29/03 Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz

Mrs B has to work so Mr B takes me on a trip around the area. First stop is the Merc garage as the hood and the electrics on his CLK have stopped working. This means a 40 minute drive to the garage in sporadic showers (yes, the weather has followed me down here but least there are sunny intervals) with the top down (the car’s). I have to put the umbrella up at one stage, and I must like a right dipshit sitting in the front of a car with an umbrella. As it turns out, the reason the electrics are not working is because someone, who shall remain nameless, has not put the batteries in the remote in properly.....

Our next pit stop is lunch just before Monteville overlooking the countryside and the sea in the distance: it is all rather pleasant even though lunch is interrupted by heavy showers. Apparently, this area is the wedding capital of Queensland but I don’t read too much into this and besides, there is something in the air that brings on my hay fever so it is highly unlikely that I will be settling here!

I have a look around Monteville and it’s expensive shops and art galleries whilst B sits on a bench and has a smoko, before we head back to the ranch to see Mrs B who is now back from work. It has been a fantastic day and I’m glad that my plans were changed so that it meant that I was able to fit in a visit.

p.s the reason I had my photo taken outside Hilltop Toes is that my paternal grandparents' farm in South Wales was called Hilltop.

28/03 Hippie hippie shake

I leave Cairns amidst sporadic showers and I am disappointed that I didn’t get to snorkel the GBR but there might be an opportunity to do some snorkelling in the DR when I visit Ig and family. If not, then there are always plenty of other reefs in the world to look at!

B & B pick me up at Brisbane airport and I am whisked off to Maleny which is about an hour and a half’s drive North West of Bris Vegas (as the locals call it).

Maleny is a lovely little ‘hippie’ hamlet situated amongst rolling hills and farm land and most of the countryside reminds me of England. B & B live in a house overlooking the Glass House Mountains and the view from the house is quite spectacular. It is nice to have my own room, bathroom and a home cooked meal (a Sunday roast with all the trimmings: sweet, mate!)

Dreamtime Painting

Here's a picture of the painting I bought. Answers on a postcard, please.

26/03 & 27/03 Rairns in Cairns

I am in better spirits today and despite the rain and the swimming pool outside the front door of the hostel, I brave it and head towards the local shopping centre in search of free Wi-Fi and a cinema. I have decided to head off to Maleny on Sunday and to wait and see if the rain subsides tomorrow to allow me to get to the GBR. The shopping centre is, thankfully, close by and I soon find a cafe and type up my blog and check emails etc. The trouble with hanging out in a shopping centre is that it encourages one to spend money on clothes and I treat myself to a pair of shorts but I resist the shoes.....

By the time I know it, it’s 6.30pm and I head back to the hostel and the rain has eased off a bit. I am joined in the room by a friendly Dutch girl who tells me about her travels in NZ over dinner in the hostel (dinner is free as part of the deal but it’s a 15 minute walk into town and I don’t fancy coming back in the dark and the rain, so the local supermarket provides me with some exciting cheese rolls!)

I have decided not to book anything for tomorrow as the weather forecast is bad for the next 7 days and I don’t want to spend £75 and not be able to see anything. I am disappointed that I won’t be able to see the GBR but things happen for a reason and maybe I can come back some day.

I sleep better and it’s raining when I wake up but I head out when it stops and I go for a walk on the front and it’s none too exciting , so after a cup of tea I head back to the shopping centre and treat myself to a massage to sort out my neck. I recognise some shoppers in the centre from yesterday which brings me to one conclusion: there is nothing to do in Cairns when it’s raining (or not raining, for that matter)

I’m off to Maleny tomorrow to visit Dad’s skool friend and he is picking me up from Brisbane airport.

Headed to the Woolshed pub to take advantage of the free meal and it wasn’t bad: a choice of 4 meals and I opted for the spag bol. Who says there’s no such thing as a free dinner? I walk back to the hostel and luckily it’s only spitting but when I get back, we have been joined by two young English girls who have turned the already minuet room into a laundrette. Nothing dries in this climate and apparently they have had some stuff stolen from the communal washing lines. I am feeling a little claustrophobic and am pleased that I only have one more night here but everyone soon quietens down to read or sleep.

25/03 Exit Alice

It’s my last day in Alice and I cannot say that I am sad to see the back of it. I join some of the others and we wander into town to have a coffee and to find some of the locals selling art but there are nowhere to be found. We head to a local park to have a picnic and coincidentally, there are some women in the process of painting. I like one of the painting and am told that it’s for sale for 50 AUD and it will be ready in half an hour and I wait in the park whilst the others head off. Mavis is one of the women painters and she comes and sits next to me in the bench. I cannot really understand what she is saying but I get the gist that the painting is about a male dreamtime and it has some women in it too: I don’t think I’ve done the story any justice but there you go. She then tries to extort an extra 30 AUD out of me for the painting as she “ thinks it’s now worth that” but I tell her that we agreed a price and refrain from explaining the principles of offer and acceptance to her.

My flight to Cairns is about 2.5 hours and we land in torrential rain but it’s very humid and apparently this is the tail end of the rainy season (note to self: check this next time!). The yoff hostel (described as ‘small and quiet’) is ok and I am the only person in a four bed room but there is no en-suite and I am feeling a bit miserable and want to check myself into the Hilton! It continues to rain through the night and I don’t sleep very well.

23/03 & 24/03 Picnic at Ayers Rock

It was another early start to the day before getting my first sighting of Uluru. As I mentioned, I managed to get a good night’s sleep in my swag under the stars and even managed a trip to the dunny in the middle of the night without running into any dangerous animals. We went for a hike around Kata Tjuta which is near Uluru before having a look around the Aboriginal Cultural Centre. The ACC is a tourist rip off and whilst the paintings are lovely, they sell for around the £800 mark. I am curious about how much the artists actually make from having their paintings brought by galleries and why there aren’t more traditional galleries set up by the community itself.

We get our first taste of the rock with a small walk around it to have a look at some rock paintings before setting up to have dinner and a beer whilst watching the sunset and the changing colours on the rock. This turns out to be a bit of an odd experience as bus loads of people turn up to do the same thing and it becomes a bit too much of a circus experience for me. A bunch of Koreans next to us are having the expensive sunset champagne experience but they only stay about 20 minutes but that may because drinking champagne whilst trying to swot the flies away from your face isn’t quite what they had in mind.

After sunset, we head back to the camp site and have a well deserved shower, some chat around the campfire and then off to sleep in my swag, which I have become quite attached to.

Another early start to catch the sunrise and our tour leader manages to set us up somewhere away from the madding crowds. Sunrise is not as spectacular as the sunset but still, it is nice to have had both experiences. The flies are starting to gather and we head off the Uluru for either the choice of a 9.8 km base walk or a climb. Contrary to popular belief, you can still climb the rock but the Anangu prefer that you don’t out of respect for their law and culture. This seems fair enough to me and when you see the 60 degree climb with only a flimsy rail to assist you, you’d have to be bonkers to attempt it. Our guide tells that at least 80 people have died from losing their balance and the Anangu traditionally have a duty to safeguard visitors to the land and feel a great sadness when a person dies or is hurt.

As it turns out, the climb is closed due to high winds (yesterday it was closed due to the temperature being above 36 degrees c) and this helps in the decision making process (not that I was contemplating climbing it anyway!)

The rock is a monolith and apparently they reckon that it goes on for miles under the earth’s surface and has actually been turned on its side due to tectonic plate movement millions of years ago. I am very impressed with it and I didn’t expect it to have as many ‘holes’ in it, caused by wind erosion.

We head back to Alice via the Camel Farm (yes, there are loads of camels in the outback but now they are causing havoc by munching everything so they have had to cull a lot them). Having just been to the Middle East, I’ve seen my fair share of camels and luckily no one else in the group seems particularly interested in hanging around the farm.

Some of us are staying at Annie’s and we share a room, which makes life easier.
Two of the girls were bitten by bedbugs the last time they stayed there and I am paranoid about being bitten and instantly develop psychosomatic itching! Fortunately, it is only psychosomatic and we all head out for a pleasant evening.

Alice has a big problem with drunk Aboriginals (this is a little biased as to me there seems to be an equal problem with drunken backpackers and local Aussies) and we are advised not to walk around at night alone and to either walk as a group or take a taxi. We pass a number of them on the way back to the hostel but they are ok and both sets of groups exchange ‘hellos’ and I do not find them menacing or aggressive in the slightest.

22/03 – There are flies on the windscreen

I survived my night in the yoff hostel despite one girl snoring like a beast and I think it would be rude not to thank the person who invented earplugs. Everyone staying there is really friendly and I had dinner with two German girls and another girl called Fabian who is sharing the same room as me and she is also from Germany. In fact, everyone seems to be either from France, Germany, Austria or Holland and there are no Brits. Of course, the Europeans all speak perfect English and speak English to each other as one of the reasons they are here is to learn English (learning Australian English?!). Most of them also seem to be incredibly tall so for once in my life I feel diminutive!

‘The Rock’ tour starts at 6am and there are 21 of us (one English couple from “ull”; Danish, Germans, Dutch and some Aussies: mostly in their 20s). The Aussies are a brother and sister in their 60s/early 70s and an Austrian woman in her 60s who has lived in Oz for 33 years. The brother now lives in Canada and is as mad as a mad thing. He runs a retreat in Vancouver and is here on a spiritual journey creating a ‘rainbow’ of peace, love & abundance etc. You get the picture. Actually, I cannot be too cynical about him as by the end of the tour he and I had had a good conversation and his new-age life was borne out of losing his wife to cancer 10 years’ ago. Our tour leader is a typical Aussie male and makes Bear Gyllis look like a sniveling girl guide.

I cannot get over the amount of flies and they are the uber annoying small ones that do not shift when you try and swat them away from your face. I have had to purchase a hat with a fly net and it turns out to be the best purchase of my life (well, not really because if I’m honest that was probably a pair of shoes or a handbag)

Our first designation is Kings Canyon and we arriving at 12 noon to start our 3 hour hike. I personally think this is bonkers as it is so hot that you could fry an egg on the rocks and only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun. I join the oldies as my knee is still bothering me from my marathon victory and we head off on a shorter, less challenging hike and have a swim in the creek. The geology is quite spectacular and a lot of the rocks are petrified and come in all sorts of shades of red and the contrast of the green vegetation and red makes for some good photo opportunities. The area is greener than I expected and has had more rainfall than usual and we pass a lot of river beds along the way that have been washed into the road. The weather here has gone from one extreme to another and where they have had drought in most places for nearly a decade, other parts have had more rain than the average.

After an exhausting day of hiking (not me!), we have dinner around the campfire at Curtin Springs and sleep in swags under the stars. For the uninitiated, swags are a large canvas sleeping bag equipped with a thin mattress. Now, as you will be aware, I am not a camping girl and the prospect of sleeping in a swag directly on the dirt and having to piss in a long drop doesn’t really appeal to me. But I have to admit that I had the best night’s sleep in my swag under a non-light polluted sky and waking up to seeing shooting stars was ‘awesome’.

Alice Springs eternal

Another early start as my flight was at 8.10am and I had to get a taxi to the airport as P was doing a cycle ride for charity this morning. The fare was a hefty £45. I am beginning to haemorrhage money and I've hardly done anything.

I am staying at Annie's Inn yoff hostel and I think I must be the oldest by 20 years. There wasn't a great introduction to the hostel as some people had been waiting at the airport for 2 hours to be picked up but luckily I only had to wait 40 minutes. I have a feeling that I am not going to get much sleep tonight and not because I have managed to become Mrs Robinson but because there is constant music playing near the pool and I am sharing with 5 other girls who I haven't met yet. Still, it's only for one night and then again on Wednesday.

Alice Springs is a bit of a dump and it must be unbearable in mid summer - I am failing to see why anyone would want to live here by choice. I find the whole Aboriginal thing a bit sad as a lot of them are sitting around doing nothing or trying to sell their paintings and competing with the big art galleries. I'll try and buy some direct from the artists when I get back mid week.

I am off on a 3 day tour of Uluru (Ayers Rock), Kata Tjuta and Kings Canyon starting at 6am tomorrow morning. If it's anything like today, we are going to boil.

Kute Koalas 20/03

P is up bright and early for a bike ride and I have a bit of a lie in although I am not managing to sleep properly anyway. We visit the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary which also houses Tasmanian Devils, Roos, Wombats and other weird and wonderful animals. The koalas are lovely little things and you just wanted to pick them up and hug them to death. They are bone idle and sleep for 19 hours a day and don't do much else for the rest of it. It cracked me up that they had a 'retirement' section for the older bears (which of course,they are not) as it seemed to me that most of them were in retirement! I didn't have my photo taken with one because it was an extra £10 plus I didn't like the way they were being passed from pillar to post and they seemed a bit hacked off. I did manage to stroke one and that was good enough for me.

Kangaroos are peculiar things and have the strangest hind feet I have never seen. They have three sections to it, with one giant claw in the middle and their faces are a mixture of resembling a camel and a Labrador. The Wombats and Tassie Devils are the animals with attitude and you wouldn't want to mess with one in a dark alley. I have only a possum to see and that will complete my viewing of Oz's 'big five'.

Afterwards we head back into Brisbane and head out to a larney suburb for lunch via the City Cat ferry service, so I get to see a bit more of Brisbane including the Castlemaine Brewery.

Dad's friend from the Welsh valleys has been in touch and he lives in Malaney, one hour south west of Noosa and I will try and get to see them on my way down from Cairns next week. This may turn out as a blessing as the cyclone is really mucking up my plans at the moment.

Surf's up, mate 19/03

19/03

Today we are off to Noosa which is the Oz equivalent of Plett. For those of you who don't know, Plett is a des res place on the south coast of SA and so far, Oz is very much like SA. We made our way up there on the Bruce Highway (I kid you not) along the Sunshine Coast. The 'sunshine' is being threatened at the moment by a cyclone further up the coast and it is expected to hit Airlie Beach this Sunday. I am praying that it has all settled down by the time I am due to be there to sail around the Whitsundays next weekend, otherwise I will have to make other plans.

We pass Steve Irwin's zoo but I resist the urge to visit very easily.

Noosa is nice, albeit very expensive: I took P for lunch at the Surf Club and it cost me £22.50 for some burgers and drinks. In fact, I am finding Oz to be expensive full stop as sterling has gone for a ball of shito. There isn't a huge amount to see but I take full advantage of watching the surfing competition and checking out the local talent (they employ nice tall young men to apply you with sun tan lotion!) Apparently, sometimes koalas can be seen in the trees near the beach but they fail to materialise. Maybe they are off surfing or just in the middle of their 19 hour a day kip.

Sun turns to light rain and we head back to Brissie where we spend the evening catching up over a few tinnies and I meet P's new Aussie girlfriend. She doesn't think much of my Aussie accent either but then there's no accounting for taste.

I couldn't give a XXXX 18/03/10

It was an early start to get to the 'plane to Brisbane but it was made easier by a smooth journey by MRT to the airport. I was collared in to having a 'make over' by a Dior assistant at the airport ('I want to make you look prettier': good luck with that) so I obviously looked rough and by the end of it I looked 'done over' and make a swift exit to the toilets to wipe most of it off. I lucked out again on the flight by getting a seat by the bulk head and a spare seat next to me. Maybe the spare seat was something to do with the make up...

P was there to meet me at the airport. He lives in a place called Moorooka which, by his own admission, sounds like a disease. The Aussies seem to put "o's" at the end of words: 'servo', 'combo' & 'smoko': I feel like I need a phrase book most of the time. I am finding it difficult not to mimic the accent and have been told to be careful otherwise I'll get my head kicked in!

P has taken tomorrow off and we are heading up to Noosa for the day.

Singapore Sling

I am still suffering with the jetlag and spent most of the morning trying to sort out the wireless connection in the shopping centre across the road. Finally, after one attempt in McCafe (yes, I went into a McDonalds....but needs must), two attempts in Starbucks (yes, I went into a Starbucks...) and one attempt in an appliance shop, I got it working. Everyone was extremely helpful and pleasant so I felt obliged to Starbucks to buy a tea and a sandwich and to use their wifi!

I set off to Chinatown on the MRT which is clean, cheap and efficient. Chinatown is an interesting place with lots of opportunities to spend money on rubbish and other stuff that you may need. I went into a Buddhist temple and watched them perform an extraordinary long service but it was colourful and interesting to watch.

The next day I visited Little India and the Arab quarter after meeting with some friends of my uncle's for lunch. It is much sunnier today and I am feeling the heat. You cannot come to Singapore and not visit the infamous Raffles: it's a lovely building set in beautiful gardens but it is a complete tourist rip off and a Singapore Sling cost 20 quid so I opted for the 'cheaper' 7 quid 7up and ate as many free peanuts that I could shovel down. It's St Patricks day so we went for a few beers in an Irish bar. I say few because a beer is on average 7 pounds a pint.

I am off the Brisbane tomorrow!

Greetings from Singapore!

I am in love with Singers - it's clean, friendly and warm. Everything London isn't! I have finally got to grips with my new notebook (yes, parentals: I am spending more money!) and it's fab. My tour got off to a good start with a hassle free bus journey to LHR from Richmond (thanks to J again for letting me stay) and I also managed to blag a seat with extra leg room without having to pay the £30 fee (heightest if you ask me) and then I didn't have anyone sitting next to me. The pilot was a Saff Afriken, so good news all round.

I am staying with B in her amazing flat on the 29th floor of a luxury apartment block near Orchard Road. She is being a brilliant host but I am suffering with the jetlag a bit and don't feel altogether with it.

The weather isn't great: it's rainy and overcast but still very humid and a darn sight better than Londres. I am off to see the sights of Singers today and tomorrow before flying to Brisbane on Thursday.

Where is I?

Singers: 15/03 - 18/03
OZ: 21/03 - 07/04
NZ: 08/04 - 02/05
US: 02/05 - 08/05
Peru: 08/05 - 23/05
DR: 23/05 - 31/05

Please come and join me if you can.

The Beginning

Right. I am off on my world travels this Sunday and I thought it might be an idea to get a blog going since this is what all the kool kids do and it will save me emailing to let you know where I am (just in case you are interested!). In case you are curious about the title of my blog, it is taken from the title of the novel by my great, great uncle Sir Angus Wilson.