Hello NZ…

My last few days in Oz were a mash of busses and blurry nights. Having done so much up the East Coast, there was not much time for sitting back and relaxing. Magnetic Island sits just off the coast from Townsville, and if you find yourself in the right place I am told that you are in for a good time,  but I ended up on the other side of the island, where there is not much to do. My advice, stay at Base, it’s more of a bar and club than a place to stay!

Holding a little croc

After this, we headed to the Johnstone River Crocodile Park, which you can get at discounted prices through the Oz Experience. It;s a brilliant few hours! The park is actually a farm, where they farm crocodiles for meat. We were told it’s very similar to farming cows, except that these cows can kill you if they wanted to. The guides feed them chickens with no regard for their own life, and it gets a little dodgey when they tell you that one of the crocs they are feeding tends to go mental every now and again and kills the females. But it’s still a great experience!

After shooting up the remainder of the coast and spending one night in Cairns (which is not enough to experience both the heat and the things to do there. Again I am told that it is amazing place to stay for a few days. Maybe next time) it was time to get to the adrenaline capital of the world; New Zealand.

On landing, once again, I was moving from hot to cold. But this time I was prepared with hoodies and coats. I didn’t get into the hostel until 12.30 am and I had only had an hours sleep in Cairns (the night life is fantastic!) so it was straight to bed.

Christchurch is one of the biggest cities in New Zealand, and yet it is still smaller than most of the places I have visited over the past few months. It is more of a stop over point as you cruise through the South Island, with not much around it in the way of the Backpacker lifestyle.

What has to be noted about NZ is that there is a lot of nothing in between towns, but that makes way for the most breathtaking views I have seen so far. One minute you will be looking over massive green fields surrounded by enormous ferns, and the next you are driving through a canyon steeped in mountains. It is incredible!

One of first things I saw in NZ

The next couple of weeks is to be riddled with skiing, bungee jumping, sky diving, the list goes on. Its going be a heart pumping few weeks!

Matt M

STA UK WTI 2010

Whitehaven heaven!!

It’s becoming something that I am saying a lot, and I know there is only a limited amount of times that I can say it. I have just been to the most beautiful place on the planet (I wonder what the next one might be)

Perfection in Beach form

Whitsundays is a collection of islands of Airlie Beach. They have been classed as a ‘National Heritage Site’ which means that no building can be built on them, and the waters are policed heavily. The islands are surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef which only adds to the beauty of this place.

Driving yachts is fun!

From Airlie Beach, visitors jump on any number of boats for a variety of days and head over to the islands to take in the scenery. We ended up on The Hammer.

Luckily the weather was holding out (which we were told was not the case for the past couple of weeks) and we got clear blue skies the whole way round.

Our first stop was Whitehaven Beach. Which looks as if it has been brought in from a movie set. It does not look as though it should be real, but when you feel the sand under your feet (which is the softest sand I have even stood on) all you can do is look around and laugh. How the hell did I end up here??

The softest sand you will ever feel

It was on this day, that back at home, all my friends in the drama department at Exeter were donning their gowns and mortar boards for graduation. I had a very different picture, using my cowboy hat from Kroombit as my mortar board and an Australian towel as my gown with the traditional blue screen background being replaced by a view over the Whitsundays islands. Perfect.

Right now, we are out of the jelly fish season, so there is no serious danger, but the crew on the boats are still obligated to giving you stinger suits to wear before you go in the water. Standing on the most perfect beach in the world, looking at the clearest water in the world, with not a cloud in the sky, there is NO WAY that was going to be putting on what can only be described as a thin wet suit to go swimming. Besides, the crew weren’t even doing it either. Which is how I got my first ever jelly fish sting. Don’t jump ahead though, it felt as if someone had starched me pretty hard, and the sting that comes with it wouldn’t go away. James, one of the crew members, said that we would know if it was serious in 20 minutes was I might start feeling funny, I hope he was joking.

Like with Fraser Island, there is no light pollution around these islands. In fact it is even less so. Again, we were very lucky. There was not a cloud in the sky, which meant that for the first time in my life I got to see the edge of the Milky Way. Awesome stuff!

Whitsundays is one of the places that I wish I didn’t have to leave. I could sit on Whitehaven beach for my entire life and never get tired of the view both during the day and at night. But of course, we have to move on.

It’s getting even hotter now, and the scenery is getting more and more beautiful. 2 more days of Oz fun times ahead!

Matt M

STA UK WTI 2010

‘Ride ‘em Cowboy…’

The Oz experience is a pretty good way to get you up (or down) the East Coast of Australia. It’s a hop-on-hop-off service, meaning that you can get off wherever you want and stay there for however long you want, calling them up the day before you want to leave to get on the next bus out (of course do this sooner in high season or you might be trapped for a while. All of the people on the bus are like minded travellers, and the drivers try and make this as enjoyable as they can. Included in the price of the bus ticket (which varies depending on the kind of package that you buy) are several activities you can do as you go like surfing, lawn bowels (!) and the Kroombit Cattle Station.

Me and Pipsie

If anyone has watched any kind of cowboy film, then you will know what I am talking about. Kroombit is in the middle of nowhere (so remote in fact that in 1995 they found and downed WW2 plane that had been ‘missing’ since 1946, it was apparently not in any way hidden, it was just that no one walked past it in almost 50 years) and the people who work on this farm (made up of both locals and backpackers working for accommodation… as a cowboy!) spend their days moving goats around the enormous expanse of land they own and cracking whips.

When you come here, you get to share in that experience. I can now say that I can ride a horse!

The beauty of being a Cowboy

There are so many different things you can do at this place. Quad biking, Horse riding, Goat Mustering, Shooting and there is something called a goat rodeo, that everyone gets involved in at the end of the day, which constitutes of dragging a goat out of its pen, lifting and turning it over and simulating the branding on their arses (of course we were only using a rod painted red at the end). It’s a lot of fun!

Then the winners of the goat rodeo (depending on the time it took you to brand your goat) choose either ‘the circle of love’ or ‘the ring of fire’. For us it was ‘the ring of fire’, which turned out to be all twenty of us standing in a circle holding hands while our guide stuck a cattle prod into someone on the other side of the circle, sending 11,000 volts (apparently) through us all. I find myself wanting to know what ‘the circle of love’ my have included. He then asked for volunteers to have the rod put directly on them. Being who I am, I stepped up and he promptly stuck the rod on my bare stomach. Poor cows.

In the evening, there’s a buffet dinner (there’s a lot of these up the East Coast), whip cracking lessons and a Bucking Bronco. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago I was in the concrete jungle of Sydney.

It’s starting to get hotter as well, and yet this is still winter over here. I can’t imagine what summer is like.

Matt M

STA UK WTI 2010

Breakfast with a real life Cowboy...

Duuuuude…

I went Surfing for the first time back in Newquay in Cornwal about 8 years ago. Here, I was lucky enough to get a private lesson (friend of a friend type thing) which meant that I was able to stand up by the end of the lesson. I remembered how much fun it had been back then, and was so eager to get back out on the board in Spot X, on of the places that the Oz Experience will take you to on the way up the East Coast. It will cost you AU$50 to stay here, but that includes a buffet style dinner, buffet style breakfast, your four our surf lesson the next day, and an incredible lunch after you get back to the camp (which is optional and if you do not want to have it you can knock AU$5 off the price of the stay, but believe me, you will WANT to have this lunch!).

The night before you get your lesson, after dinner, there’s a chance for you to get to know your fellow surfers and your instructors over a camp fire, a guitar, and a box of goon. Cue some slightly inebriated camp fire sing alongs. I love my job.

The next morning it’s straight out onto the water. And I am proud to say that I got standing on my first try. It then took me a further 45 minutes to do it again. Beginners luck indeed. Once you have the hang of it though, it get addictive, and I can see why these guys do it for a living. I can also see why they are so fit, after four hours of this I was exhausted and all my muscles were aching. The most exercise I’ve done in a long while.

Nearer the end of the lesson, myself a Charlie, I guy I met on the bus, were getting up the board most of the times we caught a wave. And as they started to call everyone back into the beach, we went out to catch out last couple of bigger waves. On the penultimate surf, we both starting paddling under a wave about 2 metres high (this might be inaccurate, but to me, this wave was 2 metres high) and after a bit of a wobble both got up and standing. Realising how close we were standing to each other, we high-fived, and promptly fell off. How many times can you say you have done that?

Again, I love my job.

Matt M

STA UK WTI 2010

5 days in Sydney

It’s been 7 months since I was last in Sydney, and back then I was in the height of their summer. The picture that I had in my head before I set off two weeks before christmas, was of sitting on the beach on Christmas Day, nursing a barbecue and watch Santa’s surf down Bondi Beach.

I was horribly disappointed.

Apparently it is the worst Christmas (weather wise) they have had in years, so it was annoying that this was the year that I decided to head over there. It rained a lot and wasn’t even that hot at the best of times.

The Oz version of 'Winter'

On my return, in the height of their winter, I was in for a nice surprise. We pulled into the Woodduck Inn, a hostel just off Kings Cross, and headed up to their top deck which over looks the observation tower and Hyde Park. And there was not a cloud in the sky. Not only that, I was stripping off the four layers I had donned in preparation for the cold. The fist guy we met was actually sitting in the sun in shorts and not much else “catching a tan”… in the middle of winter… go figure.

The Woodduck is a fantastic place. The people working there were brilliant, and it was also full of backpackers working for accommodation, some of whom had been there for a good long while (it seems that the inspiration to actually find a job is quite had when you are living in this place for free and are surrounded by people wanting to have a good time) so we already had a head start in finding the best places to go.

The Opera House

There are obviously the standard things that one goes to see when in Sydney; the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the Botanical Gardens (pronounced Booww-taaaanicaal by the Welsh Paul who had been working in the Woodduck for just a week but had settled in straight away) and The Rocks (it has to be said that The Rocks is an entire area of shops, houses and bars, all with a very rustic feel, and all very cosy. There is a pub crawl that you can do which takes you to all the bars in the area, and will take about three days, but it is a little more pricey here that other places you might go. Here, is more of a place to go and get some food. And what food it is!), but for the more backpacker cheep deals, we found The Gaff.

It’s a small bar/restaurant/club/general place all backpackers go after a bag of ‘goon’, and some of the deals you can find in here are amazing. It’s no Ivy, and certainly isn’t Fabric (a restaurant and club in London respectively for those who have no idea what I’m referring to) but the food that comes out is some of the best that I have had on this trip. The Woodduck has a long-standing relationship with them (as with the sister hostel, Boomerang) which means that you get even more money off with them than usual. I had an incredible steak and a drink for AU$6, and on nights out, the amount of free drinks vouchers that fly around is brilliant!

If you find yourself in Sydney for a few days, and are looking for a good night on the town, there is something called the Oz Party Bus, and is exactly what it sounds like. The guys who own the company bought an old but and gutted it, filling it with speakers and disco lights. They pick you up from certain points around the town and then take you to five bars and clubs around Sydney (ending in The Gaff) and it can get pretty hectic. If you think about what it is like on the underground in rush hour when a train comes to an abrupt stop, add 3 bars with a free drink at each and dancing people. You get the idea.

Fun at the Woodduck Inn

The (vaguely) Blue Mountains

It is in Sydney that you can get the chance to go and see the Blue Mountains, given their name because from a distance they look ever so slightly blue thanks to the millions of Eucalyptus trees growing on them. Now while these mountains are fairly spectacular, and the ‘Three Sisters’ formation is pretty nice, I have to say that it is not the most amazing thing I have seen on the trip so far. The tour itself was perfectly nice, but if you have been all over Australia before this, then you might not be so blown away by these mountains. By all means, go and see them if you want to, but don’t expect anything really special.

Heading up the East Coast now… all the way to Cairns in 13 days… wish us luck!!

Matt M

STA UK WTI 2010

Things can only get colder

With yet another England misery, came another amazing day in Hong Kong. Some how we had landed ourselves among the rich and famous of the Ex-Pats, and were chilling out next to a pool and being waited on hand and foot all day. The friends you make while travelling can land you in the strangest of places!

The drags of a 9-5

Quickly we had to come back to reality and leave the luxury of Hong Kong for Oz. We gave a fond farewell to our new friends (who offered to put us up for a few weeks next year for the ‘Sevens Tournaments’ which are apparently the best thing since sliced bread, and after experiencing the Hong Kong nightlife, I will be booking my flights back very soon), and set off for Melbourne. Stepping off the plane was a bracing experience. The last time I landed here, I was leaving winter and arriving in summer. Now, I was leaving 42ºC and landing in 9. I should not have been wearing shorts.

I will never under appreciate the joys of living in an English-speaking country again. The fact that we were able to go into a corner shop and ask for what we wanted without being confronted with a blank, dazed expression was heavenly.

Melbourne skyline up the Eureka Tower

YIt was all about catching up on lost time over the following days. We were back in hostels, back in dorms, and back to the real travelling life, and so there were no luxuries to distract from the job at hand. After hours of editing and uploading, we hit the streets of Melbourne, calling into STA Australia, who handed us free tickets to the 280 metre Eureka tower. Although higher, it was nothing compared to the thrill of the Macau Sky Tower!

If you ever find yourself in Melbourne, I urge you to go to Shanghai Dumplings, located on Tattersalls Lane, just off the main road. I was handed 15 dumplings of fried pork for a mere AU$5.60 (about £3.50), and they were fantastic, but beware that these will come out hotter than the sun. I am still recovering.

Off to Tasmania now, were I’m told it’s even colder than here…. god help me.

Matt M

STA UK WTI 2010

PS England went through second in the table and are now facing Germany, thank God I’m travelling the world as I watch this. Did watch it in a casino just off Federation Square though, and won a tidy sum. Every Cloud!!