Hendrik and I woke up early to go back to Monkey Mia to see the dolphins come in for feeding.  I was disappointed that we were not able to swim with them but seeing the crowd it was understandable that they could not let people swim with them or they would chase them away since there were about 100 people lined up along the shore ready for the dolphins.  Nevertheless, we were able to see the dolphins really close-up.

Then we had to start the drive back down south. On the way we stopped at Eagle Bluff which was a spectacular lookout.  We only saw one shark though, which only looked like a tadpole from the distance.  Next we stopped by Shell Beach which is a beach made up entirely of crushed shells, no sand.  It was very white, beautiful and peaceful, seeing as we were the only ones there.  If we had had more time I would not have minded going for a swim.

Alone, except for that guy.

The last stop on the peninsula was for the Hamelin Pool.  It is one of only a few places in the world where living marine stromatolites can be found.  Stromatolites look like rocks and are an example of the earliest record of life on earth.  They were spectacular in their own right, but by then the sun was beating down, and the humidity was rising.  Therefore, I was very happy to go back to the AC of the car and not spend too much time with the stromatolites.  Then we drove to Geraldton where Hendrik and I spent a long time in the Winstersun Motel’s pool, which was very refershing.

stromatolites

Dec 24- 29

We went back to Sydney since my father visited us in AU for the holidays and since it was his first time in AU we had to do all the main sights and Sydney is definitely the place to go.  You could spend 10 days in Sydney and not be bored.  It was odd being in a very warm climate for Christmas and seeing pine trees (fake) all over the place.  We hopped on a bus our first day which looked like a gaudy Christmas wonderland with decorations in every place possible.  It had bows ton the seats, garland hanging from above head holders, and pictures of Christmassy things on every window.  Everyone who was on the bus was laughing and the driver greeted everyone with a “Merry Christmas.”

We had wanted to reserve Christmas dinner but lunch seemed to be more popular in AU and almost all nice places offered lunch but rarely dinner.  We had lunch on the Showboat for Christmas which was very nice, though there was no show for Christmas.  We got poppers, drinks were included, and we had a wonderful view.  Sydney definitely looks its best from the water in the Harbor.

View from the boat

After our cruise we were surprised that the Aquarium and Wildlife World were open so we went to them.  Both are well worth a visit, and I especially liked the butterfly exhibit where butterflies fly all around you and land on you as well, but they were way too hard to photograph.

Sea Dragon in the Aquarium

In the following days we were tour guides for my father since we had already done mostly everything in Sydney so we sent him to the highlights such as the opera house tour and The Rocks walking tour through historic Sydney.

We also went to the botanical garden which is gorgeous and allows for wonderful views of the bridge and opera house.  When we lived in Sydney we would often go there for picnics on the weekends.  It is a home to many birds and lots of bats which are spectacular at night because they start flying and the sheer volume of them make you feel as if you are in a horror movie

Darling Harbour is a must and there always seems to be something going on such as Chinese New Year, street artists or dragon boat racing.  The Sydney Tower is not so great since other buildings around it seem to be equally tall so the view which you’d like to see of the opera house is much obstructed.  Hendrik and I had been there because we had the Sydney card which is well worth it if you are going to be in the city for a week, not so much if you are only going to be there for a few days.  We told my dad that he had seen Sydney way better from the boat.

Sydney from the botanical garden

As for beaches, I recommend going to Manley beach instead of the famous Bondi.  Manley is much prettier since it is longer and behind it there are trees and a road with surf shops unlike in Manley where you have lots of busy roads and dull pavement.  Unless you are a good surfer, Bondi often seems too rough and is deep while you can stand in the water quite far from shore in Manley and there are usually smaller waves for not so good surfers like myself.  We tried surfing 3 times there and never got the hang of it.  If I every have the chance again I think I’ll take a lesson.  We took my dad to Manley beach instead of Bondi since we did not have time to do both.

Manley Beach

There are always day trips from Sydney, and Hendrik and I have done the Hunter valley tour which is the wine region near Sydney and the Blue Mountains.  We went with Tours-r-us with my dad.  This took us to the Olympic park, which is not that interesting especially if you are not interested in the Olympics.  It turned out to be more of a bathroom break than anything else.  Then we headed out into the Blue Mountains and did the scenic railway, flyway and Skyway which are all part of Scenic World.  These are so popular with the tourists but they are nothing special, but really if you don’t have all day to hike there is no other way to get to the boardwalk and the rail and flyway take you up and down.  The boardwalk is very nice and it is a peaceful walk.  Then we stopped at the famous three sisters, and Hendrik and I did a mad dash to them since we did not have too much time and it looked really cool to be able to go down to them, but really the view is much better from the lookout.

Blue mountains and the three sisters

Near the end of the day we visited Featherdale Wildlife Park which was nice since they let you pet most of the animals including wombats and koalas so there were many photo opportunities.  Unfortunately, the wombats were asleep, but nevertheless, this was a worthwhile stop.

My dad and I with a koala

It was someone’s bright idea (not mine) to go on a hike in the morning for the view of the glaciers and the ocean all in one. The hike was steep and seemed steeper hung-over, and when I finally dragged myself to the top I was greeted by swarms of sand flies. I’m sure the view would have been amazing but all we saw were clouds. We didn’t have any repellent so we spend a few minutes slapping ourselves and then hiked down again. We were not sad to leave the glacier region as it had left us very disappointed.

Simon was always way ahead of the rest of us and took pictures of the stragglers

We found a pretty beach to have lunch on but the minute we sat down we were swarmed with sand flies. They are like mosquitoes but their bite stays for much longer and it itches like crazy. We ate as fast as possible to minimize the sand flies’ feasting, but they would bite any showing skin and our ankles suffered. Back in the car it was also full of sand flies so I made it into a sport to kill them. At least they stopped bothering to eat on us in the car but fluttered around the windows so it was easy to shoo them out or squash them.

Haast Pass waterfall

We drove through Haast pass and stopped at many waterfalls, it was pretty but it had nothing on Arthur’s Pass. I enjoyed the blue pools the most and wished it was warmer so we could have swam in them, since they had the most stunning blue color. We made it to Queenstown in the evening and Simon and Hendrik were disappointed to find out that the bungee/ rafting combo left at 8:00 AM and all the booking offices were closed, so they were worried they wouldn’t be able to do what they had wanted again, and therefore they were very anxious to get up early and hope to still be able to go.

The pictures don't do justice to the Blue Pools

We left Lake Macquarie early since we had a lot to do the next day. We wanted to go surfing in Manley, since we knew there was usually good surfing there and we hadn’t yet been able to surf on the trip. Miraculously, we made it to the beach without a hindrance through Sydney morning rush hour, but when we arrive there, there were hardly any waves. A few waves would come every 20 minutes. We decided to go for it anyway since we had come all the way out to Manly and we saw others trying too. It wasn’t a warm day and we rented wet suits as well as surfboards and therefore we didn’t get to use our new rash shirts which still had their tags attached. It was a very slow surfing day, and I only caught about 3 waves but never managed to stand. We had to leave Manley by noon and go to the opposite end of Sydney to Kingsgrove because there we had the rest of our stuff in storage.

Sydney

We had to take apart the whole van and luckily there was a lot of storage space under the bed which we utilized to the fullest and we were able to fit at least three times as many belongings than we had currently with us. We thought we would be even slower than we had been previously which was about 100km/h. We always joked that even if we wanted to speed we couldn’t. We could drive with the pedal to the medal and the van would not go faster. It was like cruse control. Going uphill was terrible because it would slow down drastically and we had to down shift so it wouldn’t stall. The engine would growl and the speedometer would slowly decrease and if there was a passing lane, cars would be passing us. Sometimes on rare occasions the van would have its good days and it would get up to 130 km/h which was even above speed limit. We kept trying to figure out what cased the sudden surge of speed, opening the water tank, full gas tank, air conditioning, but nothing seemed to do the trick. And now when we were so heavy the van had a good day. We drove down to Wollongong and briefly walked around the town, beach, and lighthouse.

I was thrilled when I woke up this morning and saw that the sun was shining. We were late coming to the beach since the gate of the campsite was locked and we had to go around and were worried we might miss the tour. When we arrived to the parking lot surrounded by pyramid shaped tank traps or Dragon’s teeth there were two 4wd cars there. The beach was fortified against a possible attack by Imperial Japanese forces during WWII and the pyramids are what’s left of it. I was expecting a bus and more people but we were the only ones there. The driver of one of the cars motioned for us and he told us we were the only tour participants. We assumed he just picked us up in his own private car. Unlike our Fraser island tour guide, this one seemed pretty uninformed and just drove us to the locations without too much explanation.

First we did a bit of sandboarding which is like sledding but on sand dunes. We did that in two locations. It was scary at first but then became fun. The really bad part was walking back up because it was so steep and we were out of shape. So we didn’t sandboard for very long because we got too tired.

Sandboarding

Stockton Beach is less than 3.5 km from a military base and we saw and heard many military airplanes fly over us as we rode along the beach. The next stop was Tin City, an actual town in the dunes with a handful of inhabitants. It was first built to store provisions for shipwrecked sailors because the beach was a popular place to become shipwrecked with almost 100 wrecks between Newcastle and Port Stephens. It was also where Mad Max with Mel Gibson was filmed and I feel like I have to see the movie now. It was interesting to see how some people chose to live, I definitely wouldn’t. The last thing to see on the trip is the wreck of the MV Sygna, a Norwegian bulk carrier, which we stopped at and observed.  I thought Stockton Beach was very unique and really enjoyed the visit.

Tin city

Since it was only midday we drove to Newcastle and had a look around the town. There was a nice beach, but we didn’t have time to go swimming, and a lookout over the beach. The centre was cute and there was a lookout over the central train station so we climbed the tower and had a panoramic view of Newcastle. It was a nice town to have some lunch in and walk around but there was not much else to do or see.

That evening we decided to stay in Lake Macquarie, for no particular reason other than we had liked Port Macquarie, so we figured Lake Macquarie was nice too. It wasn’t particularly nice and we could tell we were getting to a more populated area since people did not seem as friendly and the bbq’s weren’t free anymore. The lake wasn’t a swimming lake and may have been nice if we had a boat but we weren’t too impressed.

We had to keep pushing further south and crossed the state border to New South Wales and therefore only had a brief stop in Byron Bay which reminded me of Noosa. I was getting a bit bored of the beach-small-backpacker/tourist towns at this point because they all began to look like each other. It was over-run by run down campervans and tanned people in slinky clothing. I didn’t mind only spending a few hours there and moving on. A little further was the town of Ballina. There’s nothing there so they built a restaurant right next to the main road but to attract patrons they built a giant shrimp on top of it. This big thing was sadly one of the more impressive ones.

We stayed at Lennox Head that night and then continued south towards Coffs Harbour, but we didn’t quite make it there since we stopped at a campsite before Coffs Harbour.  We spent the rest of the day skipping rocks on the beach, jumping on the jumping pillow, and trying to make friends with a few resident wallabies who were less friendly than the ones at the zoo.

Jumping pillow

Coff’s Harbour is home to the first of Australia’s big things, the big banana. It’s located next to a banana plantation and also now an amusement centre which contain an artificial ski slope, an ice skating rink, tobogganing and a monorail tour of the banana plantations. We didn’t do any of the activities or buy any really tacky souvenirs shaped like bananas, and you name it they had it in banana shape and color.

The Harbour itself is really pretty and there is an island, called Muttonbird Island, which is connected to the harbour by a manmade breakwater so everyone walks to the island and has a short hike around it, which is well worth doing. A real-scale model of Captain Cook’s ship the ‘Endeavour’ made the scenery even more beautiful and ironically we had seen the same ship in Sydney in Darling Harbour. It is a museum and we wanted to go in because we didn’t visit it in Sydney but the exhibit only opened the next day and we had to be in Port Macquarie by then.

We drove south down to Surfer’s Paradise which we were really excited about since we wanted to go surfing and figured where could there possibly be a better place to surf than Surfer’s Paradise? I mean the name says it all. I’ve heard it’s a developed area so I was expecting the rows of tall hotels and apartment buildings along the beach. We found a parking spot, which was always a challenge with our bus since we took up two parking spaces and then looked out into the ocean to see the surfers catching waves. When we did we couldn’t see any. On a closer look we saw about two but they were lying in the ocean not catching waves. The waves were choppy and uneven and hardly suitable for surfing. I’m no surfing expert by any means but I do know when I wouldn’t go surfing.

I asked the lady at the booth by the beach who was renting surfboards whether this was typical weather, thinking that she’d tell me this was way out of the ordinary and has been the worst day she’s ever seen, I mean this was Surfer’s Paradise.

The most stereotypical pic from Surfer's Paradise

“It’s pretty much always like this,” she said. “It’s usually good around 6AM.” Most surf beaches are good at 6AM, how is this possibly a surfer’s paradise, I thought. Basically it’s a name they gave to a not so great beach so tourists would visit and they do. Most tourists go to the Gold Coast and that includes Australians who don’t usually sight see their own country but they’ll swarm to the gold coast because that’s where Australia’s four theme parks are such as Sea World and Warner Brothers Movie World. I met an Aussie who was jealous of the quantity of theme parks we have in the states because they have a severe deficiency of amusement parks. Instead they have a crappy fair in cities like Melbourne and Sydney called Luna Park. They have no more than 5 mediocre rides and charge about as much as a 6 Flags ticket in the USA for an unlimited day pass. He told me he wants to go to the US to do a tour of theme parks which I thought sounded incredibly fun.

We did not go to any of the parks because we’ve been to many more larger, better and cheaper parks so we weren’t going to waste our time and money. We did however go shopping for rash shirts because we figured eventually we’ll go surfing and then we’ll need them because what do two armature surfers, who can hardly catch a wave and never stand up need? A rash shirt obviously. One store was having a two for one sale so even though we weren’t ecstatic with the design, we figured we really didn’t need the most expensive coolest rash shirts and any would do. So for 20 bucks a piece we got a shirt each which was a good deal but we have not used them yet (3 months later) so we have not gotten our value for money.

Instead of surfing since it was incredibly windy we flew a kite on the beach. I had picked up a kite at one of the campsites for 2 dollars, which Hendrik made fun of me for but he had never flown a kite before which I found strange so he particularly loved it and let the childhood fantasy fulfil itself. What we saw more than surfers were kite surfers and the activity looked really fun but I probably wouldn’t have the muscles for it. I would have loved to try it. So maybe the Aussies in their habit just shortened the name of the town from Kite Surfer’s Paradise to Surfer’s Paradise

The next morning we were off to Noosa where there was a festival going on so there was no parking anywhere near town, but we were able to find parking at the beach so we went boogie boarding. It looked like a cute town when we drove through it, and we wished we had more time to spend there since it looked like there is some good surfing, but we were worried about falling behind schedule, and we had to go further south the same day.
We made our way down to Beerwah, which is close to Brisbane and the home to the Australia Zoo. I had wanted to visit the zoo because I had heard so much about it after Steve Irwin’s passing.

Our tents in the morning

I was thrilled when I stepped out of the tent to see that it wasn’t raining. I can’t say that it was sunny but at least water wasn’t pelting down. Kirk told us that a few weeks ago it rained for his whole tour and that they got stuck in the sand and everyone had to dig out the bus in the rain, so comparatively we had a much better time.

Our first stop was at the Coloured Sands which were piles of sand with sand that ranged in colour from pale yellow to almost red. It was pretty because at that time we even had some sunshine which lit up the sand. On our way to the next destination we spotted a snake on the middle of the beach. So we all got out to observe it and saw that it had been run over. It was a poisonous water snake which had been washed out to land. We wanted to help it but didn’t know how since we couldn’t touch it. Kirk got a shovel and managed to pick it up and toss it out to sea and the snake swam away, so hopefully it survived.

Captain Kirk rescues snake

We got back on the bus and soon after we saw a dingo, but Kirk wasn’t allowed to let us out of the bus to take pictures because those were the rules. We were glad we at least got to see one wild dingo since Fraser Island is home to the purest breed of dingo in Australia. Our next stop was Lake Wabby which is a lake formed by blown sand that forms a bank which then dams an already existing creek. This is called a barrage lake and Lake Wabby is the only one like it on the island. It has a steep bank which is a sandblow that drops into the lake which we rolled down. It was a cold small lake which I was able to swim across.

Rolling into Lake Wabby

Then it started to rain and we all started the trek back to the bus. At least the rain didn’t last long because we had to walk through a forest. As we were walking a branch of a tree fell a few meters in front of us on the path. Luckily, this time it was not on top of me but it gave me a scare. Inside, the tree was blood red, and bugs crawled all over it.

We had lunch in Central Station which got its name because it was the centre of the logging industry. There was a short boardwalk around the area where there were some neat trees. I thought the trees with holes or ones that were overgrowing with vines were interesting.

Our last activity on the island was Lake Birrabeen and luckily it was sunny.  It is a clear blue lake surrounded by extremely fine white sand. We did not visit Lake Mckenzie which we were a bit sad about, but Kirk assured us that Lake Birrabeen was just as pretty and even more so because it wasn’t overrun by tourists. It was nice being on the beach with only a small group of people and having the whole lake to ourselves. The sand was soft and I polished my earrings until they shined. The water was cold but refreshing and at the end Hendrik and I had to make a run for it and we were the last people on the bus which was not a good thing for the last activity of the tour.

Lake Birrabeen

Then the ferry took us back to the mainland, and we spotted dolphins swimming along the boat and jumping out of the water. Before the bus dropped us off we spotted kangaroos having a feed in the meadow. Kirk pulled over and everyone but a few Aussies, who thought we were silly, got out and started taking pictures. They were the first wild living kangaroos we saw in Australia so we were excited.

I thoroughly enjoyed the tour and I’m glad we didn’t drive because we wouldn’t have gotten any of the commentary which was probably the most interesting part of the tour to learn about the history of the island, the logging, the aboriginals, the animals, and the plants. I would have been really mad if we had spent half a day digging out our vehicle in the rain, though Hendrik still regretted not having a car to speed down the 75 mile beach with.

I insisted on at least driving through 1770 because it is the site of the second landing by James Cook and the crew of HM Bark Endeavour in May 1770. Obviously for this reason alone 1770 deserved at least a photo. Though once we got there we were pleasantly surprised how nice it was and stayed a bit longer. There were, beautiful beaches and hiking paths, and of course the sculpture commemorating Cook and his efforts. We found a nice beach with waves to finally use our boogie board that we had been schlepping around and went for a swim. It’s definitely a nice place to spend some time in.

The marker for Cook's landing spot and our van

Then we were off to Bundaberg. Bundaberg is most famous for its rum distillery which is called Bundaberg and Bundy for short since the Aussies (Another shortening from Australians) can’t be bothers to say names with more than two syllables. The ever present mascot is a polar bear because they wanted the drink to appeal to people in colder climates down south, because Rum is a tropical stereotype.

The other reason the town is famous is the Ginger Beer factory which I have to say I like more than the rum. It’s non alcoholic but it’s really good, so I was excited about going on their factory tour more.

We arrived in Bundaberg in the evening and decided to try to have a meal out again since we had failed yesterday. I had a craving for Chinese since I hadn’t had Chinese the whole trip and I missed it. Of course there was a Chinese restaurant in the town, which was much cuter than Rockhampton. We were the only patrons at the restaurant the whole time, it smelled of mildew, and the wallpaper and rugs didn’t match and the colors were overwhelming, but we decided to stay anyway even though we felt uneasy about it. We would have rather just taken the food out but then we had no where to go besides eating takeout in the van which was less appealing than eating in the mismatched soggy restaurant. When the food came, though, I have to admit that it was the best Chinese food I’ve had in AU. The problem is that there are so many Asian people here, that the food is actually properly Chinese and not the Americanized version which I’m used to. But in Bundaberg I had proper westernized Chinese food which was so yummy, or maybe it was because I’d been eating ramen for days before that but it was lovely.