Australia Zoo

Crikey! Australia Zoo, number one on our Australia must do list. Despite the loss of Steve Irwin some months ago his influence was still very apparent.

As soon as we arrived at our hostel in Maroochydore we booked the free shuttle to the zoo (since leaving home free has become my favourite word).

We were at the bus stop nice and early the next morning ready for our trip to the zoo, unfortunately the bus wasn't so prompt, about twenty minutes late (that meant twenty minutes less zoo time for us). However we did get to watch croc hunter videos on the bus, which was quite sad as it was about Steve and his kids.

When we arrived it was straight in and to the first show, which was the otter feeding. They had two female Asian short-claw otters that ran around like naughty kittens. We then went over to see the elephants where we got to hand feed them.

It was then time for the main event in the crocoseum, the Crocodile show. There was a couple of warm up acts consisting of snakes and a whole range of birds before the main act Graham the Crocodile (although they use a different croc for each show). Graham showed us moves in the water and how they can propel themselves far out of the water to get food (tail walking). We were also told that you should never stand on anything that overhangs the water in croc country as they can easily get you.



As the day went on we got to stroke kangaroos, a koala, a lizard, a python (Samantha ran away so fast, she tripped over a wheelchair and almost ran into the snake) and a baby alligator (baby crocs are to aggressive to be handled).



The second highlight of the day was the tiger show. They have two hand reared tigers that would do anything for milk and meat, the trainers had them doing jumps and climbing trees.

We had an amazing day and will definitely go back as they have plans to grow the zoo from its current 72 acres to around 1000 acres in the future. They firmly communicated their conservation message and we are now wildlife warriors too.

Surfers Paradise

We arrived in Surfers Paradise under the cover of darkness, because the only bus we could get out of Byron Bay was 9pm. However, even though it was dark it looked like a mixture of Vegas/Waikiki/Costa del Sol. So not the best first impression but I thought I'll see what I think in daylight. Our first night wasn't much fun either, as one of the girls in our 5 bed dorm, got a little tipsy with her ?boyfriend and they decided to try and get a bit "technical" in her top bunk. Me, Alan and the other 2 girls were not best pleased with their behaviour, but thankfully they decided that there wasn't enough room on the top bunk and so left the room.

Surfers Paradise is the jewel of Australia's gold coast, with its miles and miles of gorgeous beach and huge waves. Unfortunately if you don't surf or its too chilly to sunbathe, there really isn't that much to do or see. We walked along the beach quite a bit and dipped our toes in the chilly pacific.

The hostel had a list of top ten things to do in Surfers, so we decided to do one of them, as we had done most of the other attractions elsewhere. So we booked ourselves a night out at Draculas.

Draculas is a horror, comedy, cabaret restaurant/club. It is the only restaurant I've been too where you have to ride the ghost train to get to the restaurant/theatre.

It included a 3 corpse dinner which was excellent but the highlight was the dessert. This was advertised as death by chocolate, so I was expecting a chocolatey spongy dessert. However, what we got was awesome - it was a dark chocolate coffin with a coffee and Kaluha mousse centre, the coffin lid balanced on top with some raspberry coulis surrounding it. It was delicious!

The show was hiliarous, it was advertised as "Fangs and Fetish" but it was neither really apart from their clothing. It was very good though and a great night out.

Byron Bay

Byron Bay is one of the big names of Australia and given a hot sunny day it would probably have lived up to it reputation. However we are finding out that travelling through Australia in winter tends to dampen down some of the great places.

When we booked our trips to Fraser Island and the Whitsundays the travel agent Wicked travel gave us vouchers for discounted accommodation and one of these was in Byron Bay. Great we thought it’s bound to be a really expensive hostel that lures you in on a discounted deal and then hikes their rates for extra nights, WRONG! When we arrived with high hopes they were soon dashed by the average looking hostel, before our hopes turned to horror when we saw the room and outside bathrooms. Our nights sleep was just as bad, I had only just fallen asleep when one bloke came into the dorm and woke me up with his smell alone before he fell straight to sleep and snored the night away.

Needless to say we cut our loss and moved to another hostel that morning that we had been highly recommended.

After all the accommodation dramas were over we started to look round Byron Bay itself. Much to our surprise we bumped into two guys that we had been on the pyramid tour with in Mexico, it’s strange how in five months of very different traveling, we both ended up in the same place.

Byron Bay has the most amazing beach and is a really nice little town but it reminded us both strongly of Newquay (just less tacky souvenir shops).

We decided to do the third most popular thing in Byron behind surfing and lying on the beach, walking up to the lighthouse (made famous by Home and Away as it’s the Summer bay lighthouse). On the map we had this looked quite an easy walk but it turned out to be a rather strenuous one considering the hot sunny weather. The view from the lighthouse was well worth the walk, we could see dolphins playing in the surf, whales on their migration up the coast and even a shark or two in the waters below the lighthouse.

When we left we both agreed it would make a great holiday location.

Coffs Harbour

We got a lift to Coffs Harbour with a Craig, nice bloke, he wanted a bit of company on his journey to Byron Bay. We thought great, we'll arrive at lunchtime, instead of teatime and we'll be able to do more stuff.

It started raining as soon as we arrived and didn't really stop until the day before we were due to leave.

The hostel was really friendly and had the warmest log fire in the evening, I sat next to that every night. Our first night was amusing as this odd aussie guy ran around the hostel asking everyone if they had his weed (it had been stolen), he then did alot of moaning to anyone who'd listen about how unsympathetic his dealer had been to his situation and how he'd been ripped off again. I had a snigger at that little gem, who's heard of a sympathetic drug dealer!

We spent a day at the Pet Porpoise Pool, which rescues and rehabilitates dolphins, seals and sealions. We got to touch and play with the dolphins which was awesome, they feel a bit rubbery. They also put on a show for us, showing us what they could do such as tail walking.

We enquired about doing our PADI diving certificate as it was a fairly cheap place to do it, we were also hoping to do some diving on the Great Barrier Reef. However, due to our respective medical conditions we are not allowed to dive at the moment.

On our last day we took a walk up to Mutton Bird Island, the views were amazing. We couldn't really see any whales as they were swimming too far out.

Port Macquarie

When we planned our stay in Port Macquarie we thought the only attraction here was the Koala hospital but boy we were wrong. Having only just arrived, the hostel manager started telling us everything we could do and see, so we immediately had to extend our stay.

Day one was to be our visit to the Koala hospital but we were told to take a nature walk along the creek on the way, as we might see wild Koalas. Much to our joy and amazement we did see one, although before I could whip out the camera he spotted us and retreated behind some leaves.

At the Koala hospital we saw around five Koalas most of which were long term residents that had been released and readmitted with further injures. We left a donation and they gave us some really cute photos of Koalas.

Day two was a bicycle ride around Port Macquarie on which we were told we might see dolphins and kangaroos but sadly we didn't see any kangaroos but we did see dolphins (Yes Jess, we've seen dolphins!).

Day Three was originally going to be hiring a small boat to go dolphin watching but having already seen dolphins we opted for a whale watching trip instead (mainly because it's the cheapest place we've found to do it). The trip was awesome, we saw a pod of three humpback whales and on the way back we had a whole pod of dolphins racing the boat and jumping in front of us (see the pictures and video on picassa).

Thoroghly exhausted we are off to Coffs Harbour tomorrow for hopefully a few quieter days.

Hunter Valley Vineyards

Speaking to people who have travelled the opposite way down the coast, we were told that the Hunter Valley was not to be missed. So we booked ourselves a hostel and got on the train to Newcastle.

There isn't alot to see or do in Newcastle so we booked ourselves on a wine tour. We were warned we might be the only people on the tour as its low season now. We did end up having our own private tour with our personal guide/driver Alan.

We went to 6 vineyards and tasted about 6/7 wines at each (3/4 white and 3 red), a fudge place, a chocolate place and a cheese place. It was fantastic. Alan tried the reds even though he wasn't very keen on them, he did find a nice white verdelho so we bought a bottle. We bought a "beginners" red for him to try with a nice steak.

The vineyard we stopped for lunch at, also specialized in creamy butterscotch schnapps and a chilli schnapps, which is aptly named "dragons breath". I was a little worried about trying a chilli schnapps but it is fantastic, it makes your tongue and lips tingle. So we had to buy a small bottle of that.

As you can imagine we were not exactly sober after tasting all those wines, especially when I did a breathalizer test and found it was 0.12, the limit is 0.02 in OZ. But it was an awesome day out and I had a little snooze on the bus on the way home.

NB - I have found out that Lindemans Reserve Hunter Valley wines are stocked in Majestic Wine stores ( if they are out they will order it for you). There is also a place in Hertfordshire who is selling Sobels wines (one of the vineyards we went too), they do quite a nice white port too. There website is www.wombatwine.com.

I'm not telling you to go out and buy this wine, this information is so if I lose/forget it, I have it written down.

The Australian Pedlar Family

I have always known about the Australian Jones' and have met a few of them when they have visited the UK. However, nobody knew of any Australian Pedlars (my mums family) until recently.

Luckily some of them live in the Blue Mountains, so whilst we were there we met up with Kim. It transpires that Kim's mum and my mums dad are cousins, this is the easist way to explain it. Anyway, Kim is absolutely lovely and allowed to take her picture, which we have added to the online photo album.

Kim showed us lots of photos of her family and there is definitely a strong Pedlar gene.

The Blue Mountains

Now the first thing I need to mention is that the mountains aren't really blue. The sun and the mist in the air makes them appear a little blue but that's about it.



To see the Blue Mountains properly you really need to go on a hike around, which did not seem like too much of a problem after the 20km hike we did with Samantha's relatives on Sunday before arriving here.

Anyway back to what we saw. The first stop on our walk was Echo point where we saw The Three Sisters, three large rocks that come out from the side of the canyon. Until it was explained to us some time later I thought the name was a bit sexist, why are these things always named after women, why was it not called the three blokes from the pub. It was actually associated with an Aboriginal legend about a group of sisters that wanted to marry outside their tribe so the tribal wizard turned them to stone (pity he wasn't around when I was younger I would have had him turn my sister to stone).

We then thought it was a good idea to walk down the steps into the canyon except there was a lot of steps and by the time we got to the bottom it looked like more of a bad idea. We were then faced with a choice of the steapest railway in the world or a cable car to get back to top. Samantha didn't look too thrilled with either but after hearing that if anything goes wrong the train would stop in three seconds (hitting the bottom!), we opted for the cable car. Luckily the cable car was the smoothest I ever been on and Samantha was ok.

With sore feet and blisters on our blisters, our walk back into Katoomba turned into a mountain climb as the hills we had walked down eariler seemed to have grown whilst we were on our walk.

Weekend with Martin and Jenny

We spent our last weekend in Sydney with Martin and Jenny. Jenny is Bronwyns (my dads cousin) daughter, she kindly offered to show us a few things around Sydney after Bronwyn became ill and was unable to meet up with us.

Martin and Jenny were appaulled when they learned how lazy we had been whilst in Sydney, we thought we had done quite a bit of sight seeing but apparently we hadn't done enough. To be fair though we had been enjoying staying in one place for a reasonable length of time - a small pleasure after spending one night here, three nights there etc. Anyway after giving us a huge kick up the bum, they put us on the ferry to Manly beach and we spent the afternoon there.

Manly beach was lovely, apparently its the more upmarket Bondi/less touristy. We walked along by the shops and Alan bought his 2nd pair of sunnies (which if you include the pair he bought with him, it makes a total of 3 pairs for this tour). We also got a boost smoothie and armed with a map (courtesy of Martin) we headed off to do a short-ish walk (6km). We got lost! and ended up in some residential estate (nice houses) and then had to cut through some rather thick bush to get back. I sent Alan first so he could meet any big spiders first.

When we met back up with Jenny and Martin in the city, they took us for a walk across the Sydney Harbour bridge. It was approx 3.5km round trip so we rewarded ourselves with a pint, as in total we had walked about 10km (6.2 miles). Little did we know that this was just a warm up.

On Sunday, Jenny told us that we were going for a little walk in the Royal National park. How little we asked? 20km was the answer, but it was ok because it was fairly flat all the way with a little hill at the end. Ok we thought, we've done 10km, we'll give it a go.
It began with a little train ride and then a trip on a boat across to the national park. We walked up a hill and around another residential estate (approx 1.5-2km) and then we got to the start point which said NSW coastal walk 23.5km. We were horrified as this was already 5km longer than anticipated, but Jenny said it was flat.
The views were stunning from the cliff tops and were saw several migrating whales, but the walk itself was far from flat unless you count going up and down rugged cliff terrain flat. After 5hrs my cheerfull and positive nature wasn't quite so cheerfull and positive anymore, and I had enormous blisters and a huge bottom lip which was slowing me down. We walked about 20km as half way through the walk it was obvious we wouldn't finish until after dark and we weren't prepared for that, so we turned around and headed back. A good day was had by all though and we were happily exhausted when we went out for dinner later.