Jannis & Martine

We have arrived in Canberra last Thursday and it’s quite a nice change from the very hot Brisbane wheater.

The last days it has been around 10 (Ten!!) degrees here, which is, even for Canberra spring wheater, a little out of the ordinary. Here, it now looks more like Dutch autumn than Australian spring. I am not complaining, since I didn’t like the hot Brisbane wheater at all, and I also do like the way the city of Canberra is made up of wide tree covered lanes and many green parcs.

It will get warmer again soon as we we are going to leave Canberra for 1o days to visit Sidney and its surroundings, but no worries…

We will return to Canberra again at December 5th to celebrate the Dutch Sinterklaas ‘birthday-party’ here, with Martine’s brother Nick and cousine Monica who both live here. Thereafter we will have a full week left to explore the area around Canberra, before we are going to fly out of Australia to Buenos Aires to begin our 5-month South-America trip.

Since we changed our schedule a bit (we originally had planned to stay in Canberra until December 5th and move to Sidney thereafter), we still have not been able to upload our pictures from our Great Ocean Road and Tasmania visits. This will have to wait another week, but I promise the pictures are worth waiting for.

In the meantime we will keep you updated of our whereabouts.

Jannis.

We arrived last Thursday at the approximately 60 acre place (about 15 hectare in Dutch measurements) one of Martine’s uncles – Aad.

This place is as big as my fathers’ organic farm, but the difference is Aad is not doing any active farming here, but is only staying here to have a very good life, but in full balance with the environment. The only thing he ‘farms’ is original Australian tree races, to revegetate the Brisbane area again with native Australian trees (as it was untill 200 years ago).

One of the reasons we are here is, that Aad had a big party Saturday at his place to celebrate he is turning 80 years old. The wheater just turned in the weekend (it had been raining the week before)  so it was the perfect weekend here for a big party. Lots of people gathered here this weekend, including Martine’s brother Nick and Martine’s parents.

That was just as well since we could then also celebrate the fact that Martine’s parents have been married for 40 years this week.

Apart from the big celebration party in the weekend we recelebrated their 40 year marriage in a somewhat more cosy setting by staying over in Brisbane city with the six of us: the two of us, Martine’s brother Nick and his wife Lucienne and of course Martine’s parents themselves: Henk and Willy.

During our 80 km drive from Aad’s place to Brisbane city, the 35 degrees (very) hot wheater (very common here) turned into a big thundestorm which completeley disrupted the whole Brisbane area with falling trees, floodings, drowned cars and even people. Except for some delays due to this wheater, we arrived without any problems in Brisbane city and had a great evening accompanied by some drinks, pizza’s and wedges. Next day we visited the mignificant Brisbane Art Gallery before Nick and Lucienne had to return for their flight to Canberra where they live and (now and then) work.   

Today we have visited some more of Martine’s family who live around here: aunt Wicca, her mother Miena and Martine’s cousin Stof with his wife and kids. 

Tomorrow we will be probably doing something like that, as it will be raining (and maybe even thunderstorming) again here tomorrow. Rain was something we had not expected here, as heavy spring rain such as happening this week is pretty unusual here, so I think we are maybe experiencing some of the Global Warming effects….

I am now writing on a very slow internet connection in the country side, so the posting of the pictures from our Great Ocean Road and Tasmian trips, will have to wait until we have arrived in Canberra at the end of this week. See you then.

Jannis.

We are now in Tasmania for 9 days, and today we have found the first spot where you can properly access the internet, so here is the next (pretty long) post.

There are not going to be any pictures this time, since we are on a pretty tight schedule over here. 

Tasmania is about four times as big as Holland, with only about half a million inhabitants, so we had to adjust somewhat to the way everything works over here. Even compared to other not so densly populated areas we have been, the Gold Rush Area and the Grampians mountains, everything in Tasmania is at least a 3 hour drive away and closes at 19.00 hrs: the petrol stations, restaurants, hotels and motels. The only stores still open after 7 o’clock are the so called bottle shops, where they only sell alcoholic drinks. It seems to be very important here, to keep everybody supplied for 24 hours a day with a proper amount of alcohol.

That said, Tasmania is at least as cool as everything I have have been to before. One exception to this is maybe the Great Ocean Road area we vistited just before we left for Tasmania.

Now about Great Ocean Road: this road has been built in the 1920’s as a Governmental unemployments project, and runs along Australia’s southern coastline. As Tasmania, it is also a very cool and not so densly populated area where all the shops and petrol stations also seem to close around 7 o’clock.

Along the Great Ocean Road we first spent the night in the Koroit village where we visited the little Tower Island park, seeing lots of kangeroos, some emu’s and even a koala bear that was doing a walk around our car. The koala was especially very great, since even Martine never has seen one so active and so close by.

Next day we drove on along on to the Bay of Islands cliffs, the first of the Great Ocean Road cliff formations and watched them at sunset. We spend the night there in a charming bed & breakfast, which even included a night visit by a possum.

After a good night rest and a very good breakfast we drove on to visit the various cliffs, gorges, caves, arches and blow holes in the Port Campell area. The blow holes are the most spectacular over there, since these are very (some 100 meter) deep underground holes in the rocks, generating a big ‘blow’ bang everytime, a wave of the ocean enters the underground hole. The big ‘blow’ sound is generated when the water crushes the air in the underground hole together.

The last visit of that day was the famous twelve apostals rock formation. We visited them at sunset, since we had gotten a tip that you could see penguins going ashore in the evening. We were very lucky, since we didn’t only see hundreds of penguins going ashore, but also saw the twelve apostals rocks covered in a misty Scottish/Irish like setting at sunset, as you can see in this picture:

After having a short night sleep in a very ‘ basic’ very cheap cabin, we moved on the next day on to yet another different area of Great Ocean Road with ecalyptus tree covered cliffs, white beaches and three more koala bears (sleeping – they sleep 20 hours a day), untill we arrived in Lorne, the surf city. Over there we found out we only had to deliver our car back the next morning, so we still had some time to visit a part of the rainforest over there, with a very beautifull waterfall in between the palm trees, as you can see here:

The last night at the ‘mainland’ we stayed in a pretty basic but very expensive room in Melbourne, as that Tuesday the Melbourne cup took place (called ‘the race that stops the nation’ over here since all of Australia stops working to watch this horse race). Next day we moved to the airport to catch our short flight to Lauceston airport in Tasmania.

When being in Tasmania we have seen lots of green hill covered sceneries, mountain lookouts looking out over white sand beaches, two 100 meter deep waterfalls, a couple of very cool black cacatoo’s, lots of echidna’s crossing the road and even two snakes (one probably a tiger snake).

The much adviced Bay of Fires which is advertised as one of the highlights, was a bit of a disappointment. You really can spent your time better in Tasmania than to visit some of the nice Bay of Fires beaches.

Driving around the island was better, where you tend to see a lot of animals. Four days ago we went on a night drive, on a non paved road to the Port Arthur town to be in time for our ECO boat cruise the next morning. During this 45 minutes drive we just avoided crushing lots of kangeroos, saw a brush tailed possom and a couple of almost extinct quolls.

The next day we did the 3 hour ECO cruise, cruising on a fast catamaran boat, seeing lots of seals, albatrosses and other birds, cruising underneath 300 meter tall cliffs and even entering some of the caves with the small catamaran boat. This really was the highlight of the past weeks, since this comes down to doing a Great Ocean Road trip, but doing it from the water side, which is even more spectacular, as you can enter some caves, cruise alongside the cliffs and even get to see lots of seals, birds and a little blue penguin.

Yesterday we visited the Cradle moutain national park to conclude our Tasmania visit and to fly back to the mainland again, but now to Brisbane on the east coast.

Next time we will show you some photo’s of our Great Ocean Road and Tasmania visits.

Jannis.

Zoals we al eerder genoemd hebben, hebben we een aantal weken een auto gehuurd.

Omdat Jannis voor vertrek zijn arm gebroken had, en daarom natuurlijk voorzichtig met zijn arm wil zijn, heb ik tot nu toe steeds gereden.

Op zich is dat tot nu toe goed gegaan, want ik heb nog maar 1 keer “spookgereden”. Wel is het zo dat iedere keer als ik af moet slaan, ik de ruitenwissers aanzet. En als het gaat regenen, begin ik onbedoeld met groot licht te seinen. Net als dat ze hier links in plaats van recht rijden en het stuur en de schakelpook “aan de verkeerde kant zitten”, zijn ook de ruitenwisser en richtingaanwijzer omgewisseld.

Maar we zijn in ieder geval nog (ondanks dat we veel kangaroes, wallibies en possums hebben moeten ontwijken) schadevrij!!  

Aangezien we nu op Tasmanie zijn, en dat een zeer dunbevolkt eiland is, is het wegenstelsel hier minder goed en zijn er bovendien veel zandwegen. Deze zandwegen zijn vaak erg hobbelig en vol met grote (!) gaten. Nu zijn we erachter gekomen dat je juist hard moet rijden om hier zo min mogelijk last van te hebben. Omdat die grote gaten vaak net voor de bocht zitten, is dat iets waar ik niet erg blij mee ben………….

Gelukkig gaat het met Jannis’ arm erg goed. Niet alleen omdat we blij zijn dat zijn arm goed opknapt, maar ook omdat Jannis nu ook kan rijden!! Hij weet gelukkig wel raad met bobbelige wegen en vind het juist leuk hier als een coureur door te maneuvreren.

Nog twee dagen voordat we de auto moeten inleveren, dus (even afkloppen) dat moet wel gaan lukken!

Liefs Martine

Here are some of pictures of our vist to the Grampians natural park, as described in the previous post. 

But, before moving on to that that, first two more pictures from our visit in the gold rush surrounds, with Martine in miner’s gear in the Bendigo mine (in case you hadn’t noticed it in th previous posts) and a nice view of the Vaughan Springs park, which we visited before me moved on to the Grampians area.

Here are our pictures from the three days we visited the Grampains natural park, starting with a typical view of the landscape and first views at a lookout of the Grampians area, before we moved for some walks into the mountains itself, to get views of:

the many old volcanic lava fields by doing a 5 km walk to get to the Pinnacle lookout,

many burnt trees up to the way up to the Balconnees lookout, as the whole area was burnt down 2 years ago by a very big bushfire,

and lots of typical Australian gras trees (it needs fire to grow – it only grows a little bit every time after the top (‘gras’) of the tree has been burnt down by a fire) to the McKenzie falls.

After we had visited the Halls Gap Aboriginal Centre we moved on to the coast, visting a very nice extinct volcanic crater near Pensherst village, before moving on to stay in a Irish style hotel in Koroit – a village raised by Irish immigrants.

On the advice of the hotel owner, we visited the Tower Hill natural park in the evening before going to sleep. On vistiting the park we were suprised to see that we Koroit is located very close to the coast and then we were suprised to see groups of kangeroos close by, emu’s and even a walking (!) koala changing trees before nightfall.

This was a very good start for our Great Ocean Road drive, which we wold start the next day.

Here a preview of what we have seen at Great Ocean Road trip, with our best picture, yet:

the 12 Apostols rock formation, on a rainy evening…

Jannis. 

Now something about the Oz food, animals, people and politics…

The last day in Bendigo (the town we did the gold mine tour Martine wrote about) ended with a not so good experience with Australian food. We had some pasta and pizza which was pretty expensive and real bad. This differed from my previous food experiences in Ballarat and most of the other gold mining towns, but I think the Bendigo food was bad, since:

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  1. it was Italian food prepared by non Italian people; this seems to happen a lot over here, resulting in a strange blend of English style prepared English pastas,

  2. the big ‘Clogs’ restaurant we ate at, is owned by a Dutchie who probably just used lots of cheap ingredients, to earn as much money as he could.

After the Bendigo food experience we tried an Italian type of restaurant one more time in the Castlemain town where we staid in a cabin for a couple of days. There we had a slightly less bad experience with English style cooked pasta, but after eating this we  immediatly left Castlemain for a visit to the Grapians mountains, and probably will now only eat self made food or the very (very) tasty Azian food.

On the way to the Grampains we found a cheap hotel in the tiny village of Elmhurst where we had a pretty long discussion with the hotels’ owner about the cause of Global Warming and other stuff. The hotel owner didn’t believe in any connection between Global Warming and the current way of living. I have learned a lot from him, since I got a pretty good insight into the kind of people that brought the anti Kyoto Howard government to power.

We also had a good talk with a sheep farmer (who was much more laid back and logical) who explained something about the type of sheep farms they have over here, together with lots of snakes and posoineous spiders. He has some 1200 sheep, 300 bulls and some snakes on 1600 acres of pretty dried out land. The sheep don’t get bitten much by snakes, since a snake can sit for a week in a small spot waiting for prey, and will only move to flee if he feels the vibrations of a big animal or human coming his way. Dogs do get bitten very often, since they tend to run very fast and a snake has no time to move out of the way.

The next day we moved out to Halls Gap which is a cluster of campsides and hostels in the middle of the Grampians area.

Here we stayed in a cabin surrounded by hundreds of kangeroos, have done some great walks into the mountains and visited the Brambuk Aboriginal centre, since the Aboriginal people have lived in the Grampains for more than 40.000 years. 

In the next post we will show some great pictures of our mountain walks, but the for me the visit to the Aboriginal centre was at least as interesting. There the story was told about an almost perfect society of 1 million people living in full balance with environment around them, and that for some 100.000 years, until they where wiped away less than 150 years ago by a bunch European invaders….

This gets you thinking about Global Warming and things like the water shortage over here…

Jannis.