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Time flies when you’re having fun.  It’s always the way.  It’s nearly the end of March already, and I’ve been in lovely Melbourne so long now it feels like home.  I’ve been working and trying to save up for New Zealand, although I’m finding it difficult to reign in what can be an expensive social life.  Melbourne’s summer is coming to an end, but there are so many little festivals and and events held in and around the city that’s it’s hard to pause for breath. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, what have I been up to then? Eh?  Lots of silly shennanigans.  All sorts of crazy sh*t.  I have truely fallen for Melbourne in a big way – I could happily live here for a while longer for sure, if I had the money and a friend in the Visas Department that is.  I don’t, so I plan to enjoy every moment here that I get, because it may never come again.  So far, I have been doing just that… Read the rest of this entry »

By the South bank of the river Yarra, Melbourne

It’s strange when a city you’ve never been to before reminds you so much of a place back home.  It’s even stranger when you assume, before arriving in that city, that it will be just like somewhere back home, and that ends up being the case.  Melbourne and Manchester are, it seems, closer than you’d think.  Although you’d never hope to get a picture this nice standing over the Manchester Canal or Salford Quays, Melbourne is as vibrant, artistic and eclectic as England’s ‘capitol of the North’.  Even stranger(er) is the amount of Northern placenames Melbourne borrows for it’s suburbs – you’d never guess where I am just looking at this picture alone:

That’s right – I’m in Southport.  In fact, there is a suburb named Southport round these parts too.  Excellen-tay.  But this picture wasn’t taken in Southport, or indeed Preston.  Moving on… Read the rest of this entry »

Destination: Cairns

So we made it.  First off – a slight apology over how long it’s been taking me to update this blog – it’s extremely difficult to find time, and a decent internet connection when you’re travelling about the place over a short space of time.  We covered a lot of ground on the East Coast and I wanted to document some of the highlights here (not including Townsville…), but time flies when you’re having lots of fun.  So sue me.  All three of you that read this. Read the rest of this entry »

Townsville.  Hmm.  Not much to say about this litlle stopover in our journey really.  Any location that names itself a cross between two location-names (‘Town’-s-‘ville’) obviously has problems with its self-identity.  It’s not all that big a place, and when we arrived (2nd Jan) the place was as dead as my prospects of having a useful career path.  This could be attributed to several factors: namely that it was just after New Years and everybody was likely to have been nursing their holiday hangovers, but more understandably because Townsville is a heavily student-populated University town.  Obviously, all the sudents had gone home for the Christmas/New Year period and stayed there to nurse their own hangovers. Read the rest of this entry »

‘The Broomstick’. That was the name of the racing yacht we boarded at Airlie Beach on 30th December 2006. There were others – ‘Condor’, ‘British Defender’ – yet we got the one with the slightly camp name. Nevertheless, The Broomstick set sail with a crew of three and a cargo of 21 layabout pissheads, all on board to see in the new year in style (but not necessarily comfort). Read the rest of this entry »

Fraser Island

The object to the left of the van on the left of the second picture is a frisbee that I managed to capture mid-flight whilst photographing our 4-Wheel-Drive vehicles on the beach at Fraser Island, in case you were wondering. I could have said it was a UFO and made millions touting the picture to the specialist press, but I thought ‘Naaaahh’ and told you all the truth instead, cos I’m a good fella. (Note: in this post ‘4-Wheel-Drive’ will be referred to as ‘4WD’, because (a) I’m lazy when it comes to typing, and (b) that’s what everyone calls it over here…). Read the rest of this entry »

So we made it somewhere for Christmas – it it wasn’t a crappy campsite either thank God. We stayed at Koala’s Beach Resort in the Queensland seaside location of Hervey Bay. Hervey Bay reminds me a little of Morecambe or somewhere similar: there’s a main promenade lining a stretch of sand that harbours rocky spots and a pier at one end. Admittedly, I saw the beach when the tide was fully out, and so there was only a small area of soft golden sand to walk on, but it still pisses all over Morecambe any day. Read the rest of this entry »

Rainbow Beach… and our sandman!

Rainbow Beach is a nice little area raised slightly above the sea level, so-named due to the mixed colour of the sands on its lengthy stretch of coastline. The heat increases the more you travel up the East, and as we were now entering the ‘Capricorn Coast’, it was quite intense between 11am and 4pm. The town is quite a quiet spot, and reminds me in a way of Nimbin. We arrived at our campsite late at night after a hefty driving effort by Nicky to get us there – we killed all manner of insects along the way, and our windscreen now looks like a paintball shooting range. Read the rest of this entry »

After leaving Brisbane, we were looking for somewhere preferably next to water, perhaps even a beach-side campsite.  In Maroochdore we found what we were looking for: the campsite was situated on the banks on a huge river which conveniently ran straight into the sea round the corner, all part of the same beautiful stretch of coastline.  The waves were fairly strong on the sea side, but the river was excellent for taking a cool dip in when the sun got too much. Read the rest of this entry »