Our Australian Adventure Begins

Our journey over to Australia was just a tad stressful with our first flight back to Singapore being delayed and leaving us with about half an hour to go through immigration and baggage claim and get back through departures! Fortunately our second flight was also delayed which gave us time to relax in the free massage chairs in Singapore airport.

Finally after 82 days of traveling, 32 hours of flights, 43 hours of train journeys, 8 hours on boats and 78 hours of bus journeys, we landed in Australia!

Our first stop was Perth where we spent our first day walking round the city, visiting the mint, the WA museum, the bell tower and kings park. Perth was not really what we were expecting and is a very small 'city' that can easily be walked around in about 5 minutes, so the following day we took a train down to Fremantle. Here we took a tour of Fremantle prison which was very interesting and definitely worth it. This prison was built by British convicts who were then persuaded to stay in Australia once they had served their sentence. Lashings and hangings took place here and the prison only closed down in 1991 when it still did not have proper toilets installed. We also discovered that multiple Todds, Corbetts and Andrews had been residents there!!

After the prison we took a look round the market, the shipwreck galleries, harbour and the round house. Fremantle is a really nice, sedate and cultural place to visit. On our way back to Perth we even saw some dolphins near the harbour!

Our second stop in Australia was Alice Springs. We spent one night here before getting up at 5am the following morning to head out on a tour to Ayers Rock and the outback. This was truly AMAZING!! The weather was a good 35oC+ for the three days and our tour guide was a quarter aboriginal so told us information and stories that not many others would know. Our first stop was at Kings Canyon where we did a 4 hour walk up to the top and around the edge of the canyon. The views were really good and at one point we all lay down an tuck our heads over the edge of the cliff to get a good view.

  That evening was spent 'camping' in the outback. All 21 of us sat around a camp fire eating kangaroo meat chilli and then sleeping in 'swags'. A swag is basically a large sleeping bag with a thin foam mattress in it that does up over your head. It was so hot though that everyone just slept on top of them hoping not to get attacked by snakes or any other animals (no one did) although some ended up with lots of ants for company. Unfortunately our journey to our 'campsite' involved a road kill.....Kangaroos sit on the side of the road and get blinded by the headlights so when the vehicle is about 5 metres in front of said kangaroo, it decides to run across the road in front of the car. There is nothing the driver can do at this stage so we ended up hitting one with a large bang! The next day was our Uluru (Ayers Rock) day! We started at the aboriginal cultural centre before embarking on a 10km, 2 hour walk round the base of Uluru. After lunch we did a couple of short walks with our tour guide, Micah, who told us lots of interesting stories along the way. The evening was spent watching the sunset at Uluru before spending another night on our swags, but at least we had toilets and showed at this campsite!!

 

  Our final morning was a very early one, getting up at 4 to head to Kata Tjuta to watch the sunrise by Uluru followed by 2 and a half hour walk through the Valley of the Winds at Kata Tjuta.

 
From here we headed back to Alice Springs playing various amusing games along the way including everyone doing karaoke, the weet-bix game and a quiz. Overall the three days were truly incredible, even though they were also very sweaty!! All three sites were amazing but different at the same time. We also saw lots of wild Kangaroos, Camels, Lizards, Thorny Devil Dragon Lizard, Eagles, Rabbits, Cows and Horses. In total we walked about 20km and drove 1428km! We definitely recommend finding the time to visit Uluru if you ever come to Australia!

Back in Alice Springs we had a rather expensive evening of dinner and drinks with our fellow Trekkers. Needless to say the next day was a very lazy one having had only 5 hours of sleep for the last 2 nights. So we headed into town and up Anzac hill for a view of Alice Springs before spending the afternoon by the pool and having a BBQ with friends we'd met on the tour.

After Alice, our next destination was Darwin. Arriving in Darwin was like stepping into a sauna - extremely hot and sticky! Our first day was spent exploring the local sights - the smith street mall, the Chinese temple, the waterfront, Biccentinial Park and we even spent a few hours cooling down at the Wave Lagoon.

The following day we decided to venture further afield and hopped on a bus to the Parap markets, from here we headed to the Darwin Museum which was pretty interesting, especially the gallery about Sweetheart the crocodile and cyclone Tracy. Again we had a lazy afternoon but this time over by Lake Alexander. Our final day in Darwin was spent on a crocodile jumping tour. This was awesome! We took a boat down the Adelaide River which has 2,500 crocodiles in it! In total we saw about 10 crocodiles in our hour trip, with a number of them jumping to grab boys of chicken within less than a metre of our boat!

From here we visited some termite mounds and cathedrals before going for a swim in Wangi Falls.

 

In the afternoon we visited Florence Falls and then our tour guide took 5 of us 'youngsters' on a swim through the jungle at Burley Rock pools which was really cool and peaceful!

Our day finished with champagne and prawns watching the sunset over Fannie Bay.

 By the time we left Darwin we had successfully set up our lives in Australia - we have bank accounts and debit cards, phones, tax files numbers and have registered with Medicare! You'd be surprised at just how easy it is - no long phone calls to customer services, only one form of ID, and you don't even need a permanent address!!

Our next stop after Darwin was Canberra, via a short overnight stop in Sydney. Canberra is a bit of a strange capital city - it's tiny, very quiet and has a limited number of attractions! The first day we decided to rent bicycles and cycle around Canberra. We visited the new Parliament House and old Parliament House where we managed to get on free tours.

From here we cycled through reconciliation place to Lake Burley Griffin where the Captain Cook water jet memorial is. Next up was the National Gallery....as neither of us are that into art, it did not take us very long to go round!! But any artists out there would be sure to love it - it has a large government budget so gets some good exhibitions in. We got to see Waterlillies by Monet!! Finally we cycled back across the lake an along the waters edge, past the carillon, back to our hostel.

The following day we hopped on a bus to the National Museum and then in the afternoon took a tour of the Australian Institute of Sport which was pretty interesting, although our tour guise definitely needed to learn how to smile!! Our final day in Canberra was spent looking round the National Film and Sound Archive, National Capital Exhibition and Australian War Memorial. All of these were very interesting but we are definitely museumed out!

 From Canberra we headed back to Sydney where we will be spending Christmas! Our coach journey to and from Sydney was pretty good - we didn't get stuck on any traffic jams in either direction....luxury!

It's quite good being able to cook our own meals finally (and no rice that's for sure!!!) Although we are basically living off Kangaroo - it's both the cheapest and healthiest meat here. And woo we can finally have fresh milk and cereal - it's the small things!

The feature for this blog, and maybe a few others, will be 'words used by Aussies' (or words that have different meanings over here!). The majority of them you can work out what they mean but some are a little trickier so you may have to ask us if your struggling. We suggest you learn what these all mean as we will no doubt have picked them up and be using them when we return to the UK!!

- Mall
- Pants
- Gum boots
- Weet-bix
- Esky
- Thongs
- Piker
- Pash
- Chips
- Yous all
- G'day
- Pushie
- CBD
- City (irrespective of settlement size)
- Intersection
- Freeway
- Capsicum


And one last piece of advise when you come to Australia....beware of Drop Bears and Hoop Snakes!

We hope you all enjoy the Christmas festivities! Our next blog post will be our Christmas/New Year edition so stay tuned!

One final thought for you all: how much does Ayers Rock weigh? Comment your answer on the blog and the correct answer wins a plush toy Koala. Just make sure you really think about it - it's not as simple as you may think!

Lots of hugs to you all freezing back home!

X x x