Wagon Watch... The Search is On!

Oh yes we’re feeling it. The days are getting longer and the evenings warmer. The worst of winter is behind us and there are now just three working weeks between us and freedom. We’re visiting the car markets this weekend to begin the search for a wagon that’s up to the challenge. Normally that would mean a car that’s dependable, spacious and comfortable… but after hours of pouring over websites looking for a car that matches our budget we’ve nearly arrived at a decision over what to buy… and that is (drum roll) a Ford Falcon, a car that possesses none of the above qualities but embodies many of the characteristics shared by the intrepid explorers who hope to travel in her, in as much as it’s cheap, getting old, and almost certain to have a breakdown at some point during the trip. To compromise for the lack of in-car facilities we’re going to buy a two-man tent to attach to the car at night, immediately transforming it into a ‘mobile home’. For the third person who gets to sleep in the back of the car we’re going to fit the windows with netting to keep out the insects and bush wildlife when it's hot, no dingoes will be getting inside this car… unless dingoes can bite through netting - in which case we have no backup plan. But aside from the possibility that some months from now a search party will find a pack of satisfied looking dingoes living inside a deserted Ford Falcon the trip should be a great success. We’ll keep you posted on the progress of wagon watch as it unfolds.

Lee in the Lost World

Click here to see Lee's photos from Hamilton, New Zealand. So far I haven't spotted any Velociraptors in any of these photos, but that doesn't mean they weren't there... watching him from the sides. Clever girls.

The Black Hole Post

It's been over two weeks since our last post so if you’re still checking the blog and you’re wondering “why the blog-silence?” the main reason has been because of work. We got jobs, and not just regular back-packer jobs either but jobs with responsibility, and in my case I have two of them. Lee has been working hard under the demands of his marketing role and I’ve been busy working for the Australian Government by day and as an usher by night at the Theatre Royal, a large 1200 seat venue built into the base of a 60-storey skyscraper. So the blog may be a little inactive over the next few weeks but don’t fret, we’re still going to post as regularly as we can and all this work is in aide of buying the wagon a month early so we can leave Sydney at the end of September and begin the far more exciting 8’000km road-trip around Australia. It also looks like there will be three of us making our way around the continent together, which although great news does mean pushing our personal hygiene to new lows.

Our plan as it stands is to drive south via Canberra until we reach Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria (a.k.a the Garden State). We’ll then make our way west to Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road and hopefully get in as much surfing as possible before we drive inland to Alice Springs and Uluru in the Red Centre. As soon as the interior gets too hot for us, which won’t take long since we’ll be nearing the peak of summer by that time and we'll need to leave before the car tyres melt, we’ll leave the red dust-swept roads of the Northern Territory behind and travel east to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef for some scuba diving. Finally we’ll journey south through Queensland stopping at Brisbane and the Gold Coast on our way back to Sydney in time to celebrate the start of the New Year. But we’re not quite there yet, so here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been up to over the last couple of weeks.

The most exciting thing to happen to either of us recently is that Lee spent last week in Hamilton, New Zealand. The closest I got to seeing New Zealand was standing in Blockbuster wondering whether or not to hire the Fellowship of the Ring and live vicariously through Lee's stories. He's currently writing a post about his time over there as well as picking out a few envy-inducing photos from his travels – both will be added to the site soon.

On Monday night we went to see ‘Hell Boy II: The Golden Army’ at a special (and I like to think highly secret) advanced screening in Bondi Junction, a screening made even cooler by the fact that the audience got to quiz the director, Guillermo Del Toro, via satellite link at the end of the film. Del Toro is probably best known for his work directing the fantastic ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. Despite a few annoying and over-intellectualised questions we discovered some golden nuggets of information, like the fact that Del Toro did the voices himself for over 90% of the monsters you see in the film - an impressive feat considering the monster count! The film is excellent and I can’t recommend it enough. The clever use of animatronics (something of a lost art now) wherever possible to bring the weird creatures and awesome cog-driven machines to life reminded me a lot of films like ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘The Dark Crystal’ that I enjoyed so much when I was growing up, but there’s a powerful Lord of the Rings feel to the movie too that bodes well for his upcoming adaptation of the Hobbit.

I can't finish this post without mentioning how great it is to be living in Australia at a time when we’re beating them in the world’s most prestigious sporting event. Never before have the words ‘bloody Poms’ filled me with such a great feeling of national pride.

Lee’s New Zealand photos should appear on the site soon.

The Blue Mountains Photo Album

Click here to view our photos from the Blue Mountains.

Stranded in Scenic World

Today we travelled to the Blue Mountains National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site and an area of breathtaking sandstone plateaus, escarpments and gorges set amongst seemingly endless eucalyptus forest. We got off the train at the sleepy town of Katoomba, our gateway to the Mountains and Echo Point – the site of the Three Sisters cliffs. The train ride took over two hours and stopped at dozens of nowhere stations on its route through the sprawling suburbs of Sydney. One after another towns with names like MacDonald Town and Zig Zag came and went. When we finally arrived and clambered out of the packed train car we immediately felt hit by the cold and quickly put on an extra jumper and coat, at 4 degrees Katoomba was well over 10 degrees cooler than the city.

After familiarising ourselves with the town map we strolled along the main road for 2km to Echo Point, from there we would eventually make our descent down to the valley floor. The road was wide and lined either side with model-like white wooden houses topped with Australian flags and faced with creaky wooden porches and manicured lawns. As we turned off the road and into a car park we were suddenly met by an incredible and expansive view of mountains and forest that stretched out to the horizon. After taking a few photos we continued down a dusty foot path to the first Sister, the only one of the three that can be reached by foot. The path traced the cliff edge, meandering close to the cover of eucalyptus trees that looked alien to us with their brown papery layered bark that had peeled away exposing pale trunks. We descended a few hundred steps, at some points down near vertical metal ladders across the cliff face (not recommended for those with a fear of heights) until we reached a foot bridge that spanned the 1000m gorge to the Sisters. This was a truly surreal sight and one that was made all the more dreamlike by the white cockatoos perched in the trees above us squawking loudly.

After visiting the first Sister we made our descent down the remaining 1000 steps to the forest floor of the Jamison Valley. On the ground we felt as though we’d discovered a lost world far removed from the noise of Sydney. We located a route map and decided to follow a well-trodden trail to Scenic World where we could get a lift to the cliff top aboard the Scenic Cableway – Australia’s steepest aerial cable car. Happy with our plan for the day we made a start on the 5km trek along the valley floor. Unfortunately when we arrived we discovered that neither of us had actually brought any cash! The cable car was within metres but the $10 ticket price might as well have been a million dollars. This kind of diffusion of responsibility to plan and prepare has happened before but never to the extent that we've found ourselves hopelessly stranded in the shadow of a towering sandstone monolith somewhere inside 10’000 square kilometres of eucalyptus forest. We were stuck, all we could do was watch in apathy as the mammoth wheels at the mountain base began to turn, pulling happy families skyward, their smiling children safely aboard with arms waving down at us through the glass floor.

We stood there for an unknown quantity of time staring up at the cable car as it deposited its carefree cargo at the top of the cliff. With the temperature hovering just above zero we knew we had to get out of the valley before nightfall, but with only two hours of daylight remaining walking the 5 km back to the base of the Three Sisters and ascending the thousand steps to the top was out of the question. We would have to find another route back to Katoomba. It was then that we noticed a smaller sign beneath all the others, one that pointed to a route out of the valley on foot. This sign was obviously ignored by the majority of people visiting the forest floor, only the unfortunate 1% who found themselves stranded without money or food would ever know of its existence. This sign was an afterthought for fools. It even had an emergency telephone number on it and a warning about leaving plenty of time to safely ascend the valley wall. It pointed in the direction of an old disused coal house we had past a kilometre back, behind the coal house was another thousand step trail that would take us to the top. Resigned to a choice between either a 5km or 1km walk before an unavoidable 1000 step climb we chose the closer of the two and reluctantly set off for the coal house.

As expected the walk was exhausting. Half way up we stumbled upon an old bench, rotten and twisted it had clearly waited a long time to be sat upon again. It was fixed beneath an overhanging sandstone ledge. We committed the location to memory as a place to come back to in the advent of a sudden downpour, but secretly we both chalked it down a place to possibly survive the evening if our tiring legs finally gave out before the top. Another hour past and we both agreed that this was as close to the book ‘Into the Wild’ as we ever wanted to be, though by now our communication had devolved to a series of monosyllabic words, grunts and nods between stops. We decided to take a break at Victoria Viewpoint, a clearing that overlooked an enormous and truly majestic waterfall. Here we found a collection a rock slabs to rest on and an information point that explained how the slabs had been used as a barbecue at the turn of the 20^th century. Only in Australia could you stumble upon the archaeological remains of a barbecue in the middle of a national park.

We left Victoria Viewpoint and headed back into the forest, the eucalyptus leaves shimmered with the spray from the waterfall. We pressed on up the trail passing a large rock formation called Witches Leap, a giant ball of sandstone that had eroded in such a way that it now resembled a witch’s head. But by this point our luck had changed and we felt relieved to be able to make out the cliff top through the trees above us - we were going to make it out before nightfall. Once back in civilisation we made an emergency sandwich and refreshment stop before catching the two-hour train ride back to Sydney. The Blue Mountains photo album will be on the site soon.