Hello everyone. At last my parents have submitted their blog entry for the time they spent travelling with us in Australia. Thank you! Later on I'll change the date of this entry so it fits chronologically with my own.
Here it is...
"You're middle-aged. You've worked hard for a year. You've saved up. You're ready to "chill out". What should you do?
A 5* hotel in the Caribbean? A luxury cruise round the Mediterranean? An all-inclusive trip to South America? No, no, no.
.... Far better to spend it with clip and clop in a van, a tent, a couple of youth hostels and someone else's apartment .... Well I was looking forward to it! (E)
Surely!!??
After a full day at home, 25 hours of flights and shifting the clocks by just 9 hours we were as ready as we could have been for the next 12 hours of sight-seeing and entertainment which our young couriers had planned for us. Actually the Ekka show and the evening Rodeo, trick motorcyclists and firework display were very good, but we were quite weary as we made our way back to the YHA in Brisbane. It was a nice surprise to find that the place had conventional toilets and showers and no sign of the smelly, foul-mouthed, drunken back-packers that we had anticipated. In fact the place was quite big, well-equipped and comfortable enough. We liked the ban on smoking in the premises. It was re-assuring to see that there were other "geriatric youths" there as well as ourselves. We met a number at breakfast time before the younger ones had emerged. (meaning those under the age of 50, clop)
There had been an 8 month drought in Brisbane and its environs, a very serious one which had necessitated the boring of bore holes. This ended during the night we arrived resulting in it raining throughout the night and "p'siss"tently doing it throughout the next day whilst we visited Steve Irwin's zoo .... where he lives (well close by anyway).
This did not prevent us from enjoying our day there as fewer people visited the place than usual, making it less crowded, and the crocodiles, pythons and huge tortoises looked nice and shiny due to the water on them. Here we saw the first of numerous Koala bears we were to see later. Well worth photographing! (if we still had them, E)
From hereon our itinerary took us down the east coast, sometimes staying on the coast, sometimes moving inland, staying at a wide variety of campsites of "different quality" but generally heading in the direction of Sydney.
Here are some of the highlights of "the tour".
The next batch of Koala bears was seen at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary where you can hold one and have a photo for a fee. This allows you to feel their deep fur and smell and become impregnated with the oil which oozes out of their every pore due to them eating so much of the stuff. At least it keeps your nose and throat clear!
Our next notable stop was at Byron Bay, notable for several reasons, (a) we had our food stolen from a communal fridge, (b) we saw some whales/dolphins some distance away, in the sea, as we walked to Byron Point, (c) Byron Point is the most easterly point of Australia, (d) it was the scene of Ella's 14000 ft tandem skydive .... a dream fulfilled! (can’t wait to do it again, E)
Next was a campsite near Coff's Harbour. This was called the Clog Barn and was a strange affair, being of Dutch influence, having a clog manufacturing business along with a model village.
As we travelled south away from the equator, it soon became apparent that chilling out meant just that. Brian developed a nice system using a 3 litre fruit juice PET bottle. This was filled with water from the laundry or shower at night and used as a hot water bottle. In the morning this was refilled and used as a radiator to dry washed underwear in the van as we travelled. It was also handy as a source of washing up water or hand washing after lunch on the hoof.
The Waterfall Way was a lovely drive around the Sawtell area and enabled you to visit some spectacular waterfalls .… as you would expect. Dangar Falls, Ebor Falls etc. were all a tremendous surprise. Basically you follow a sign in the middle of nowhere, down a deserted country lane, into what appears to be a farmer’s field with a few trees at the end. This gives the impression of leading you to a piddling little beck and elicits a "yawn,yawn" response. OK, so you get out and walk over to what appears to be jokingly called a lookout point on the signposts. Then Wow! It is! Suddenly, just in front of you appears a huge gaping chasm a few hundred metres wide and probably, according to our calculations based on counting seconds whilst a stone thrown by clop hit the bottom and substituting this into one of Newton’s Equations of Motion, was about 400 feet deep. A pool at the bottom was fed by a huge waterfall dropping the full depth of the drop …. Stunning!
After lunch at Platypus Flats, a pond where there were none to see, we drove on to Cathedral Rock campsite, our first “bush camp” some 4000 feet above sea level. Here there were some pit toilets, a stream and a supply of wood to light a fire in the old iron grid to cook etc. not a lot else! Apart from us there was no-one else there. This makes it very dark, very quiet, very early. It’s a bit weird really. The huge campfire which Ella kept on stoking up kept us all warm. The tent near her fire also got its fair share of heat... a bit of a worry for clop. All this kept us amused until we fell in to bed at 8:45! (I did keep offering to sleep in the tent. Just getting it warm in case, E)
The walk round Cathedral Rock and the climb up some huge smooth boulders was entertaining, particularly as the final section needed a little athletic agility, but the chains which had been fastened to the rocks to assist you in pulling yourself up were a great help. Then it was off again in Bertha, continuing on the Waterfall Way with stops at Woolangong and Baker’s Creek falls. At the end of the day we set up camp on a posh YHA campsite at Armidale and went out to a pizza restaurant to buy pizzas which were too big for any of us to eat, but which provided a handy lunch for the next day!
Next day was a drive to Port Macquarie via Walcha and Aspley Falls where we saw a basking snake, several feet long just below us under one of the obligatory lookout points. This was said by locals to be a Red-bellied Black Snake, very poisonous but re-assuringly not able to proceed at much more than 5 mph.
Monday the 25th found us visiting a Koala hospital. These little bears are very popular, because they are cute, they’ve got nice little fluffy ears and a soft coat and engaging eyes and little black noses and they cling on to you like a baby and …. I can’t understand what the girls saw in them really! Well, perhaps! (They were more cuddly than some we could mention, E)
On to a wonderful campsite at Halliday’s Point next. Apart from a camping van and some permanent residents in bungalows some distance away, the place was deserted. This was rather bizarre really as it had loads of chalets, big blue resort style swimming pool with sundowners and umbrellas, pool room, table tennis, a 40 seater TV lounge etc. and a lovely campers’ kitchen with all mod cons etc. we had the full use of all these facilities to ourselves. It’s good when you have several BLOCKS of toilets and showers to yourself to choose from! The whole site backed on to a beautiful, deserted beach. Very nice!
The following day found us visiting Seal Point, where there were none, but there were plenty of pelicans and other birds and some stunningly beautiful scenery. Then it was on to Myall Lake and another of those "basic" sites, only toilets this time in fact. E and B even had to drive some distance for wood to make a fire as you are not allowed to collect any inside the national park area. To be fair clop has now got such a conscience about things like collecting wood when asked not to, that he wouldn’t allow it anyway, even though there was no-one around. Good for him! It was a cold night, and an early start in the morning, thus managing to miss the park ranger who collects the fees and so having a free night…. No conscience this time! It was nice to have bacon etc. BBQ’d on one of the free roadside electric grills that you find all over the place and this one was at the sea-side (these are built onto bricks, referred to as BBQ’s and have roofs over them and often picnic tables, taps and toilets and get cleaned during the night by local council staff.)
A drive through Lakes Way brought us to our next stopover and then it was on to Katoomba at around 4000 feet in the Blue Mountains. This is where E and B had booked us all into a 4* YHA. This was quite upmarket with ensuite rooms, patio with fountains, central heating, large lounge in converted dance hall etc. Very comfortable.
To see the area we booked onto the local hop-on hop-off bus and saw a variety of scenic views from the lookout points to which we were taken. You can see as far as 91 km on a good day and all of it rolling forests, prompted by huge chasms and everything shrouded in a blue haze due to eucalyptus vapour from the trees.
One of the highlights was the trip down a steep hillside in a scenitrain, a fast-moving carriage on lines and a wire. The return journey was by Sceniscender, a large carriage suspended on, and pulled up by, a piece of wire.
Saturday the 30th saw us on our way to the apartment of Will and Ange in Sydney, Will being the son of a Horsforth family with whom we have been friends for some 27 years, and Ange being the Australian girl whom he married.
The evening consisted of a meal based on BBQ’d Barramundi and local King Prawns. How civilised.
Over the next couple of days we did various things. B did the Sydney Harbour Bridge climb whilst E visited the botanical gardens. We toured the harbour in a little yellow taxi boat and fed the local ibises with steak and kidney pie and chips. How B chuckled as they poked their long curved beaks into his hands to take the food.
We also took the 2 hour walk from Coogee where we were staying to Bondi Beach. This was a bit of a let down. We were thinking it would be huge and …. well it wasn’t. All there is, is a horseshoe-shaped beach, not as big as Robin Hoods Bay, a car park and some shops. Admittedly the sand is nearly white and the sea is blue and clean and lots of surfers posed in the water…. but still not what we were expecting somehow!
So Tuesday came and it was time to leave old Aus having had some "experiences" to which your normal middle-aged parents do not have access.
25 hours later and mid-late afternoon in England we were home and "ready" for work the following morning!
We’ll never forget:
* The echidna (spiny ant eater) who was creeping about one night
* clop’s frustration at never being able to beat his father at a highly skilful word competition which he had made us play (yeah, yeah, whatever, clop)
* The cigarette lighters and purses and other ornaments made out of kangaroo scrotums that had been "harvested" under the official rules and guidelines of New South Wales
* The Kookaburras that ate sirloin steak trimming out of your fingers …. and they’ve got enormous beaks!
* The fact that clop admitted that it had all been ok most of the time and not as bad as it might have been had we got into any arguments ….. but why should there be any friction between two parents, their son and his girlfriend, living in a 3-seater van and a tent for a couple of weeks?!
I had an enjoyable though different holiday and would do it again although I need to improve my Yahtzee skills so that I can be the WINNER next time! (E) (dream on mother, clop)
Thanks clip and clop. Hope you enjoy the rest of your trip.
26 September 2003
In Mersing we got a free upgrade from the slow ferry to a twin-engined speedboat. We were led through a building site to the jetty and had to clamber, fully laden, across three bobbing boats to reach our vessel. The boat dropped us off in Air Batang, a quiet bay on the north west coast of the island, just an hour after leaving the mainland (56km). The temperature was 36C, the humidity over 80%.
Time Magazine once listed Pulau Tioman as one of the top ten most beautiful islands in the world. They weren't joking. Set in the glowing azure waters of the South China Sea, surrounded by coral reef, with wild jungle ramping up from white beaches to two 1000m peaks, the island is simply gorgeous.
The few islanders live in ramshackle wooden huts set along the top of the beach. A strip of concrete, five feet across, runs the length of the bay. The strip is too narrow for cars but carries a sporadic stream of overloaded (think "a family of five") two-stroke mopeds back and forth throughout the day. Immediately behind the huts starts pure untamed jungle.
The islanders provide limited accommodation in wooden chalets set in well-tended gardens with sea views. We looked at five different cabins in three different gardens before sadly realising that our expectations were laughably high. We finally settled on a double en suite cabin with fan for 3.20ukp per night. Though the best of the bunch, the "chalet" was in fact a shed on stacks of bricks. The "bed" was a foam mattress lying on some planks of wood. The bedroom was panelled with tacked plywood, warping nicely at top and bottom. There was no sink. The cold (no hot water in any cabins) shower was a grey plastic tube hanging off the wall. clip described the toilet as "grim". I suggested she seemed a bit tense. She replied, "Of course I'm tense. I'm living in squalor."
We sat on the verandah and played cards. We ate mangoes from a mango tree. Eleven monkeys came and played by the cabins. A black flying squirrel played in a palm tree nearby. Lots of fruit bats hung squeaking in trees. There were dozens of huge monitor lizards prowling about. Hundreds of stray cats with truncated or curly inbred tails.
At the end of the season the island is very quiet - there were fewer than thirty tourists staying in the bay. We made friends with a couple of British backpackers, Aries and Sandrine.
In the evening we ate in a restaurant overlooking the beach and backlit by the constant orange flickering of a distant electrical storm. When we returned to the cabin we found a massive cockroach hanging to the plywood over our bed. We stood for ten minutes with a plastic cup, dithering like little girls, both too scared to go near it. Eventually I threw a pair of dirty underpants at it and it fell down the side of the mattress. Bloody typical. There followed five more minutes with goosebumps, trying to coax it out, before I trapped it in the cup and moved it outside. We quickly put our mosquito net up (thank you Carolyn!)
We spent four nights on the island doing various islandy things: we walked down the coast to Tekek and bought a slab of beer; we trekked 20km through the jungle to Juara on the east coast of the island; we saw a lot of monkeys and bird-sized butterflies; we climbed over the northern headland and went snorkelling in Panuba Bay; we saw a stingray and a big fish; a giant grasshopper got into our toilet and frightened clip at an extremely unfortunate time.
One night over a hundred sea turtles hatched on the beach outside our cabin. The tide was out so the marine rescue people came and rescued them in a box before the cats could get them. As usual we were asleep and missed all the excitement. Luckily, one of the islanders had kept two of the baby turtles so we got to see how incredibly cute they were. She planned to release them after two weeks when they stood a better chance of survival.
The slow ferry back to Mersing took five hours. Well. It was two hours late, then it had to wait for a pirate ship to unload its booty at the jetty, then it had to call in at each bay and pick up hordes of jabbering gits, then it took two hours to reach the mainland. From Mersing we took a bus west through Kluang and Muar to the historic city of Melaka.
Melaka is a city of tessellated one way streets. Cars and motorbikes and flowery trishaws with musical chimes career haphazardly through junctions competing for road space like smoke particles exhibiting Brownian motion. Melaka has been English, Dutch, Portuguese, English and is now Malaysian. Consequently it has all kinds of interesting buildings and churches and locales. We're staying in a very nice hostel; double room with fan 4.20ukp.
Last night we tried "satay celup". It's a bit like a peanut fondue. You cook the meat and vegetables in a bubbling bowl of peanut sauce at your table. Afterwards we went for a beer at a chinese hawker stall. The menu included Pig Brain Soup. I saw a rat scurry out of a food cupboard and run into a drawer. Then we saw a group of seven rats scampering around beneath the tables and chairs. The owners just pointed and laughed.
Time Magazine once listed Pulau Tioman as one of the top ten most beautiful islands in the world. They weren't joking. Set in the glowing azure waters of the South China Sea, surrounded by coral reef, with wild jungle ramping up from white beaches to two 1000m peaks, the island is simply gorgeous.
The few islanders live in ramshackle wooden huts set along the top of the beach. A strip of concrete, five feet across, runs the length of the bay. The strip is too narrow for cars but carries a sporadic stream of overloaded (think "a family of five") two-stroke mopeds back and forth throughout the day. Immediately behind the huts starts pure untamed jungle.
The islanders provide limited accommodation in wooden chalets set in well-tended gardens with sea views. We looked at five different cabins in three different gardens before sadly realising that our expectations were laughably high. We finally settled on a double en suite cabin with fan for 3.20ukp per night. Though the best of the bunch, the "chalet" was in fact a shed on stacks of bricks. The "bed" was a foam mattress lying on some planks of wood. The bedroom was panelled with tacked plywood, warping nicely at top and bottom. There was no sink. The cold (no hot water in any cabins) shower was a grey plastic tube hanging off the wall. clip described the toilet as "grim". I suggested she seemed a bit tense. She replied, "Of course I'm tense. I'm living in squalor."
We sat on the verandah and played cards. We ate mangoes from a mango tree. Eleven monkeys came and played by the cabins. A black flying squirrel played in a palm tree nearby. Lots of fruit bats hung squeaking in trees. There were dozens of huge monitor lizards prowling about. Hundreds of stray cats with truncated or curly inbred tails.
At the end of the season the island is very quiet - there were fewer than thirty tourists staying in the bay. We made friends with a couple of British backpackers, Aries and Sandrine.
In the evening we ate in a restaurant overlooking the beach and backlit by the constant orange flickering of a distant electrical storm. When we returned to the cabin we found a massive cockroach hanging to the plywood over our bed. We stood for ten minutes with a plastic cup, dithering like little girls, both too scared to go near it. Eventually I threw a pair of dirty underpants at it and it fell down the side of the mattress. Bloody typical. There followed five more minutes with goosebumps, trying to coax it out, before I trapped it in the cup and moved it outside. We quickly put our mosquito net up (thank you Carolyn!)
We spent four nights on the island doing various islandy things: we walked down the coast to Tekek and bought a slab of beer; we trekked 20km through the jungle to Juara on the east coast of the island; we saw a lot of monkeys and bird-sized butterflies; we climbed over the northern headland and went snorkelling in Panuba Bay; we saw a stingray and a big fish; a giant grasshopper got into our toilet and frightened clip at an extremely unfortunate time.
One night over a hundred sea turtles hatched on the beach outside our cabin. The tide was out so the marine rescue people came and rescued them in a box before the cats could get them. As usual we were asleep and missed all the excitement. Luckily, one of the islanders had kept two of the baby turtles so we got to see how incredibly cute they were. She planned to release them after two weeks when they stood a better chance of survival.
The slow ferry back to Mersing took five hours. Well. It was two hours late, then it had to wait for a pirate ship to unload its booty at the jetty, then it had to call in at each bay and pick up hordes of jabbering gits, then it took two hours to reach the mainland. From Mersing we took a bus west through Kluang and Muar to the historic city of Melaka.
Melaka is a city of tessellated one way streets. Cars and motorbikes and flowery trishaws with musical chimes career haphazardly through junctions competing for road space like smoke particles exhibiting Brownian motion. Melaka has been English, Dutch, Portuguese, English and is now Malaysian. Consequently it has all kinds of interesting buildings and churches and locales. We're staying in a very nice hostel; double room with fan 4.20ukp.
Last night we tried "satay celup". It's a bit like a peanut fondue. You cook the meat and vegetables in a bubbling bowl of peanut sauce at your table. Afterwards we went for a beer at a chinese hawker stall. The menu included Pig Brain Soup. I saw a rat scurry out of a food cupboard and run into a drawer. Then we saw a group of seven rats scampering around beneath the tables and chairs. The owners just pointed and laughed.
20 September 2003
Post SARS, Singapore has developed an almost debilitating obsession with dirt and germs. Half the television commercials are for garment-sterilising washing powders, germ-zapping handcreams and impregnated tissues. Taxis display stickers reassuring you that their drivers have their temperatures taken twice a day.
I find the hot and steamy weather completely exhausting. clip can't stand to be outside for more than a few minutes at a time, it makes her super tetchy. There is a monsoonal downpour every day. The thunder and lightning can go on for hours.
So we spent a day sweating in muggy rainy downtown Singapore and decided to sample some local food. Until we saw what was on offer. Bull Frog Porridge and Goat Penis. Umm, no thanks. Instead, we walked into Little India and ate curry and rice off banana leaves with our bare right hands (left hands are the traditional Indian substitute for toilet paper).
In the evening we went out with the Abbott people again. We downed a few Singapore Slings in the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel then headed to a night fruit market to try durian, a big thorny green fruit known across Asia as "The King Of Fruits".
Well durian absolutely stinks. It smells so bad that it is illegal to carry it on public transport or eat it in a public place. We could smell the stink of it when we were still 30 yards away from the fruit stall. The creamy flesh of the durian resembles soft rotten leek. People liken it to "eating custard in a sewer". I suppose it tasted quite nice but the overpowering putrid stench made chewing it a constant struggle not to vomit. clip felt so sick she had to leave the market. Every time I burped the smell made me gag. Our Singaporean Abbott escort, Tan, said it makes your wee smell.
Afterwards we ate mixed satay from a street stall and went to Hooters for some burgers. Personally I would have sacked most of the waitresses for failing to satisfy the job description.
Cockroaches scuttled left and right as we walked back through the hostel to our room.
Two days later we were on a bus, rattling north from Singapore over a causeway to Malaysia, and trying to gobble all our apples before the checkpoint. Singaporean motorists get fined $500 if they cross the causeway with less than three quarters of a tank of fuel.
In Malaysia we stayed on the bus through Johor Bahru and Kota Tinggi to Mersing, a seaside town 130km north east of the border. Along the way we saw fifteen wild monkeys prancing about at the sides of the road. At Mersing we got an en suite double room at the Embassy Hotel for 4.50ukp. clip calls Mersing "Slum Central". Our guidebook described the hotel as "spick-and-span". Well the author has obviously never been there. Imagine the dingiest room you possibly can: lit by a single bare fluorescent tube, mildew on the walls, springs poking out of the mattress, live wires hanging out above the bed, a ceiling fan with furry blades, a sloughing wardrobe, a sink hanging off the wall, a crazed and spotted mirror bordered with green mould, lizards running around the bathroom, a shower that sprays directly onto the back of a swollen rotten wooden door - I think you get the idea. clip lies on the bed with tears in her eyes.
Ten minutes after our arrival there was a crack of thunder and the daily downpour began. Quite a lot of the rain came in through the hotel roof and flooded our corridor. The wind picked up and drove dense sheets of rain along the streets. Whole tree limbs broke off and fell to the ground. We stood in a shop doorway and watched the deluge. A local said "it's raining dogs and cats" and "holy shit."
Today we have bought some ferry tickets to an island called Pulau Tioman. We sail at 11:30am tomorrow.
I find the hot and steamy weather completely exhausting. clip can't stand to be outside for more than a few minutes at a time, it makes her super tetchy. There is a monsoonal downpour every day. The thunder and lightning can go on for hours.
So we spent a day sweating in muggy rainy downtown Singapore and decided to sample some local food. Until we saw what was on offer. Bull Frog Porridge and Goat Penis. Umm, no thanks. Instead, we walked into Little India and ate curry and rice off banana leaves with our bare right hands (left hands are the traditional Indian substitute for toilet paper).
In the evening we went out with the Abbott people again. We downed a few Singapore Slings in the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel then headed to a night fruit market to try durian, a big thorny green fruit known across Asia as "The King Of Fruits".
Well durian absolutely stinks. It smells so bad that it is illegal to carry it on public transport or eat it in a public place. We could smell the stink of it when we were still 30 yards away from the fruit stall. The creamy flesh of the durian resembles soft rotten leek. People liken it to "eating custard in a sewer". I suppose it tasted quite nice but the overpowering putrid stench made chewing it a constant struggle not to vomit. clip felt so sick she had to leave the market. Every time I burped the smell made me gag. Our Singaporean Abbott escort, Tan, said it makes your wee smell.
Afterwards we ate mixed satay from a street stall and went to Hooters for some burgers. Personally I would have sacked most of the waitresses for failing to satisfy the job description.
Cockroaches scuttled left and right as we walked back through the hostel to our room.
Two days later we were on a bus, rattling north from Singapore over a causeway to Malaysia, and trying to gobble all our apples before the checkpoint. Singaporean motorists get fined $500 if they cross the causeway with less than three quarters of a tank of fuel.
In Malaysia we stayed on the bus through Johor Bahru and Kota Tinggi to Mersing, a seaside town 130km north east of the border. Along the way we saw fifteen wild monkeys prancing about at the sides of the road. At Mersing we got an en suite double room at the Embassy Hotel for 4.50ukp. clip calls Mersing "Slum Central". Our guidebook described the hotel as "spick-and-span". Well the author has obviously never been there. Imagine the dingiest room you possibly can: lit by a single bare fluorescent tube, mildew on the walls, springs poking out of the mattress, live wires hanging out above the bed, a ceiling fan with furry blades, a sloughing wardrobe, a sink hanging off the wall, a crazed and spotted mirror bordered with green mould, lizards running around the bathroom, a shower that sprays directly onto the back of a swollen rotten wooden door - I think you get the idea. clip lies on the bed with tears in her eyes.
Ten minutes after our arrival there was a crack of thunder and the daily downpour began. Quite a lot of the rain came in through the hotel roof and flooded our corridor. The wind picked up and drove dense sheets of rain along the streets. Whole tree limbs broke off and fell to the ground. We stood in a shop doorway and watched the deluge. A local said "it's raining dogs and cats" and "holy shit."
Today we have bought some ferry tickets to an island called Pulau Tioman. We sail at 11:30am tomorrow.
18 September 2003
After the 'Big Bang' the universe was around 75% hydrogen and 25% helium. So where did all the other elements come from that we have today?
In space, gravity makes hydrogen collect to form vast invisible clouds of gas. If one of these clouds grows big enough the pressure at the centre is sufficient to squeeze hydrogen atoms together so that they join to form a new element called helium. This 'fusion' creates light and heat - the vast dark cloud suddenly lights up and becomes a star. Our sun is a typical example.
As the pressure inside the star increases, the hydrogen and helium atoms combine again to create other elements like lithium and beryllium, and, as the pressure rises, these further combine to create elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and so on through the periodic table.
But only so far. Iron poses a problem because the pressure required to squeeze iron atoms together is very very high. So a big ball of iron collects at the centre of the star instead.
If the star is massive enough it will eventually achieve the very high pressure required to fuse iron. When this happens, the spontaneous collapse of the iron core causes the star to explode with such incredible violence that it vapourises everything in its solar system. This explosion is called a supernova. Supernovae are so mindbogglingly violent that for a while they shine brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy put together.
Much later, when things have cooled down a bit, the leftover hydrogen gathers together again and the whole cycle restarts. Some of the new elements might join to form compounds like water, salt or sand. Maybe a few planets will form around the new star.
This process has already happened twice in our solar system.
Our current sun is actually sun number 3. This is a scientific fact. The oxygen we breathe, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our haemoglobin, the carbon in alcohol, the silicon in glass; they were all created inside sun 1 or sun 2. We are all made of star dust.
It's still a fair way off but one day sun 3 will explode. It is inevitable. The earth and all the other planets will be vapourised and will disappear. Again. No matter what we do, everything - absolutely everything, will be gone. There is nothing we do to stop it happening. There isn't even a way for us to leave any sign that we were ever here at all.
It's easy to turn away from the facts and pretend that we and the earth will be here forever. But we won't. Far from it - our existence is very much finite.
To be honest I find this quite depressing.
In space, gravity makes hydrogen collect to form vast invisible clouds of gas. If one of these clouds grows big enough the pressure at the centre is sufficient to squeeze hydrogen atoms together so that they join to form a new element called helium. This 'fusion' creates light and heat - the vast dark cloud suddenly lights up and becomes a star. Our sun is a typical example.
As the pressure inside the star increases, the hydrogen and helium atoms combine again to create other elements like lithium and beryllium, and, as the pressure rises, these further combine to create elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, and so on through the periodic table.
But only so far. Iron poses a problem because the pressure required to squeeze iron atoms together is very very high. So a big ball of iron collects at the centre of the star instead.
If the star is massive enough it will eventually achieve the very high pressure required to fuse iron. When this happens, the spontaneous collapse of the iron core causes the star to explode with such incredible violence that it vapourises everything in its solar system. This explosion is called a supernova. Supernovae are so mindbogglingly violent that for a while they shine brighter than all the other stars in the galaxy put together.
Much later, when things have cooled down a bit, the leftover hydrogen gathers together again and the whole cycle restarts. Some of the new elements might join to form compounds like water, salt or sand. Maybe a few planets will form around the new star.
This process has already happened twice in our solar system.
Our current sun is actually sun number 3. This is a scientific fact. The oxygen we breathe, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our haemoglobin, the carbon in alcohol, the silicon in glass; they were all created inside sun 1 or sun 2. We are all made of star dust.
It's still a fair way off but one day sun 3 will explode. It is inevitable. The earth and all the other planets will be vapourised and will disappear. Again. No matter what we do, everything - absolutely everything, will be gone. There is nothing we do to stop it happening. There isn't even a way for us to leave any sign that we were ever here at all.
It's easy to turn away from the facts and pretend that we and the earth will be here forever. But we won't. Far from it - our existence is very much finite.
To be honest I find this quite depressing.
16 September 2003
Overheard from the case worker cabin: "you're breaking my arm you're breaking my arm get off get off you bitch"
Vegetarians impress me. I wish I had the integrity to give up lovely meat for the sake of the poor treatment and slaughter of food animals. At the very least I could stick to eating parts of only large animals and try to reduce the number of animals that have to die for me. But then I suppose the animals I don't eat will end up rotting pointlessly in the dustbins behind the supermarket.
However, one thing about vegetarianism really irritates me.
As soon as someone announces that they are vegetarian (and believe me, vegetarian backpackers just can't stop themselves from telling everyone in the kitchen) some simpering git always looks at what they're cooking (usually some bits of carrot and broccoli and sweetcorn simmering in watery chopped tomatoes), slowly shakes their head in astonishment and gasps, "oooh! that looks delicious!" from a state of stupified awe, to which the vegetarian triumphantly responds, "yes! vegetables are really tasty!" like a vegetable missionary on a crusade to spread the hallowed word of vegetables, and everyone present nods in wondrous enlightenment.
Well hallelujah.
What. A. Revelation.
Yes I know vegetables are tasty. Why do you think I eat them every day? For god's sake. Your wonderful delicious watery vegetable slop is my tea with the pieces of chicken taken out. It's not the vegetarians who annoy me - it's the notion that vegetables are somehow transformed from being bland and boring to mouthwatering gourmet miracles because there's no meat on the plate next to them.
Get this then. In Sydney there are entire supermarkets with no prices shown. You don't find out how much anything costs until you pay for it. One shopkeeper told me that this is perfectly normal in Sydney. Well what yuppie twat came up with that daft idea? I can tell you now, it'll never catch on in Yorkshire.
I noticed that five pages of The Official Guide to Sydney tourist leaflet were devoted to adverts for women, somewhat euphemistically termed 'escorts', with prices ranging from $350 to $4000 per hour. Coincidentally, there is a place in Sydney called Bobbin Head.
After being our home for almost six months, selling Bertha was a mixture of relief and sadness. Without any significant doubling back we had driven her 12600 miles in Australia and hadn't even managed to complete a loop around less than one half of the country!
It took five minutes to register for free with Medicare, the Australian version of the NHS, and less than ten minutes to be seen for free by a doctor at the first medical centre we walked into. Australians are not registered to specific doctors or surgeries as we are in the UK. We're now immune to tetanus and meningitis, and stocked up with four months of anti-malaria pills. The pharmacy had to borrow tablets from another pharmacy to make up our prescription.
Then at last it was time to pack up and move on to Singapore.
I did not want to leave Australia. I struggle to think of any bad things to say about it apart from a bit of anti-English and anti-Aborigine racism and a penchant for making purses out of dead cane toads.
Australia is fantastic in so many ways: the weather is great, the public transport is clean and safe and reliable and graffiti-free, houses and cars and land are cheap, petrol is only 37p/litre, the wildlife is utterly amazing, the people are almost embarrassingly friendly (when was the last time a British dustbin man smiled and waved and asked you how you are?), the landscape is so varied and interesting, the air carries the wonderful scent of eucalyptus oil, bullbars are more than pedestrian-maiming fashion accessories, the land is so vast and there are so few people in it that you can experience true wilderness and solitude close to major cities; the list goes on and on.
Given the choice, why would anyone choose to live in a small overcrowded cold expensive polluted country like the UK where our attitudes are poisoned from childhood? One day I hope to become an Australian citizen. I want to spend my life there.
The following journey, from Australian campsite to Singaporean hostel, took over 49 hours.
First we staggered to the bus-stop, caught the bus to Chatswood and posted our tent and sleeping mats home by seamail. It will take them three months to reach Leeds but the postage cost less than 20ukp. What a bargain. We have calculated that, even taking into account the costs of buying the tent and mats and posting them home, camping saved us 320ukp over staying in hostel dormitories. Sleeping in Bertha saved us another 820ukp over staying in hostel dormitories. This rather begs the question, "how can hostel backpackers afford to travel anywhere?" And they buy beer in pubs! Really, how are these people so rich?
We took a triple-decker train into Sydney, then a McCaffertys (nee Greyhound) coach north to Brisbane. If you look at a map of Australia you'll see that Brisbane is only a shmitchy distance up the coast from Sydney, yet the coach journey takes 17 hours - it gives you some idea how big the place is. We tried to sleep on the coach a bit.
We took a shuttle bus to Brisbane airport and managed to change my flight from 11:55pm to 3:00pm as clip's flight was due to leave at 3:10pm (remember that clip and I are flying with different airlines from now on). The flights took eight hours. clip's plane was ten minutes behind my plane all the way to Singapore.
We arrived in different terminals nine hours early with no accommodation booked and had to leave the comfy reclining chairs in airside to reclaim our rucksacks and meet each other landside. We had our temperatures taken. Neither of us had SARS. We spent five hours 'sleeping' on the floor behind some plants in the viewing mall.
The next morning we took the train to Pasir Ris, staggered the last mile to our hostel, and fell into bed at 11am.
The first thing that struck me about Singapore was that almost everyone here is oriental, mainly Chinese, Malay or Indian. I had expected more Europeans but we are actually very rare here.
The next thing we noticed was the heat. Being just eighty miles from the equator the daytime temperature always hovers around 33C and the humidity is uncomfortably high. It's either sunny and sweltering or raining and sweltering.
Singapore is an island about 24 miles across and 14 miles from top to bottom. The population is 3.5 million, which is about the same as that of New Zealand. The government imposes a rather restrictive and penal regime but it is widely accepted by Singaporeans in return for a clean, safe and affluent lifestyle. For example, to limit road traffic and pollution, prospective car buyers must bid against each other for a limited number of 'entitlement certificates' which simply allow them to own a vehicle. Then the cars attract tax at an incredible 150% and most of the roads are tolled.
A cheap apartment costs 350,000ukp. A standard family home costs 1,000,000ukp. A large family home costs 3,500,000ukp.
Chewing gum is prohibited because it is expensive to remove from floors and seats. There are virtually no homeless people. Singaporeans are issued with shares in their own country! The fines and penalities imposed for breaking the law are so severe that crime is almost unheard of. Most of the police are in plain clothes. Some offences still carry the death penalty; hangings take place in the jail.
The shops sell all manner of bizarre things: Pig Organs Soup, Chrysanthemum Tea, Grass Jelly drink, Pink Dolphin (like Red Bull), and shredded cuttlefish ("The Chewing Gum For Orientals"). Yeurch!
On our first evening we were taken out for a fantastic seafood meal at Marina South by the Singaporean branch of Abbott, the company I used to work for in the UK. Thanks Tan! The seafood waiting to be eaten was swimming around in tanks nearby. The waiters wore badges proclaiming, "Temperature taken. No fever. I'm OK!"
When we got back to our room we found a whopping great cockroach in our shower - it measured over three inches from its bum to the end of its feelers. Gross. It took us ages to catch it because every time we approached it it ran at us and scared us silly.
And the next day we were taken out (again) for lunch at Clarkes Quay by a guy who used to be my manager in the UK ages ago. Thanks Ian!
Being away from home doesn't feel wrong anymore. The realistic being-back-at-home dreams have stopped. It has taken eight months to achieve this state of mind.
Vegetarians impress me. I wish I had the integrity to give up lovely meat for the sake of the poor treatment and slaughter of food animals. At the very least I could stick to eating parts of only large animals and try to reduce the number of animals that have to die for me. But then I suppose the animals I don't eat will end up rotting pointlessly in the dustbins behind the supermarket.
However, one thing about vegetarianism really irritates me.
As soon as someone announces that they are vegetarian (and believe me, vegetarian backpackers just can't stop themselves from telling everyone in the kitchen) some simpering git always looks at what they're cooking (usually some bits of carrot and broccoli and sweetcorn simmering in watery chopped tomatoes), slowly shakes their head in astonishment and gasps, "oooh! that looks delicious!" from a state of stupified awe, to which the vegetarian triumphantly responds, "yes! vegetables are really tasty!" like a vegetable missionary on a crusade to spread the hallowed word of vegetables, and everyone present nods in wondrous enlightenment.
Well hallelujah.
What. A. Revelation.
Yes I know vegetables are tasty. Why do you think I eat them every day? For god's sake. Your wonderful delicious watery vegetable slop is my tea with the pieces of chicken taken out. It's not the vegetarians who annoy me - it's the notion that vegetables are somehow transformed from being bland and boring to mouthwatering gourmet miracles because there's no meat on the plate next to them.
Get this then. In Sydney there are entire supermarkets with no prices shown. You don't find out how much anything costs until you pay for it. One shopkeeper told me that this is perfectly normal in Sydney. Well what yuppie twat came up with that daft idea? I can tell you now, it'll never catch on in Yorkshire.
I noticed that five pages of The Official Guide to Sydney tourist leaflet were devoted to adverts for women, somewhat euphemistically termed 'escorts', with prices ranging from $350 to $4000 per hour. Coincidentally, there is a place in Sydney called Bobbin Head.
After being our home for almost six months, selling Bertha was a mixture of relief and sadness. Without any significant doubling back we had driven her 12600 miles in Australia and hadn't even managed to complete a loop around less than one half of the country!
It took five minutes to register for free with Medicare, the Australian version of the NHS, and less than ten minutes to be seen for free by a doctor at the first medical centre we walked into. Australians are not registered to specific doctors or surgeries as we are in the UK. We're now immune to tetanus and meningitis, and stocked up with four months of anti-malaria pills. The pharmacy had to borrow tablets from another pharmacy to make up our prescription.
Then at last it was time to pack up and move on to Singapore.
I did not want to leave Australia. I struggle to think of any bad things to say about it apart from a bit of anti-English and anti-Aborigine racism and a penchant for making purses out of dead cane toads.
Australia is fantastic in so many ways: the weather is great, the public transport is clean and safe and reliable and graffiti-free, houses and cars and land are cheap, petrol is only 37p/litre, the wildlife is utterly amazing, the people are almost embarrassingly friendly (when was the last time a British dustbin man smiled and waved and asked you how you are?), the landscape is so varied and interesting, the air carries the wonderful scent of eucalyptus oil, bullbars are more than pedestrian-maiming fashion accessories, the land is so vast and there are so few people in it that you can experience true wilderness and solitude close to major cities; the list goes on and on.
Given the choice, why would anyone choose to live in a small overcrowded cold expensive polluted country like the UK where our attitudes are poisoned from childhood? One day I hope to become an Australian citizen. I want to spend my life there.
The following journey, from Australian campsite to Singaporean hostel, took over 49 hours.
First we staggered to the bus-stop, caught the bus to Chatswood and posted our tent and sleeping mats home by seamail. It will take them three months to reach Leeds but the postage cost less than 20ukp. What a bargain. We have calculated that, even taking into account the costs of buying the tent and mats and posting them home, camping saved us 320ukp over staying in hostel dormitories. Sleeping in Bertha saved us another 820ukp over staying in hostel dormitories. This rather begs the question, "how can hostel backpackers afford to travel anywhere?" And they buy beer in pubs! Really, how are these people so rich?
We took a triple-decker train into Sydney, then a McCaffertys (nee Greyhound) coach north to Brisbane. If you look at a map of Australia you'll see that Brisbane is only a shmitchy distance up the coast from Sydney, yet the coach journey takes 17 hours - it gives you some idea how big the place is. We tried to sleep on the coach a bit.
We took a shuttle bus to Brisbane airport and managed to change my flight from 11:55pm to 3:00pm as clip's flight was due to leave at 3:10pm (remember that clip and I are flying with different airlines from now on). The flights took eight hours. clip's plane was ten minutes behind my plane all the way to Singapore.
We arrived in different terminals nine hours early with no accommodation booked and had to leave the comfy reclining chairs in airside to reclaim our rucksacks and meet each other landside. We had our temperatures taken. Neither of us had SARS. We spent five hours 'sleeping' on the floor behind some plants in the viewing mall.
The next morning we took the train to Pasir Ris, staggered the last mile to our hostel, and fell into bed at 11am.
The first thing that struck me about Singapore was that almost everyone here is oriental, mainly Chinese, Malay or Indian. I had expected more Europeans but we are actually very rare here.
The next thing we noticed was the heat. Being just eighty miles from the equator the daytime temperature always hovers around 33C and the humidity is uncomfortably high. It's either sunny and sweltering or raining and sweltering.
Singapore is an island about 24 miles across and 14 miles from top to bottom. The population is 3.5 million, which is about the same as that of New Zealand. The government imposes a rather restrictive and penal regime but it is widely accepted by Singaporeans in return for a clean, safe and affluent lifestyle. For example, to limit road traffic and pollution, prospective car buyers must bid against each other for a limited number of 'entitlement certificates' which simply allow them to own a vehicle. Then the cars attract tax at an incredible 150% and most of the roads are tolled.
A cheap apartment costs 350,000ukp. A standard family home costs 1,000,000ukp. A large family home costs 3,500,000ukp.
Chewing gum is prohibited because it is expensive to remove from floors and seats. There are virtually no homeless people. Singaporeans are issued with shares in their own country! The fines and penalities imposed for breaking the law are so severe that crime is almost unheard of. Most of the police are in plain clothes. Some offences still carry the death penalty; hangings take place in the jail.
The shops sell all manner of bizarre things: Pig Organs Soup, Chrysanthemum Tea, Grass Jelly drink, Pink Dolphin (like Red Bull), and shredded cuttlefish ("The Chewing Gum For Orientals"). Yeurch!
On our first evening we were taken out for a fantastic seafood meal at Marina South by the Singaporean branch of Abbott, the company I used to work for in the UK. Thanks Tan! The seafood waiting to be eaten was swimming around in tanks nearby. The waiters wore badges proclaiming, "Temperature taken. No fever. I'm OK!"
When we got back to our room we found a whopping great cockroach in our shower - it measured over three inches from its bum to the end of its feelers. Gross. It took us ages to catch it because every time we approached it it ran at us and scared us silly.
And the next day we were taken out (again) for lunch at Clarkes Quay by a guy who used to be my manager in the UK ages ago. Thanks Ian!
Being away from home doesn't feel wrong anymore. The realistic being-back-at-home dreams have stopped. It has taken eight months to achieve this state of mind.
09 September 2003
Well good grief! After nearly biting my nails down to my knuckles with all the selling Bertha stress, I don't think a career in car sales is for me.
Now all I need is to get through the doctor visits and injections against ridiculously long-named diseases, fly to Singapore on my own followed by 15 hours wait in Changi arrivals lounge and then maybe I can calm down and my shoulders will leave the bottom of my ears and return to their usual place. I can hardly wait.
The good news is, from then on we'll be sleeping in a bedroom, having our laundry done for pennies and eating chicken satay for tea every day. Yum!
Now all I need is to get through the doctor visits and injections against ridiculously long-named diseases, fly to Singapore on my own followed by 15 hours wait in Changi arrivals lounge and then maybe I can calm down and my shoulders will leave the bottom of my ears and return to their usual place. I can hardly wait.
The good news is, from then on we'll be sleeping in a bedroom, having our laundry done for pennies and eating chicken satay for tea every day. Yum!
Yey!
w00t!
Ha ha ha!
Give me a KFC Bargain Bucket!
The reason for this glutinous levity will be revealed shortly.
First, on with the show...
After my father had erased all his photographs he turned into a little boy who has been caught being naughty. My mother assumed her typical air of resigned despair while he trotted morosely alongside her with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouched forward. It wasn't so much "forgive" as "accept that I'm married to a disaster-prone moron."
The next morning we discovered that some thieves had stolen all our food from the campsite fridge. Thanks a lot. My father, still anxious to make amends, slouched into Byron Bay and bought replacements of everything.
Then we were off to the airfield. Not to be outdone by her travelling son and his girlfriend, my mother decided to do a tandem skydive from 14000 feet - that's 2000 feet more than us and 50 seconds of freefall! She played it very cool on the way there, pretending not to be nervous or scared or anything, but her uncontrollable shrieks of "Awesome!" and "I've done it!" after landing gave her away. My father, still anxious to make amends, paid for her to be videoed during the jump; no doubt they'll be happy to show you the results if you ever pop round for a coffee.
After the fridge theft incident we packed up and moved to another campsite. Many of the campsites in this area are run by the council. In the UK this would probably mean disgusting slums with graffiti and no toilet paper, but in Australia it means friendly owners and clean well-maintained facilities. We walked around Cape Byron (the easternmost point of the Australian mainland) and saw dolphins and humpback whales in the bay.
Next stop was Coffs Harbour where we stayed at a campsite with a Dutch theme. The reception was inside a working clog barn. Coffs Harbour was rather lacking in entertainment; the best we could do was walk across a causeway to Muttonbird Island, wander (and in my mother's case, fall over an invisible stone and cut her arm open) around the Botanic Gardens, and spend an hour not understanding the cartoons in a cartoon gallery set inside an old ammunitions bunker from World War two.
In the evening we all had a nice game of rummy. We couldn't help but chuckle when my father smugly laid down his 'winning hand' which turned out to be an almost random selection of colours and values.
After Sawtell we moved inland along a road called the Waterfall Way. As you might expect, the Waterfall Way is lined with lots of waterfalls. Many of these cascade into gobsmackingly-deep chasms which suddenly appear out of nowhere. The scientific explanation is that the land used to be under the sea, and the chasms were formed when the sea level dropped and the softer rock was eroded away. Whatever, they are very impressive. We drove along a dirt road to Platypus Flat for our dinner (didn't see any), then spent the night in a remote bush camp in Cathedral Rock National Park. We were the only people there. Firewood was provided free of charge. We got a nice big campfire going to keep us warm and cooked our food on a wood-fired barbecue. In the morning we climbed to the top of Cathedral Rock; the final part was so steep it required the use of chains. We saw some grey kangaroos.
A record drought ended in style, as it would, when we reached Armidale. clip and I spent a miserable night in the tent as a storm raged outside. People in caravans were concerned enough to ask about our welfare. My parents took us out for a pizza.
Back to the coast for a couple of drier nights in Port Macquarie. We visited historic Roto House and the Koala Hospital. The Koala Hospital had about 25 poorly koalas. Some had been hurt in bush fires, some knocked over by cars, some attacked by dogs. others orphaned etc. As you can imagine, clip loved the Koala Hospital and wanted to work there immediately. I loved it too but I couldn't help being struck by the hypocrisy of caring almost to obsession about one type of animal whilst ignoring or persecuting others. My father reckons that koalas are more important than other animals because they're cute and look like teddy bears. He's probably right. I've never heard of a Jellyfish Hospital or a Scorpion Hospital. As usual, the larger or cuter the species, the more important each animal seems to be. It's ok to eat fish but not to eat dolphins or whales. Cows, pigs and sheep are mammals. It's fine to kill geese and ducks but not to kill swans. Eat pigs but not dogs.
We stayed two nights at a deserted beachfront campsite near Hallidays Point. Nice and sunny and hot. The kitchen and TV room were great but the peace was marred by the ubiquitous diggers.
We had our dinner at Seal Rocks and then tried to get into Myall Lakes National Park. Three of the access roads were flooded. We managed to find one that was open and spent another lonely night in a bush camp on the shores of a lake. We lit a campfire, wrapped potatoes in aluminium foil, and placed them in the embers. An hour later the four potatoes had turned into charcoal briquettes. Of the two we were able to retrieve, only one offered a marble-sized core of edible smoke-damaged material. How we chuckled when my mother went to take a drink from her cup and found my father's chamomile teabags dangling in her wine.
Through Maitland and Singleton and on via an Opal Museum to Katoomba on the edge of the Blue Mountains National Park. "Blue Mountains" because the mist from the eucalyptus trees appears blue in sunlight. There are chasms, forests, lookouts, waterfalls and tourists galore. In return for letting them sleep in Bertha for two weeks, and making us sleep in the tent, my parents paid for clip and me to stay in the uber-smart Katoomba YHA hostel with them. This was a big secret from clip until after we had arrived. She started crying at the reception desk.
We spent a couple of days in the Blue Mountains. We took the Trolley Tourbus round the major sights, stopped off in Leura to see a sweet shop that didn't sell kali, walked along the cliff walk, viewed the Three Sisters (rock pinnacles), descended into the chasm through a natural tunnel on the clip-exciting Scenic Railway (supposedly the steepest passenger funicular railway in the world, inclined 52 degrees from horizontal and originally built to lift coal from the coal mine in the cliff face), and came up out of the chasm in a Swiss cablecar called the Sceniscender. They've also built a rollercoaster out over the cliff edge but it has not yet been opened to the public because a lorry drove into the track in the carpark and bent it.
Back at the hostel my father took over the kitchen and prepared a chinese banquet. The two-minute-noodle- and pasta-munching hordes in the dining area stared open-mouthed at our wokful of delicious food. Yum.
I bought myself some new boots to replace my power pumps.
Then, at last, we reached the sprawling metropolis of Sydney, the end of the road for all of us in Australia this time. We left my parents at their friend's house in Coogee and drove north to Lane Cove River National Park campsite in North Ryde. Two showers and a shave later we were on a bus to St Leonards and then another bus to The Oaks pub in Neutral Bay for drinks and a meal out with twenty five people from the same company I worked for in the UK, and all for free! The meal was amazing - stale bread cooked in a stinky cheese fondue, prawns, beef and chicken cooked in an oily fondue, then marshmallows and chunks of banana cooked in a chocolate fondue. Slurp. clip was in heaven. After the meal we went back to the pub and drank more beer. It was a real treat for us.
The next day, nursing a hangover, I went along to the haematology meeting in the company office. It was a good refresher for me and I got to meet all the Australian engineers, plus I think I managed to pass on a few tips here and there.
The next day my father climbed to the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Well done!
We went to visit a Brethren school and offended the people there by wearing shorts instead of long trousers, and trousers instead of a skirt.
And then it was time for my parents to go home. We dropped them off at the airport. The three weeks with them had gone very well. I had expected problems but things went fine. clip even admitting to missing them when they had left. However, I now understand why my mother always has subtitles on the television at home - my father never stops talking. And he talks too loudly. Sitting quietly is an alien concept to him. Anyway, I hope they had a good time. They are writing a blog entry which I'll add when I receive it.
After they'd gone we stayed at Lane Cove River Tourist Park. There were lots of possums and rabbits and parrots. The parrots sit on your shoulder. The mynah birds eat out of your hand. You can stroke the possums. The possums get into your van and try to jump up on the bed, even when you hit them repeatedly with one of clip's flip flops.
Two girls were staying in a cabin near us. Two sisters, one 16 and one 18. They were "in care." Their case worker was 17. Much of the care time involved screaming and tantrums and arguments. Late one night seven policemen and two policewomen turned up and removed two black bags with something in them.
Then started STRESS TIME.
Time to sell Bertha.
We designed an enticing advert and printed it out twenty times and trekked around Sydney for a day putting the adverts up on noticeboards. We noticed that there were a lot of vans for sale. Clearly September is not a good time to sell. We set a price of $3200. We put some adverts up in Bondi Beach and looked for the beautiful bodies.
Time passed. We fretted. Marni test drove her and said she wanted her but needed time to find the money.
More time passed. More fretting. Katy and Karey test drove her and said they'd give us $3000 pending a successful pre-buy check.
More time passes. We start to get irritable and depressed. Emily and Nathan test drive her - Emily has not driven a manual for several years. I have to show Emily what each of the pedals do and which way to move the indicator stick to turn left.
Yet more time passes. More stress. The pre-buy check highlights a frayed seatbelt, a leaky radiator and old engine oil. Katy and Karey want these putting right before they'll buy her. There are so many vans for sale we have no choice but to agree. Marni rings back and offers $2500 for Bertha without the work. We ring Katy and Kerry and tell them she's offered $2600. Katy and Karey agree to pay for part of the work. Marni rings back to offer more but it's too late - Bertha is already in the garage.
It cost us $325 to fix everything but Katy and Karey paid $100 of that, so they paid $3100 in the end. Effectively we sold Bertha for $2775. She cost us $2250 so we made a profit of $525, but of course we had quite a bit of work done to her during our trip so we lost out overall. Still, the cheapest campervan hire is $49/day, which would have cost us $8200.
I now have $3100 cash in my pocket. The relief is palpable. We promised ourselves we would buy a KFC Bargain Bucket to celebrate so that's exactly what we're going to do. Right now.
And coming up in the next episode: clip and clop have ten vaccinations and very sore arms, post home a tent by seamail and fly to Asia.
w00t!
Ha ha ha!
Give me a KFC Bargain Bucket!
The reason for this glutinous levity will be revealed shortly.
First, on with the show...
After my father had erased all his photographs he turned into a little boy who has been caught being naughty. My mother assumed her typical air of resigned despair while he trotted morosely alongside her with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouched forward. It wasn't so much "forgive" as "accept that I'm married to a disaster-prone moron."
The next morning we discovered that some thieves had stolen all our food from the campsite fridge. Thanks a lot. My father, still anxious to make amends, slouched into Byron Bay and bought replacements of everything.
Then we were off to the airfield. Not to be outdone by her travelling son and his girlfriend, my mother decided to do a tandem skydive from 14000 feet - that's 2000 feet more than us and 50 seconds of freefall! She played it very cool on the way there, pretending not to be nervous or scared or anything, but her uncontrollable shrieks of "Awesome!" and "I've done it!" after landing gave her away. My father, still anxious to make amends, paid for her to be videoed during the jump; no doubt they'll be happy to show you the results if you ever pop round for a coffee.
After the fridge theft incident we packed up and moved to another campsite. Many of the campsites in this area are run by the council. In the UK this would probably mean disgusting slums with graffiti and no toilet paper, but in Australia it means friendly owners and clean well-maintained facilities. We walked around Cape Byron (the easternmost point of the Australian mainland) and saw dolphins and humpback whales in the bay.
Next stop was Coffs Harbour where we stayed at a campsite with a Dutch theme. The reception was inside a working clog barn. Coffs Harbour was rather lacking in entertainment; the best we could do was walk across a causeway to Muttonbird Island, wander (and in my mother's case, fall over an invisible stone and cut her arm open) around the Botanic Gardens, and spend an hour not understanding the cartoons in a cartoon gallery set inside an old ammunitions bunker from World War two.
In the evening we all had a nice game of rummy. We couldn't help but chuckle when my father smugly laid down his 'winning hand' which turned out to be an almost random selection of colours and values.
After Sawtell we moved inland along a road called the Waterfall Way. As you might expect, the Waterfall Way is lined with lots of waterfalls. Many of these cascade into gobsmackingly-deep chasms which suddenly appear out of nowhere. The scientific explanation is that the land used to be under the sea, and the chasms were formed when the sea level dropped and the softer rock was eroded away. Whatever, they are very impressive. We drove along a dirt road to Platypus Flat for our dinner (didn't see any), then spent the night in a remote bush camp in Cathedral Rock National Park. We were the only people there. Firewood was provided free of charge. We got a nice big campfire going to keep us warm and cooked our food on a wood-fired barbecue. In the morning we climbed to the top of Cathedral Rock; the final part was so steep it required the use of chains. We saw some grey kangaroos.
A record drought ended in style, as it would, when we reached Armidale. clip and I spent a miserable night in the tent as a storm raged outside. People in caravans were concerned enough to ask about our welfare. My parents took us out for a pizza.
Back to the coast for a couple of drier nights in Port Macquarie. We visited historic Roto House and the Koala Hospital. The Koala Hospital had about 25 poorly koalas. Some had been hurt in bush fires, some knocked over by cars, some attacked by dogs. others orphaned etc. As you can imagine, clip loved the Koala Hospital and wanted to work there immediately. I loved it too but I couldn't help being struck by the hypocrisy of caring almost to obsession about one type of animal whilst ignoring or persecuting others. My father reckons that koalas are more important than other animals because they're cute and look like teddy bears. He's probably right. I've never heard of a Jellyfish Hospital or a Scorpion Hospital. As usual, the larger or cuter the species, the more important each animal seems to be. It's ok to eat fish but not to eat dolphins or whales. Cows, pigs and sheep are mammals. It's fine to kill geese and ducks but not to kill swans. Eat pigs but not dogs.
We stayed two nights at a deserted beachfront campsite near Hallidays Point. Nice and sunny and hot. The kitchen and TV room were great but the peace was marred by the ubiquitous diggers.
We had our dinner at Seal Rocks and then tried to get into Myall Lakes National Park. Three of the access roads were flooded. We managed to find one that was open and spent another lonely night in a bush camp on the shores of a lake. We lit a campfire, wrapped potatoes in aluminium foil, and placed them in the embers. An hour later the four potatoes had turned into charcoal briquettes. Of the two we were able to retrieve, only one offered a marble-sized core of edible smoke-damaged material. How we chuckled when my mother went to take a drink from her cup and found my father's chamomile teabags dangling in her wine.
Through Maitland and Singleton and on via an Opal Museum to Katoomba on the edge of the Blue Mountains National Park. "Blue Mountains" because the mist from the eucalyptus trees appears blue in sunlight. There are chasms, forests, lookouts, waterfalls and tourists galore. In return for letting them sleep in Bertha for two weeks, and making us sleep in the tent, my parents paid for clip and me to stay in the uber-smart Katoomba YHA hostel with them. This was a big secret from clip until after we had arrived. She started crying at the reception desk.
We spent a couple of days in the Blue Mountains. We took the Trolley Tourbus round the major sights, stopped off in Leura to see a sweet shop that didn't sell kali, walked along the cliff walk, viewed the Three Sisters (rock pinnacles), descended into the chasm through a natural tunnel on the clip-exciting Scenic Railway (supposedly the steepest passenger funicular railway in the world, inclined 52 degrees from horizontal and originally built to lift coal from the coal mine in the cliff face), and came up out of the chasm in a Swiss cablecar called the Sceniscender. They've also built a rollercoaster out over the cliff edge but it has not yet been opened to the public because a lorry drove into the track in the carpark and bent it.
Back at the hostel my father took over the kitchen and prepared a chinese banquet. The two-minute-noodle- and pasta-munching hordes in the dining area stared open-mouthed at our wokful of delicious food. Yum.
I bought myself some new boots to replace my power pumps.
Then, at last, we reached the sprawling metropolis of Sydney, the end of the road for all of us in Australia this time. We left my parents at their friend's house in Coogee and drove north to Lane Cove River National Park campsite in North Ryde. Two showers and a shave later we were on a bus to St Leonards and then another bus to The Oaks pub in Neutral Bay for drinks and a meal out with twenty five people from the same company I worked for in the UK, and all for free! The meal was amazing - stale bread cooked in a stinky cheese fondue, prawns, beef and chicken cooked in an oily fondue, then marshmallows and chunks of banana cooked in a chocolate fondue. Slurp. clip was in heaven. After the meal we went back to the pub and drank more beer. It was a real treat for us.
The next day, nursing a hangover, I went along to the haematology meeting in the company office. It was a good refresher for me and I got to meet all the Australian engineers, plus I think I managed to pass on a few tips here and there.
The next day my father climbed to the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Well done!
We went to visit a Brethren school and offended the people there by wearing shorts instead of long trousers, and trousers instead of a skirt.
And then it was time for my parents to go home. We dropped them off at the airport. The three weeks with them had gone very well. I had expected problems but things went fine. clip even admitting to missing them when they had left. However, I now understand why my mother always has subtitles on the television at home - my father never stops talking. And he talks too loudly. Sitting quietly is an alien concept to him. Anyway, I hope they had a good time. They are writing a blog entry which I'll add when I receive it.
After they'd gone we stayed at Lane Cove River Tourist Park. There were lots of possums and rabbits and parrots. The parrots sit on your shoulder. The mynah birds eat out of your hand. You can stroke the possums. The possums get into your van and try to jump up on the bed, even when you hit them repeatedly with one of clip's flip flops.
Two girls were staying in a cabin near us. Two sisters, one 16 and one 18. They were "in care." Their case worker was 17. Much of the care time involved screaming and tantrums and arguments. Late one night seven policemen and two policewomen turned up and removed two black bags with something in them.
Then started STRESS TIME.
Time to sell Bertha.
We designed an enticing advert and printed it out twenty times and trekked around Sydney for a day putting the adverts up on noticeboards. We noticed that there were a lot of vans for sale. Clearly September is not a good time to sell. We set a price of $3200. We put some adverts up in Bondi Beach and looked for the beautiful bodies.
Time passed. We fretted. Marni test drove her and said she wanted her but needed time to find the money.
More time passed. More fretting. Katy and Karey test drove her and said they'd give us $3000 pending a successful pre-buy check.
More time passes. We start to get irritable and depressed. Emily and Nathan test drive her - Emily has not driven a manual for several years. I have to show Emily what each of the pedals do and which way to move the indicator stick to turn left.
Yet more time passes. More stress. The pre-buy check highlights a frayed seatbelt, a leaky radiator and old engine oil. Katy and Karey want these putting right before they'll buy her. There are so many vans for sale we have no choice but to agree. Marni rings back and offers $2500 for Bertha without the work. We ring Katy and Kerry and tell them she's offered $2600. Katy and Karey agree to pay for part of the work. Marni rings back to offer more but it's too late - Bertha is already in the garage.
It cost us $325 to fix everything but Katy and Karey paid $100 of that, so they paid $3100 in the end. Effectively we sold Bertha for $2775. She cost us $2250 so we made a profit of $525, but of course we had quite a bit of work done to her during our trip so we lost out overall. Still, the cheapest campervan hire is $49/day, which would have cost us $8200.
I now have $3100 cash in my pocket. The relief is palpable. We promised ourselves we would buy a KFC Bargain Bucket to celebrate so that's exactly what we're going to do. Right now.
And coming up in the next episode: clip and clop have ten vaccinations and very sore arms, post home a tent by seamail and fly to Asia.
01 September 2003
Hello everyone! Sorry about the delay. I bet you thought I'd been hospitalised by an angry Australian or got lost in a land rainforest with only some sugar-free chewing gum to survive on.
More wrong guesses on the mystery harrowing event:
* clip and clop's 10 year going-out anniversary (nah, nowhere near, ummm)
* clip's er, "monthly time"
* cosmetic surgery to appear like "Billy Connelly Down Under"
* Bertha's MOT/service
* Brisbane carnival
* Brisbane "Festival of Pommie hating" (surely a daily event?)
* clip's mobile is broken and it will take until 2nd September to get it fixed so she can text again
* all shops (other than food) are closed
* it's the Rainy Season
* the officially coldest bit of the year
* Aussie Football main season - centred on Brisbane
* we don't have a surfboard on Bertha's roof
... but, as the harrowing period draws to a close, we have a WINNER! Well done to "clap" (ha ha how appropriate) who guessed, correctly, that my parents have been travelling with us for the last three weeks. Believe me, Bertha is not a big van for four adults. clip likened it to us "sitting in a little kitchen together for twenty days." Her sanity wasn't helped by my father's insistance on singing along loudly to every Johnny Cash song that came on the stereo.
After Yeppoon, Gladstone and Bundaberg (where they make Bundaberg Rum), we spent a night in Hervey Bay (Tackville), looked longingly across at Fraser Island (a huge sandbank island closed to 2WD vehicles) and carried on to Tin Can Bay where dolphins swim up to the boat ramp and let you feed them. Of course they didn't show up on the day we went to feed them. Someone told us they were out shagging in the bay. While we waited pointlessly for the horny dolphins to get hungry we passed the time watching an ugly woman telling her kids off for everything they did. Sometimes I think people only have children so they can bully them.
At Rainbow Beach we walked up the back of a gigantic sand dune called Carlo Blow and admired the view. Then I almost killed myself climbing barefoot down the fragile multicoloured sandy cliff to the beach and lost clip for an hour because she had to retrace her steps across the gigantic sand dune and we missed each other in a housing estate ginnel. The beaches down this part of the east coast are open to traffic at low tide. The usual road rules apply. We didn't have a 4WD so we had to hitchhike instead; 14km in the back of a pick-up truck to the unremarkable wreck of the Cherry Venture. Then we walked back to Rainbow Beach along the sand. Both of us got blisters on our heels.
Next stop was Brisbane to sleep in another carpark. We spent a day at DreamWorld, a nice big theme park with rides like The Giant Drop (a thrilling 120m freefall) and the Tower Of Terror (20 people sit in a 6 ton carriage and are accelerated from rest to almost 100mph in 7 seconds along a track, a feat requiring 2.2 megawatts and momentarily doubling the power usage of the entire park, before turning vertical and thundering 100m up a tower like a fighter jet before falling backwards, rapidly picking up speed, failing to be stopped by the brakes, roaring straight through the station into the emergency overshoot tunnel and having to be winched back to the start).
The tiger keepers at DreamWorld walked fully-grown tigers around the park on leads. The tigers were just a couple of metres away from everyone. I kept away from them, it all looked a bit dangerous to me.
Then the traumatic period began - we collected my parents from the airport. My father had purchased a brand new digital camera for their trip but had chosen not to read the manual properly, as was to become painfully apparent later on. We spent a couple of nights together in a posh hostel in cold rainy Brisbane; I think my parents were pleasantly surprised to find that backpacker hostels are not full of smelly unshaven dropouts as they were expecting them to be.
We went to Brisbane Show (the Ekka) and saw another Silver Spike competition, lots of animals (poultry, pigs, goats, sheep, cows), a precision driving team, a schoolboy rodeo and some fireworks. My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
We spent a day at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo (he wasn't there unfortunately). We saw crocodiles being fed, wombats, snakes, koalas with baby koalas and Harriet. Harriet is the oldest known animal in captivity, a 172 year old Galapagos Tortoise. She originally belonged to Charles Darwin! She has lived on her own for most of her life but a few years ago the keepers tried to introduce her to another tortoise called Coconut. Unfortunately, Harriet continually "chased" Coconut around the enclosure (comical to imagine) and they had to be separated. We stroked wallabies and kangaroos. My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
At the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary my mother and clip actually got to hold some koalas! clip's koala was called Zaggot. We all stroked the koalas. The koalas stank of eucalyptus. My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
We crammed shoulder-to-shoulder and cheek-to-cheek in Bertha and drove from Brisbane to Natural Bridge and Lamington National Parks. We stayed at Binna Burra and went walking through mountainous rainforests (Daves Creek Circuit). My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
Back past Nimbin and Woodenbong (no surprise that this region is strongly hippy-influenced then) to Byron Bay. How we chuckled when, meddling with his new camera, my father spectacularly misunderstood the option "Erase All Frames" and then answered "Yes" to the complicated question "Are You Sure?" and succeeded in permanently deleting every photograph he had taken so far.
More wrong guesses on the mystery harrowing event:
* clip and clop's 10 year going-out anniversary (nah, nowhere near, ummm)
* clip's er, "monthly time"
* cosmetic surgery to appear like "Billy Connelly Down Under"
* Bertha's MOT/service
* Brisbane carnival
* Brisbane "Festival of Pommie hating" (surely a daily event?)
* clip's mobile is broken and it will take until 2nd September to get it fixed so she can text again
* all shops (other than food) are closed
* it's the Rainy Season
* the officially coldest bit of the year
* Aussie Football main season - centred on Brisbane
* we don't have a surfboard on Bertha's roof
... but, as the harrowing period draws to a close, we have a WINNER! Well done to "clap" (ha ha how appropriate) who guessed, correctly, that my parents have been travelling with us for the last three weeks. Believe me, Bertha is not a big van for four adults. clip likened it to us "sitting in a little kitchen together for twenty days." Her sanity wasn't helped by my father's insistance on singing along loudly to every Johnny Cash song that came on the stereo.
After Yeppoon, Gladstone and Bundaberg (where they make Bundaberg Rum), we spent a night in Hervey Bay (Tackville), looked longingly across at Fraser Island (a huge sandbank island closed to 2WD vehicles) and carried on to Tin Can Bay where dolphins swim up to the boat ramp and let you feed them. Of course they didn't show up on the day we went to feed them. Someone told us they were out shagging in the bay. While we waited pointlessly for the horny dolphins to get hungry we passed the time watching an ugly woman telling her kids off for everything they did. Sometimes I think people only have children so they can bully them.
At Rainbow Beach we walked up the back of a gigantic sand dune called Carlo Blow and admired the view. Then I almost killed myself climbing barefoot down the fragile multicoloured sandy cliff to the beach and lost clip for an hour because she had to retrace her steps across the gigantic sand dune and we missed each other in a housing estate ginnel. The beaches down this part of the east coast are open to traffic at low tide. The usual road rules apply. We didn't have a 4WD so we had to hitchhike instead; 14km in the back of a pick-up truck to the unremarkable wreck of the Cherry Venture. Then we walked back to Rainbow Beach along the sand. Both of us got blisters on our heels.
Next stop was Brisbane to sleep in another carpark. We spent a day at DreamWorld, a nice big theme park with rides like The Giant Drop (a thrilling 120m freefall) and the Tower Of Terror (20 people sit in a 6 ton carriage and are accelerated from rest to almost 100mph in 7 seconds along a track, a feat requiring 2.2 megawatts and momentarily doubling the power usage of the entire park, before turning vertical and thundering 100m up a tower like a fighter jet before falling backwards, rapidly picking up speed, failing to be stopped by the brakes, roaring straight through the station into the emergency overshoot tunnel and having to be winched back to the start).
The tiger keepers at DreamWorld walked fully-grown tigers around the park on leads. The tigers were just a couple of metres away from everyone. I kept away from them, it all looked a bit dangerous to me.
Then the traumatic period began - we collected my parents from the airport. My father had purchased a brand new digital camera for their trip but had chosen not to read the manual properly, as was to become painfully apparent later on. We spent a couple of nights together in a posh hostel in cold rainy Brisbane; I think my parents were pleasantly surprised to find that backpacker hostels are not full of smelly unshaven dropouts as they were expecting them to be.
We went to Brisbane Show (the Ekka) and saw another Silver Spike competition, lots of animals (poultry, pigs, goats, sheep, cows), a precision driving team, a schoolboy rodeo and some fireworks. My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
We spent a day at Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo (he wasn't there unfortunately). We saw crocodiles being fed, wombats, snakes, koalas with baby koalas and Harriet. Harriet is the oldest known animal in captivity, a 172 year old Galapagos Tortoise. She originally belonged to Charles Darwin! She has lived on her own for most of her life but a few years ago the keepers tried to introduce her to another tortoise called Coconut. Unfortunately, Harriet continually "chased" Coconut around the enclosure (comical to imagine) and they had to be separated. We stroked wallabies and kangaroos. My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
At the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary my mother and clip actually got to hold some koalas! clip's koala was called Zaggot. We all stroked the koalas. The koalas stank of eucalyptus. My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
We crammed shoulder-to-shoulder and cheek-to-cheek in Bertha and drove from Brisbane to Natural Bridge and Lamington National Parks. We stayed at Binna Burra and went walking through mountainous rainforests (Daves Creek Circuit). My father took lots of photographs with his new digital camera.
Back past Nimbin and Woodenbong (no surprise that this region is strongly hippy-influenced then) to Byron Bay. How we chuckled when, meddling with his new camera, my father spectacularly misunderstood the option "Erase All Frames" and then answered "Yes" to the complicated question "Are You Sure?" and succeeded in permanently deleting every photograph he had taken so far.
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