Jackie's World Tour 2009 – Let the mayhem begin!

Australia Part 1 – Melbourne to Byron Bay

So here I am in good ol Australia. Huge, expensive Australia. Oh wait, huge, expensive and freakin cold Australia! Don’t get me wrong, I am really enjoying Australia but it is damn cold! I only brought 2 pairs of pants and 1 sweathshirt (which I bought in New Zealand) and I think that those three articles of clothing are going to walk off my body in protest cause they are the only things I have wore since I got to Australia. It is just too damn cold to wear anything else! sigh….that is what I get for spending 2 months in Fiji and heaqding over to Australia at the start of their winter season. Yes, I have been spoiled with NZ and Fiji weather. I think my body is going to revolt when I come home to NY in the wonderfully warm month of January!

Anyway, onto more exciting things like Australia. So far it has been really good but I have mostly been in the cities. Between the two cities of Melbourne and Syndey, I have to say that I like Melbourne a bit better. It is a much smaller city but it is beautiful and there is so much to do. Sydney is pretty cool as well but it reminds me more of a sprawling NYC. I liked the coziness of Melbourne a bit more.

Melbourne was actually the first place I flew into. Like I said. I liked it alot. Everything was in walking distance and I think I spent the first day walking around the whole city. The architecture is really special and on my 2nd day there was the Anzac Day (like our veteran’s Day) and there was a big parade throughout the city. It was a weird parade. Our parades have floats and people singing and dancing and bands and of course people walking representing whatever it is they are marching for. Anzac Day Parade was well people walking in groups behind whatever banners that applied to their units with a marching bands thrown in every 10-15 groups. It was a very tame parade as far as parades go. No real fanfare or anything, just people walking with some marching bands. Not very exciting. Nothing like crazy NY parades with people dancing in the streets wearing weird costumes, huge floats of Snoopy and SpongeBob SquarePants standing on floats entertaining the crowd. Well NY totally has Melbourne beat for throwing cool parades. Besides that, it was awesome. They had everything you can think of from gardens to museums to really nice city walks and great restuarants.

Oh before I continue there is something I need to get off my chest about the places I have been and ….wait for it….can you guess what I am going to talk about…think people, it is one of my favorite pasttimes…if you guessed eating than you are right! I would not be a Jackie blog if I did not talk about some form of food! Ok this blog it is going to be about sushi and the crappiness of it since I have started this trip! You all know I love sushi, especially my spicy tuna roll. My quest for a good spicy tuna roll has been utter failure since I started this trip. In New Zealand the spicy tuna was actual tunafish with wasabi wrapped in it! UCK, UCK, UCK! Ok so I tried some sushi in Fiji. Utter failure yet again, they didn’t even have spicy tuna. sigh…So now onto Australia. I tried to get a spicy tuna roll in Melbourne thinking I am in Australia, it has got to be decent, right? Well at least it wasn’t tunafish. There was sushi grade tuna but the spicy part was black pepper rolled on the outside of the roll! WTF?!?!?! Is the spicy tuna roll found in America an American concotion? I figured this side of the world would have good sushi since they are closer to that actual part of the world where sushi comes from but so far I have been dissapointed. So I will continue to search for a good spicy tuna roll and I will report when I
find one. I know you will be waiting with baited breath!And now back to our regular programming.

So I met these 2 guys, Matt and Ross, at the hostel I was staying at in Melbourne and we decided to rent a car and drive to Sydney. Well now here is the catch. My two little London boys don’t know how to drive so it was chaffuer Jackie the whole way. I actually didn’t mind. I miss driving and it was pretty cool to drive on the wrong side of the road. I did way better than I expected until we got to Sydney (more on that in a bit). My car mates were very cool and it was a nice drive. It took us 3 days and we took alot the coastal road so the views were gorgeous. We actually got a little bit off course and drove through one of the suburbs by the coast and we saw kangaroos and wild parrots on people’s front lawns. Very cool!!!! They were just hanging out there chillin. I would love to come home from work and see a whole family of Roo’s hanging out on my front lawn. We just get squirrels and pigeons on our front lawns. Point one for Australia. New York 1, Australia 1,it is a tie so far! Oh yeah we also saw pelicans! These birds are HUGE!!! No wonder they can fit whole fish in their mouths. I think they could fit a car in their mouths (notice I don’t say beaks, it feels like an insult to call their huge gaping maws beaks!). Very cool birds though and a bit awe-inspiring when they are flying cause they blot out the sun! So a nice drive with lots of nature. There was also this really cool hippie guy that we met at one of the hostels that we stayed in. He was a total crystal hugger who played digaredoo (sp?) for a living for kids. It was the first time on this trip that I actually had a philisophical conversation with people and it was interesting. By the end of the night he played the dig over our bodies while we laid on the floor. It was such a cool experience. Now you all know that I am not a very spiritual person but there was something about this. I could feel the vibrations of the dig going through my body. It was really interesting and I walked away feeling very relaxed. So cool.

Another thing that I found quite interesting during this drive is the amount of signs on the side of the road warning people not to fall asleep. I mean every 5-10 miles there was a sign saying something like take a pwernap, it could save your life and my favorite one was fatigue kills and a microsleep can kill. I guess they have a big problem with people falling asleep in Australia. It was almost comical. They could care less about drunk driving or driving the speed limit. It was all about not falling asleep.

Anyway, we got to Sydney and well Sydney is kind of just a regular city. It has really nice sites to see, like any typical city and I must admit the Sydney Opera house it quite beautiful. Again, I did lots of walking around the city. I walked everywhere! It was great. Oh yeah, the driving debacle. It is kind of funny actually. The car that we rented was a Toyata Camary so it was a nice size car. The hostel we stayed in had a parking garage so we figured we would park the car there and return it in the morning. After navigating my car down this little alleyway and manuevering it down the winding ramp I got my car into the garage, where there was 1 parking space left between a pole and a huge van. Now if the width of the garage was bigger than a tennis court I MAY have been able to pull in and park the car. But seeing that I don’t think I could manuever a golf cart into this space there was no way this was happening. So I pull down a little bit more thinking I would turn around in the handicapped and foremans parking spaces. Well those spaces had these big locked bars in the center of them so no one could park there and they stuck up into the middle of the space. So no turning around in those spaces, actually no turning around period. It would have been the 1,999 point turn to get the car the other way. So I go upstairs to reception to explain the prediciment and ask the guy if he could please unlock the handicapped spot so I could at least turn around. Well, I must say that I think the handicapped spot was put there as a big fuck you to all the people that want to park their car in the garage and can’t cause no one had the key to take the bar away! I mean, what if I was handicapped, I would have been SOL. It was really just there for show! About half an hour later the guy finds the foreman’s keys and takes off the bar so I can turn the car around and go park somewhere else. HA, you think the story is over but no it is not! I then proceed for the next half hour to try to turn this hunk of metal around without hitting the support beams and the other cars in the lot. I needed 2 people to help me maneuver and tell me when to stop. I was sweating bullets by the time I actually got the car turned around. I wanted to get out of the cart and hug everyone in sight and dance a victory jig when I finally got the car turned around! I kept it together though fearing that anyone I hugged would be turned off by the sweaty mess I had turned myself into. Thank god the guy found the key cause my only other option would have been to back the car up this 90 degree ramp with a wicked turn halfway up! That I can tell you would have ended badly! But thankfully me and my crew of 2 were able to get the car out of the lot. Lovely way to spend your evening after 6 hours of driving. LOL But besides that Sydney was really nice and I enjoyed it.

I think I spent 2-3 days iN Sydney, which I got to spend with one of my friends from Fiji cause she was passing through. That was very cool. But I decided to try to find warmer weather and head north up the coast. Ross, Matt and I booked the overnight Greyhound bus up to Byron Bay. No comment about the bus trip except to say that it was the most uncomfortable bus ride I have ever been on. I thought I would be able to sleep on the bus. HA, jokes on me cause Greyhound busses have the most uncomfortable seats known to man. Regardless, got to Byron Bay in the morning and I could tell my fortunes were looking up! I LOVE Byron Bay. What a cute little surfer town. It is kind of a hippie, tourist, surfer (along with all the resident hot surfers) town. It has lots of cool ecclectic shops, surf and dive shops and little eateries. Did I mention I really like it here? The hostel we are stayng at is real and down to earth. I could so see myself staying here for awhile if I had the time. And actually if I had the time I would be staying in Byron Bay. When I went to check out diving at the dive shop they actually offered me an internship as a divemaster. They said they could use the help with leading dives and helping with courses. I was blown away to say the least. I did not expect any type of offers in Australia at all. But I got one. It was free accommodation and 1 meal a day plus all the diving that I would be doing. Pretty sweet deal except that they wanted me to stay for 2 months. I really had to think about it long and hard cause I know I would have loved to stay in Byron Bay for 2 months but that would kill my time in SE Asia (which is WAY cheaper than Oz). And after I did the dive that made my mind up. It was a nice dive but nothing near as nice as Fiji. And it was REALLY cold! I was in a 5mil wetsuit, which is pretty thick and I was still cold by the emd of the dive. But man 2 months in Byron Bay would have been sweet. Hope I don’t wind up regretting not staying.

Well I have since left BYron Bay and have made my way to Mooloolaga which is about 2 hours north of Brisbane. I had one night in Brisbane so there isn’t much to comment on about that. Mooloolaga is pretty nice. I am liking it so far. Tomorrow I go to the Australia Zoo, home of Steve “Crickey” Irwin. I can’t wait. I have signed myself up for a wombat and monkey encounter. That means I get to go into the enclosures and actually interact with the animals. So damn cool! I totally cannot wait. (PS Went to the zoo and it was AMAZING!!! More in my next blog about that!)

Well, time to go to bed. Until next time….sweet dreams and big hugs.