrassing one being that as you turned off the engine it would backfire about 70% of the time. I'm not talking about a paltry 'phut' either, this would be more akin to standing next to someone with a shotgun as it blasted a huge flame out of the exhaust. I think we nearly gave several old men an early death from a heart attack...
Anyway, we thought a couple of weeks across the water in Tasmania would be just the thing to test the van out. We got the 10 hour ferry across and drove off with some renewed enthusiasm and hit the open road!
Tasmania lived up to all of my expectations - it's an incredible place and one of the last great wildernesses in the world. There are areas in the west where no person has ever set foot, it's so remote (which probably explains the proliferation of prisoner colonies there). The landscape is spectacular, ranging from wet and dry rainforests to something that looks like a moonscape. Since it's separate from the mainland of Australia, there is also (or seemed to be to me) a lot more wildlife there. At our first campsite we were greeted with possums, wallabies, koalas and various exotic looking birds that took great delight in swooping over our dinner trying to steal it.
And here we come to the other great thing about Tasmania - the roadkill! I mentioned in a previous message about the roadkill, but in Tassie it's just incredible. I think we saw a squished 'something' virtually every half mile or so, including all the above species plus tasmanian devils and wombats. How I managed to spend two weeks and nearly 2000km there without my own fresh kill, I don't know!
When we got back to Melbourne on the ferry, we promptly exchanged our mobile atom bomb for a different van which is much nicer. This one has a lot more street cred too with tinted windows and artwork of fantastic pictures from 'Return of the Jedi' all over it. Before we left Melbourne, we took it for a spin around Albert Park where the Formula One GP is held as it's a part street circuit. Aiiiii!
We headed west from Melbourne to the Great Ocean Road. This road was built over 100 years ago and took over ten years to complete around 300km. It was hacked out of the rock along one of the most rugged coastlines I've ever seen and provides for the most incredible scenery. It's no wonder that there are road signs all over the place warning that it's an accident blackspot!
Most of that part of the coast is limestone cliffs which are slowly being eroded by the sea. This has formed 'The Twelve Apostles' which are huge pillars of rock rising from the sea just off the coast.
After the Great Ocean Road, we've driven ourselves here, to Adelaide, via landscape that is slowly changing into a drier outback. It's here that I've finally had my fill of roadkill too, with a bird, a lizard and a close encounter with a koala bear. (And before you shout at me, I missed the koala by a few inches!)
There's a lot of vineyards around here - we've been in what we thought was a lot of them but I think we're only scratching the surface. The van is definitely riding a bit lower than it was with the extra weight from the bottles!
Well I had better sign off now. I'll finish with congratulations to Martyn and Andrea for the impending sprog. Andrea, I hope being finally fat isn't too much to bear for you :)
J&J.
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Julian Edwards
On tour, somewhere in the world, getting bitten by mosquitoes
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