Holidays?!
On Saturday we will start our holidays before returning to Germany on the 21st December. We already have planned each day and most of the tours are booked so that the preparations are nearly finished. Here a short overview about what we will do/where we will be:
- Great Ocean Road
- Melbourne
- Cairns
- Helicopter flight over the Great Barrier Reef
- Diving/Snorkelling at the Great Barrier Reef
- Whitsundays
- Fraser Island
- Brisbane
- Sydney
We hope that we will have the chance to find internet and update news during our trip along the east coast. It's a busy time, but we are sure we will enjoy it!
Flinders Ranges & Outback
Hi everyone,
We are back from our 4 day Flinders Ranges & Outback experience! We began our trip on Saturday morning with a little Wicked Camper 4WD bus. We headed north to the Flinders Ranges National Park, a mountain area about 400km north of Adelaide. On our way to Wilpena Pound (the heart of the national park) we visited different nice towns like Clare, Jamestown or Orroroo (you can find the whole trip on our ‘Been there’ page). And the landscape began to change from a ‘green’ area with farming to a drier, but still plant covered mountain side.
Flinders Ranges
We stayed the night (in our car) at the Wilpena Pound Camping Area and got up on Sunday for a very long walk. We wanted to walk onto the top of St Marys Peak, but it was around 45°C (in the shade) and way too hot! The 22km round began in the valley and after the first 8km (around 6km in the sun) we both were really at exhausted. The problem: there was nobody around and no mobile phone connection! So we had to go further. We didn’t make it up to the top and missed the last 1,5km with 200 altitude difference. And it was good. We already had a good view, but if we had gone to the top, I’m not sure if we both would have made it back to the resort…
View from St Marys Peak (not the top)
The way back was also not so easy, even if it went downwards. The first part was more climbing than walking, but we made it! Totally flattered we came back to the visitor centre, where we first ate an ice and jumped into the pool to cool down and recover. As we had no energy to walk any further we decided to do some driving in the afternoon, which was also a good idea. We drove really nice little unsealed roads through the Bunyeroo Valley and Brachina George.
Brachina George
It was really beautiful and pure nature! The next morning we drove further up north into the inland. Here the landscape changed again and we felt really really like in the nowhere. Wide sandy land, towns with a population of 20 and stock (sheep, cows, horses) and native animals (Kangaroos, Emus) walking on the streets…: the real outback!
The endless outback
But as the time went by we drove back southwards in the afternoon. The next morning we visited the Outback Centre in Port Augusta and then made our way back to Adelaide.
Now we are really exhausted of the one day walk and around 1500km driving. We hope you can get an impression of what we saw from the pictures!
See you
Johannes and Verena
Canberra
Hi guys,
This morning we came back from a short trip to Canberra, Australian’s Capital City. As it is about 1000km away from Adelaide, we took the plane ;). Canberra is not part of one of the 6 states here. It is the Australian Capital Territory and has 330.000 citizens. Compared to Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide it is pretty small, but t is the biggest Australian inland town. We arrived in Canberra on Thursday evening and took a taxi to the YHA youth-hostel. As we arrived pretty late, we only had a short walk through the city shopping area that evening. The Friday was our ‘Explore Canberra Day’. We rented a car and started our trip at the Australian National Botanic Gardens, which have a really nice rainforest area. Then we drove to the Australian National Museum. First we thought that we didn’t want to spend a lot of time there, but as the building and exhibition was pretty cool, we stayed there for 2 hours (which was still pretty short for this museum). Our next stop was at the Australian War Memorial. It is a big Memorial to remember the soldiers of the first and second world war.
Australian War Memorial
The street which is going to/from the memorial is really big and has a direct view to the old and new government house. We spent another two hours in the war memorial before heading to the High Court of Australia (Oberster Gerichtshof). Their court rooms where open to the public, so that we had a short look at them. From there we visited the Royal Australian Mint (Münzprägerei), where you can watch the workers producing Australian Dollars. As the time went by fast, we then hurried up to visit the old and new parliament houses. Both are very nice buildings and from the new one you have a wonderful view over Canberra.
Us at the top of Parliament house (in the back is the old parliament house, the war memorial and Ainslie Hill)
In the evening we then drove up Ainslie Hill, which is in the direct opposite of the parliament house to have the nice view the other way around. The Telstra or Black Mountain Tower was our last sightseeing point. We waited there until sunset and had another beautiful view over the city during daytime and in the dark.
Canberra
This night we spent in the car before we flew back to Adelaide, where we first tried to catch up on our sleep that we missed in the car :).
See you guys, have a nice weekend!
Verena and Johannes
Kangaroo Island
Hello, hello 🙂
I'm back ... Saturday and Sunday on Kangaroo Island have been great!
I got up at around 5 am to be collected at the university later. At first we were only 3 people that were taken down to Kangaroo Island. First thing we did there was visiting a nice beach and Propect Hill (well, it's been renamed to Mount Thifty or sth. as Prospect is a rather bad precinct of Adelaide). Kind of sounds like nothing, but by then it was already lunch time. That's where we caught up to the guys from the 3-day tour with their guide with our's heading back to the mainland.
I'll not bother you with all the details, but just the highlights. We saw seals (close, i.e. about 20m), New Zealand sea lions (somewhat further away in their cave), penguins (very close, i.e. about 1m). Then there were the Remarkable Rocks and lots of other stuff to see 🙂
Lets's get some impressions of it now:
New Zealand Fur-Seals on Kangaroo Island
One of the Remarkable Rocks
Seals at Seal Bay
McLaren Vale & Fleurieu Peninsula
Hello everyone,
This Sunday has been great. We rented a car for Sunday and Monday (which happens to be Labor Day this year 🙂 ) We got up very early to hit the road fast which we did at around 9 am.
First thing we did was Port Noarlunga where we wanted to see the coast with its cliffs. They are not very big, but very colorful. Sadly enough we had a cloudy morning.
The next stop was McLaren Vale which is a pretty famous wine region down here. Winegrowing is somewhat different here than at the Mosel. It's not done on the side of hills, but within the flat land. The way they do it is to tie the wine up making it look like little trees with two branches. Seems to work very well. We didn't do a whine tasting though. Got to stay sober for the road 🙁 We actually found the wineyard Verena went to last year though. Very nice place ...
From there we went down to Port Elliot. For some reason it's so much less kown than Victor Harbor, but it's more beautiful. It has a little, historic train station and a well-known bakery. We bought a bun, a pie and donuts, of course.
The very specialty came up at Port Elliot though. Well, rather at Basham Beach. We got to see 7 or 8 Southern Right Whales. Isn't that cool? We actually thought we wouldn't see any, because it's somewhat late in the season, but there they were. And not only were they there, about 4 of them were about 50m away from us, just off the shore! The others were pretty close too, but that may well have been some hundred meters. So just in case someone wants to watch whales own here, do not go to Victor Harbor ... go to Port Elliot and Basham Beach 😉
After about 3 hrs of whale watching it became more cloudy and we went through Victor Harbor right to Waitpinga Beach that's part of the Newland Head Conservation Park. As it wasn't exactly sunny and all that anymore we stayed only for a few moments and went back to Victor Harbor.
After having some pizza we went to Granite Island in the dark. You have to cross a long bridge (400 m or so) where a horse tram goes which kind of makes it interesting 🙂 On the small island there are living Little Penguins that really deserve the name as the reach about 35 cm in height. We managed to find one that was sitting in its tiny "cave". Pretty cute ...
Later we headed home directly as it was dark and still more than an hour to drive from Victor Harbor. We were tired, but happy. This has definitely been a great day!
Cheers, Johannes & Verena
And here a few pictures of the day...
3 Southern Right Whales
Tail fin of a Southern Right Whale
Verena and the Southern Right Whales
Moonlight from Granite Island
Kakadu National Park
The night had been short when we got up at 4.45 a.m. to wait for our tour guide to pick us up at 5.50 a.m. With six other people and Jeff – our guide – we headed off to Kakadu. Kakadu is Australia's largest national park as it's twice the size of Belgium. It is 150km east of Darwin. We had three days to see everything.
First day:
- watching crocodiles (salties and freshies – don't swim with the salties; they'll eat you) and beautiful birds from a boat in the Mary River Wetlands (billabong)
- enjoying wonderful Aboriginal rock art at Ubirr; gorgeous view over Nadab flood plain and at Arnhem Land
great fire camp, didgeridoo and camping at Muirella Park
Second day:
- learning about Aboriginal traditions: Playing the didgeridoo, getting to know Aboriginal hand craft, cooking the Aboriginal way and throwing spears at the pink pig 🙂
- visiting the Twin Falls: It actually took us about 2 hrs for about 70 km on a street only allowed for 4WD vehicles. We had a boat carrying us to the falls through a wonderful valley up to the path that led to the Twin Falls where would then go to by foot.
- visiting the Jim Jim Falls: We climbed over rocks about one kilometer to reach the base of Jim Jim. Right now the falls are dry as it's the dry season. As this is a place where there are no crocodiles directly at the falls we could go for a swim right to the base.
- overnight camping at Maguk
Third day:
- swimming in awesome plunge pools high up at Barramundi Gorge
- visiting Yellow Water to see some crocodiles
- having a look at some of the termite mounts (there are thousands of them)
- watching wild horses next to Old Jim Jim Road
- heading back to Darwin
Darwin
Darwin, a town with about 300,000 people, is the capital of the Northern Territory. We had only one day in town before our trip to Kakadu National Park. But the weather was great (something around 30 degrees celsius and no clouds at all) and we went to see the “Esplanade”, the harbor, the mall and lots of other stuff. Around noon we took part in guided tour through the parliament house. Our day ended in the really beautiful “deck chair cinema” (that's something like “Liegestuhlkino”) which actually happens to be an open air cinema. Guess which movie we saw under the stars … Australia 😉 Cool movie by the way.
P.S.: Note that cool hat Johannes got 😉
