RestlessNatives.net NativeGuide to
AUSTRALIA
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We have lived in Sydney since 2002. In 2001, we made two trips to Australia, one to the east coast and one for just a few days in Sydney. In 1994 George spent a frenetic week visiting Melbourne and driving 4000km roundtrip from Adelaide to see Ayers Rock and the rest of the "Red Centre". In 1993 Deb backpacked Oz, travelling to the other outback - the northern rainforests around Darwin - and several major cities.
Our photos from our earlier adventures are (we hope) in a warehouse somewhere in North America, so what we have posted here are from our more recent trips.
The Land of Oz
First off, it's a big country, the size of the continental USA. And, as in the USA, you don't quite realize just how big until you try to drive across it. If you're trying to take in Australia and New Zealand in the same trip, you'll be struggling to see much of either unless you allow a lot of time. Not that it can't be done, and in fact George enjoyed two weeks split between the South Island and the Outback, but you'll only scratch the surface.
Note that they take their customs and quarantine very seriously and have a particular interest in wood and any food items (even packaged foods that have been processed to death). Don’t bother trying to hide any of the things they ask you about – customs x-rays everything, and if you declare one thing, just for kicks a couple of friendly customs agents will hand search all of your bags. That being said, they are quite efficient about the whole thing, so you will in short order be deposited on the sidewalk outside the terminal in a miserable little heap (most flights arrive at the crack of dawn – we know, they often go right over our house).
Driving in Australia
As we mentioned, Australia is big, and the roads can be long and lonely. We quickly learned the three major rules of the road in Australia – (a) don't drink and drive (George has been subjected to a couple of random breathalyzer tests), (b) don't speed (we'd never do that *ahem* *cough* - even when the speed limits in Australia are RIDICULOUSLY SLOW) and (c) don't fall asleep at the wheel (the "stop – revive – survive" campaign has been great for local motels, which now sport signs that read "stop – revive here!"). Unfortunately, four-lane highway is still something of a rarity in Oz, so the occasional big rig or caravan or Army convoy can be an annoying obstacle.
Best Name Awards
Australia has a lot of funny names, including our favorites thus far: Mooball (which is painted in black-and-white spots, cow style), Goodnight Scrub, Town of 1770, and The Entrance.
Sydney
Sydney is Australia’s largest city, and an awfully pleasant place
to live. Most of what we discuss below are the usual tourist things (and refer
to our visits before moving to Sydney), but we wouldn’t recommend them
if they weren’t cool.
No one can miss the collection of sites around Circular Quay, on the north
end of the Central Business District. We spent one afternoon wandering through
drizzle to the Rocks, site of the first European settlement
in Sydney and now crowded with shops, restaurants and pubs. There are loads
of overpriced souvenirs for sale here, but it is worth a walk around, if for
no other reason than trying to imagine living there 200 years ago as a convict.
From there it is easy to walk around Circular Quay to the Opera House and the Botanical Gardens. There’s a spot around the cove in the Botanical Gardens where everyone stops to snap a photo of the Opera House – we figure the guy at the one-hour photo shop at Circular Quay has Sydney’s most exciting job. Further around the headland is Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, where Mrs. Macquarie – wife of one of the early governors of Australia – is said to have sat watching for her husband's return.
It’s good to try to see a performance at the Opera House. The first year we lived here we bought season tickets to the symphony at the Opera House. We had excellent seats and enjoyed some of the concerts, but we realized we weren’t symphony people when we came out of the last performance wondering if we were going to die of boredom, and then read the scintillating review of the performance in the paper the next morning.
We also spent one afternoon on a harbour cruise. In addition to the expected sights (mostly houses we could never afford), we saw the set where they film "Water Rats" (it's an Australian cop show we used to like), and a new diesel-powered Australian submarine on its way into port.
We got off the ferry at Darling Harbour, an area with tons of restaurants and bars (frequented by locals as well as tourists), the Star City Casino, and the Aquarium. The Aquarium has a good assortment of fish and some terrific tanks, including some of the "Kelly Tarleton"-type walk-through tubes, where the fish swim over and around you.
We also took the ferry to Taronga Zoo (although now that we live here we usually drive), one of the most picturesque zoos in the world and full of Australian critters. (The zoo also boasts several "exotic" animals – like rattlesnakes. Do Australians find the notion of kangaroos in the zoo as funny as Deb finds the notion of rattlesnakes in the zoo? Rattlesnakes aren't exotic – they're just the things you hope you don't find when mowing the back yard.) George is a volunteer at the zoo now and is having a great time babysitting baby wombats and keeping little kids from torturing the wallabies.
For a nice walk, the best bet in the city is the clifftop trail from Bondi to Coogee – we do this quite often and the views are breathtaking. It takes about one hour to walk in one direction which is just right for working up the appetite for a big brunch on the other end. Bondi Beach is one kilometer of sand and is full of surfers, backpackers, locals, tourists, movie stars and wannabes. Off the beach you’ll find ethnic neighborhoods and unattractive buildings. The next beach down is Tamarama (nicknamed Glamorama – enough said), Bronte beach, the beautiful Waverly Cemetary (although unfortunately currently surrounded by orange and white plastic fencing – we’re not sure when that’s coming down), Clovelly (a quiet family oriented beach), the somewhat odorific but gorgeous Gordon’s Bay which is popular with divers and snorklers, and then Coogee which is about half the size of Bondi and not nearly as trendy (which is a good thing). You can sometimes spot whales and dolphins along this walk, quite close to shore – just this year Deb saw two whales breaching just close to the shore as she was running along the trail, and we saw a big pod of dolphins playing around in Coogee Bay for a good portion of one morning.
Hunter Valley
Hunter Valley is one of Australia’s many big wine producing regions. They’re known primarily for their Semillon, although there are a range of grapes grown there and many different styles of wine. With Steve from Trek-About Tours at the wheel, we managed to visit five wineries in the space of three and a half hours. (Steve's record is 14 wineries in one day! If we'd had that much we might have been more inclined to believe the story about the carnivorous kangawallafoxes.) There are a number of wineries which have great restaurants, including Red, a name which refers either to wine or some sort of Communist affiliation. (They have red stars on the napkins and everything. When we visited from Hong Kong, we thought that maybe we should sell them a bunch of Mao paraphernalia.)
Gold Coast
Orlando meets the beach. Deb comes up here once a year for a venture capital conference, and Australia’s most popular marathon (because it’s flat) is run here. There are a number of theme parks up here, but our favorite is Dreamworld. The guys at Tiger Island have the BEST job in the world. They spend their days hanging out and playing with tigers, which they have hand-raised from infancy. The last two photos to the right are from a little "meet the tiger" type of show, and we were front and center - sitting five feet from an uncaged tiger (and puma) felt pretty cool. The women who work the koala photo op place have it pretty rough too. We also believe we have solved the mysteries of the origins of Yoda – use the mouse to hover over the picture bar on the left – can't you just see this little guy with a light saber?
Noosa
Where the beautiful people vacation and even the cockroaches are fabulous – fabulously large and trying to find a way into our luggage, that is. But our room had a hot tub in the bedroom, and you can't beat that. Dinner at Lindoni's made the whole drive worthwhile.
Gladstone
Our trusty Lonely Planet informed us that there is not much reason for a traveler to stop here other than to catch the boat to Heron Island. We don't have much to add to that, except that the Flinders restaurant has some of the best seafood in all of Australia. Feel free to ask the proprietor what a mudcrab is – he'll bring one alive and kicking to your table. Turns out it's a huge crab built like a tank. We opted for something a little less intimidating and more dead, although we’ve since sampled a few and they are quite tasty.
Heron Island
We boarded the ferry with some trepidation due to a strong wind warning that was in effect, and George started to feel a bit uneasy about the greasy fish and chips he'd eaten for breakfast. We gobbled the motion sickness pills that were offered up, and good thing, too. After two hours on the rough seas steadfastly staring at the horizon, we were among the small minority that had not lost their breakfasts (and this is on a catamaran; imagine how bad it would be on a single-hulled boat). An interesting case of perspective - that ferry seems pretty big when it's tied up at the pier, and awfully small when it's in 10-foot seas.
Heron Island is known not only for its location at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef and hence an attraction for divers but also as a great bird watching locale. The tiny island is seasonal home to some 100,000 birds, including noddies, grey and white eastern reef herons, plovers and muttonbirds, to name just a few. All of this makes for quite the cacophony day or night. One would think the muttonbirds would be tired after a day out fishing, but somehow they have the energy to spend their nights making eerily human crying noises. All night. Deb woke up one night and commented that early travelers must have thought there were ghosts on the island, and indeed we later heard that sailors refused to stop at neighboring islands because of the wailing ghosts wandering around at night.
With 100,000 birds in the space of a square kilometer or so, one obviously has to become quite nimble so as to avoid their, er, produce. It didn't occur to us to watch out for the birds themselves, however. We learned the hard way that the muttonbird is somewhat navigationally deficient, particularly when revving up for takeoff or attempting to slow down. As we were meandering out to the helipad at about 9 PM one night for an evening of learning about southern hemisphere constellations, a muttonbird that evidently used that particular path as its runway came flying at us out of the dark. It veered just enough to avoid George (who ducked and yelped valiantly) but, to its and Deb's mutual shock, smacked straight into Deb's face. Deb landed on her butt uttering a number of unprintable obscenities, and the stunned bird sat drunkenly on the ground where it had fallen, no doubt trying to figure out how the hell that tree got on its runway. We certainly didn't expect to spend our first evening on the island in the room holding a can of frozen Sprite to Deb's eye, but she got a nice bruise to sport around for the next day or so and didn't hesitate to blame it on George, who should have been chivalrous enough to take the bird in the face for her.
Deb's misadventures on the island continued a couple days later when she went out on a guided reef walk. She and the rest of the group meandered out to the edge of the reef at low tide, studying various critters including dissolving sea cucumbers, dangerous cone shells, numerous star fish, cute little blue fishes and more. Unfortunately, no one paid much mind to the black wall of storm clouds that was coming their way and eventually dumped everything it had on the little group. A twenty minute slog through knee-deep water and blinding rain brought the bedraggled bunch back to shore.
SSHHHAAARRRRKKKKK!!!!!! We were snorkeling against the incoming tide in about three feet of water, when we heard this muffled shout. We are fairly used to seeing baby black tip reef sharks when we snorkel, so we looked around expecting to see a few of those. Imagine our surprise when what loomed out of the murky water were two six-foot-long adult white tips, one of which thought it was appropriate to start circling us. Logic told us that reef sharks are not dangerous, but logic does not always prevail when one is faced with a fish that is larger than a person. We made like flailing wounded fish and got the heck out of there.
Diving
To read about diving on Heron Island, check out our diving page here.
Cairns
Cairns is a good stopping off place for a number of cool activities, the barrier reef being the most obvious. Deb also highly recommends an early morning hot air balloon ride over the Atherton Tableland, and a trip to the rainforest for a stay at Crocodylus Village, a little eco-tourist village in the middle of the rainforest. There are bandicoots (which are mostly blind) that will wander around bumping into your legs as they sniff around for food under the dinner table (which has led to Deb’s obsession with the Playstation game Crash Bandicoot), and an opportunity to do night treks through the jungle (there are lots more things to see at night - Deb also did a self-guided trek during the day, but did not see much except for one wild boar which scared the pants off her).
Lizard Island
Lizard is at the opposite end of the Great Barrier Reef from Heron Island, and the resort on Lizard Island is run by the same people as the resort on Heron Island. Little differences can make a big difference, and they added up to make our stay on Lizard much better than the one on Heron.
First off, the weather was fantastic. We were a little worried that we'd show up in the middle of a cyclone or at least have the sort of windy and drippy days that we had at Heron. But we had perfectly calm, sunny weather the entire time we were on Lizard - and were told by everyone there how lucky we were, because it was apparently the first really good weather in about three weeks. And since Lizard is the northernmost island resort on the Barrier Reef, it was plenty warm.
At 2500 acres, Lizard is a much larger island than Heron (it isn't a coral island but a granite one), with far fewer guests, so it was easy to go off and find a wide sandy beach - any one of 24 - that we didn't have to share with a single other guest. (The cruise ship "The World" was there when we arrived, but they were only allowed to use one particular beach, and they were gone by the next day anyway.) The rooms, amenities, service, etc., are outstanding. Everyone is friendly. The bungalow was a spectacular large and open design ("I could live here" was heard more than once). The chefs are very good (but maybe trying a little too hard, with a couple of concoctions like "split pea shooters"*). And the daily refills of our very own cookie jar with homemade cookies were a big hit.
And as an added bonus, neither of us got hit in the face by a muttonbird.
There is quite a bit of other fauna on Lizard, though, including ... wait
for it ... lizards! Regular lizards, of course, skinks and geckos (we like
geckos) and the like ... but also huge (up to two meters long) Gould's sand
monitors. They're the ones that Captain Cook named the island for, when he
stopped to climb the local hill for a view of the barrier reef (he was having
a hell of a time finding his way to open sea). In addition to lizards, there
are flying foxes and at least one nesting osprey pair.
Unlike Cook, we had the convenience of modern transportation, and flew from
Cairns out to the island in a little 6-seater plane. Despite Deb having a
few misgivings about trusting her life to a loud, cramped, probably aging
little flying machine, we hopped aboard. It turned out to be pretty sturdy,
and in good hands, and we got an incredibly scenic tour of the coast and the
reefs on the way out to Lizard (and on the way back, too).
Given the perfect sun and calm seas, the diving (and snorkeling) was superb as well. Not only great visibility - 30 meters and up - but also no chop, so we could lean over the side of the dive boat and see details on the bottom, fifty or a hundred feet down.
We did some snorkeling around the local reefs around Lizard - there are
hours and hours worth of good snorkeling spots out there, with good stuff,
like the local blue-spotted lagoon ray, the giant clam, christmas tree worms
(one of Deb’s favorites), and more. Even caught a glimpse of a little
sea turtle lazily flapping along at the surface when we stood up to walk ashore.
For more on George’s diving, click here.
(* Split pea shooters are little shot glasses filled with cold pureed uncooked(?) peas with a tiny bit of caviar on top and possibly some eye of newt. They look like baby vomit and taste accordingly. George tried his on a "what the hell" basis, and was unimpressed. Deb got one into her mouth and her body rebelled. It ended up in her napkin. Waiters struggling to hide their grins brought her some moist towels. "Shall I take this away?" one asked delicately, to which Deb nodded her head while still clutching the napkin to her mouth, shaking in spasms of silent laughter and emitting an occasional shriek. Hey, you can't say we don't do our part to liven up a dinner.)
Darwin
Darwin, like the rest of the bits up north, pretty much has two seasons – hot and wet and hot and dry. Deb spent a few days here and thought Darwin was a pleasant enough place, although she can vouch that it is, in fact, the drinking capital of the world and the men tend to behave accordingly. The beaches are nice, although there’s a preponderence of the deadly box jellyfish that kept her out of the water. For variety she went on a day trip to Litchfield National Park and did a lot of swimming in water holes at the bases of beautiful waterfalls. She also went camping in Kakadu, which involved swimming across the crocodile-infested Barramundi Gorge (you might have seen a news report about a chef, whose specialty was crocodile, who got his arm bitten off….). There are some great aboriginal rock drawings in Kakadu, as well as some generally gorgeous desert scenery.
Red Center
Or "centre" if you prefer. The vast desert and scrubland center of Australia is in some ways reminiscent of the American southwest, with its wide open spaces, curious canyons and rock formations, desert creatures and grazing herds. But it also has big red kangaroos hopping around, “road trains” (semis with multiple trailers) thundering down the oddly straight two-lane roads, the occasional camels and emus and dingos, and so on.
The focal point of the Red Center is Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock. An enormous monolith sticking up out of a relatively featureless landscape, it offers different aspects of color, shape and shadow depending on time of day, etc. At sunset the rock went through a brilliant series of reds and purples, and George met his first wild dingo in the carpark. He was pressed for time and didn’t climb the rock (which in any case would be disrespectful of the local aboriginal customs).
Near Uluru is Kata Tjuta, or the Olgas, a group of rock
formations that take unusual shapes and form an eerie little valley. Not quite
as nearby is King’s Canyon. Taking the direct route there was an interesting
drive in the middle of nowhere; George saw a couple of huge kangaroos in full
flight and vibrated a(n apparently inessential) screw out of the rental car’s
dashboard while driving on the washboard dirt road. King’s Canyon
itself is a good place for a walk, with cooler areas and even pools of water
hidden away in what initially seems like a dead, dry landscape.
The drive from Adelaide to Ayers Rock and back in only a few days didn’t
leave much time for anything else, but George did stop overnight in Coober
Pedy, which is as strange a little town as he’s ever seen.
Opal mining, cave homes, golf course and soccer field without a blade of grass,
oddball local characters, and more.
Melbourne
Between the two of us we’ve been to Melbourne a few times. From Melbourne you can head out to Prince Philip Island to see the fairy penguin colony, which is pretty cool. Despite its reputation as the food capital of Australia, and the assertion of some of Deb’s friends that all clothing should be purchased there instead of Sydney, it’s not our favorite place – for one thing the weather always seems to be a bit on the grim side when we’ve been there. Discounting a few business trips we were there most recently for Deb’s first marathon (woohoo!) (for more on Deb’s running – click here) and we went to our first Rugby World Cup match (Canada v Wales).
Jervis Bay
Jervis Bay (pronounced JARvis in Australian) is an area on the southern New South Wales Coast with a few small towns, plenty of wild coastline and protected forests, and excellent wildlife. The central town is Huskisson, where we spent two nights in one of several average motels near the shopping strip and dock that serves as the center of activity.
It's a nice quiet place, more so because we visited off-season, where the best food is in the local pub (outstanding fish and chips), there's always someone coming or going from the dock in a diving or whalewatching or fishing boat, and a string of shell beaches stretches out for miles to encircle the big bay. Deb put her feet up with a good book when we weren't out for a walk on the beach or whatever, and George dragged his sorry butt out of bed on a cold morning to go diving...
For information on George’s diving, click here.
George and the divers saw a couple of whales while they were out, so the whale watching seemed like a good activity to book for the next day. Unfortunately, we cruised around for quite a while and didn't see any whales or any of the many dolphins that live in the Bay. But it did give Deb a chance to see the seals playing in the water and up on the cliffs, and right at the dock we saw a lost little penguin happily chasing things around the pilings. (That's their name, "little penguin"; they're bluish and only a foot or so in length.)
So we saw a couple of critters and generally had a nice relaxing weekend. Even the Sunday drive home was ok, as we got to see the countryside we'd missed in the dark on the way down.
Canberra
Canberra is about a three-hour drive southwest of Sydney (a nice enough but very warm drive with the top down the first time we went). The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is a small landlocked area carved out of NSW in much the same way that DC was created from VA and MD in the US. (Thus Australia resolved the dispute between Sydney and Melbourne as to which would be the capital of the country.) Canberra is arranged around a manmade lake and, like Washington, is very much a planned city, with the broad boulevards and symmetrical forms and contrived sightlines that implies. There's even a Mall extending from Parliament House, reminiscent of the one in Washington.
Canberra has some mildly interesting public buildings and memorials and museums and the like, and clearly it attracts some tourists (though nothing on the order of DC), but as a general rule if you tell people in Sydney that you're off for a weekend in Canberra, they're liable to respond with "Oh. Why?" in a tone which implies that they have trouble thinking of any persuasive reason to set foot in the ACT.
Well, the first time we went we had two things planned in Canberra: a trip to the zoo and an evening at the rugby. Anything else we fit in would be a bonus. The second time we went was for Deb to run the Canberra marathon – for more on Deb’s running, click here.
Why go all the way to Canberra for the National Zoo when we have a good zoo right here in Sydney? Because we'd heard about a couple of special offers. One was a tour with a keeper, the focus being on getting a bit closer to the bars and feeding some of the larger carnivores through the bars. That sounded (and was) pretty cool. But the one that got us down there was the chance to spend 15 minutes or so inside the cheetah enclosure.
Three cheetahs, two females and a male, share a fairly large enclosure. They have become comfortable enough with their regular keepers to accept the strangers that the keepers bring into their territory. When we walked in, one of the females was keeping watch nearby while the other two napped in the shade of a little covered den. It being middle of the afternoon on a very hot day, we weren't expecting much activity, and in fact they were pretty happy to just lie there and be petted. Cheetahs do purr just like enormous housecats, and they gave us a lick with tongues like sandpaper. We sat and stroked the cheetahs and chatted with the keepers -- and snapped some photos, and had the keepers take a few for us -- and the fifteen minutes and more flew by. In the end it was entirely worth the money and trouble to spend some time up close with these animals.
As you can imagine, the other tour was a bit anticlimactic after the cheetahs, but still fun. We visited (and in most cases fed) their otters (seven of them, named after Snow White's seven dwarves), sun bear, tigons, colobus, lions, cougars, dingos, tigers, and European brown bears before finishing up by acting as a jungle gym for a big olive python. Each critter had its own quirks and each visit was a bit different in terms of our interaction with them. We went into the enclosure and petted the dingoes, tossed shrimp to the otters, had our fingers licked clean by the brown bears, etc. The otters and the baby colobus were very cute, and it was fun to pet dingoes even though they're basically just dogs, and cougars are very striking, but the tigons were maybe the best part. They're the biggest of big cats, born to a tiger father and a lion mother. There never were many of these in the world as tiger-lion mating happens only in captivity, and there are even fewer around now -- the ones in Canberra are eighteen years old. So a chance to handfeed them was a treat.
After our fun at the zoo, we headed out to see a Super 12 (rugby union) match between the Auckland Blues (whom we've adopted just because the team is full of All Blacks, including Deb's favorite, Carlos Spencer) and the local ACT Brumbies. The mighty Blues were supposed to win handily, but played from behind all night and essentially collapsed from poor decision-making near the end. It's hard to say which was more annoying, the Blues loss, or trying to get in and out of the small but idiotic stadium with its numerous unnecessary bottlenecks for cars and people. We kept half-expecting a moat and drawbridge to block our path.
The following day we visited the National Museum and then stopped by Capitol Hill briefly on our way out of town. The museum isn't bad, but Australian history just seems a bit ...hmm... sparse, perhaps. Imagine visiting a State Museum of Wisconsin and you'll have an idea. The capitol area is reminiscent of DC, but the Parliament House in particular struck Deb as a bit Soviet in its grim (lack of) style.
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