Citylife, beaches, festival, and farmlife

Good Day our beloved friends and family!

Last time we left you was when we just arrived to Sydney here in Australia. There we ended staying nearly two weeks and we had a wonderful time. The first days we stayed in hostels in the centre, then we went couchsurfing for five days and finally we took a couple of nights in the centre again before we headed off North along the beach.
Our stay was pleasantly accompanied by Elka’s friend from University, Valborg. She just moved to Sydney to study Biochemistry there for a year. Well done! We had some great fun together, loving the beautiful weather, Bondi Beach, the Opera House, Hyde Park, a little shopping :S, the Botanic Gardens and some really good nights out in Kings Cross and downtown :) We also met up with the lovely Swedish girls that we travelled with in California + New Zealand and we had such a good time all of us together! With them we also went to Manly Beach, the Rocks, the Opera House once more :), and had a picnic, chilling out in Darling Harbour.
Valborg got us in contact with a really nice guy called Mark, who had this couchsurfing going. For those of you who haven’t heard about couchsurfing, it is a concept where travellers meet through a website; some are on the road and others have a couch to offer. The idea is then that you, as a traveller, stay for free and get an opportunity to meet the locals, whereas the one offering the couch often has been travelling earlier and enjoys being able to keep meeting different people from interesting cultures as you do when you are travelling. Mark has a great apartment in North Sydney with magnificent view of Harbour Bridge and Sydney. In the evening wild parrots came to the balcony to be handfed! We had our own room (luxury!) and stayed at Mark’s place for five great days.
Then we had a couple of stressful days since the deadline for Universities in Denmark was the 15th of March! So we jumped off the travel life for a couple of days and made choices, applications and CVs :) Despite tears, blood and sweat ;) it all ended good and we got it send in the last second! Well, actually we do not know if it ended good, that answer we will get in the end of July :S
Concluding, Sydney was one of the big cities on our long journey that we have enjoyed the most! (And that includes competition from Havana, Quito, Lima, La Paz, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Auckland!) All of them were amazing as well, and of course it will always be a generalisation to compare, but Sydney was high on the list of star quality in our eyes ;)

We then bought a one-way bus pass up the East Coast from Sydney to Cairns giving us possibility to jump on and off as many times as we want within two months. Our first stop came to be Port Macquarie; a small-town atmosphere with quite nice beaches. This town also had the loveliest Koala Hospital, which we visited and came very close to the cute teddy bear-like animals in treatment. Wonderful place! Furthermore, Port Macquarie has one of the biggest rock climbing centres, and this being one of our new favourite activities we took a couple of hours climbing around there :)

Next destination was hippie Byron Bay, a small spot at the easternmost point of Australia. People here are quite down-to-earth but still it is a small town with a great hype. We arrived Wednesday before the Easter Holiday, one of the busiest times in Byron due to the big annual 5-day Blues and Roots Festival. However, we were lucky to get two beds in a hostel throughout the weekend and we then got a last minute cheap offer for some 5-days ticket and took the deal. We had the best time there, just summer, sun, beaches, music, and beautiful, interesting people. Our daily programme was: wake up, eat breakfast, go to the beach, have lunch, go to the festival and finally sleep a little, then repetition the following day ;) At the festival we listened to many talented Australian artists, among others Xavier Rudd and stunning Angus and Julia Stones. Some of the international names we saw were Keith Urban, John Fogerty and Sinead O’Connor.

After the festival we bought tickets into the country to visit Bettina and Phillip Lynn, some friends of Tinna’s parents. Bettina and Phillip live on a big organic farm with their two children Peter and Kathrina plus cattle, horses, dogs, chicken and a big goat industry. In addition, on the hill near the house they had a big group of wild kangaroos living there! We spotted them a couple of times very close; they are so funny animals. The family on the farm were so welcoming to us and actually we got quite homesick because we felt so much at home! We stayed there for nearly a week, enjoying the lovely atmosphere and experiencing the life on an Australian farm. Among others, we helped to gather the cattle from the fields on horseback, and we helped injecting, weighing and sorting the young ones. One day we almost stepped on a very, very dangerous snake, another day we had this huge hairy spider on the ceiling over our beds! Furthermore, we went with Bettina to have a lesson with Chris Bayne teaching us about natural horsemanship and making us ride all gaits with nothing on the horse’s head, only using our legs! We could make the horse stop, canter and bent with nearly no signals, very impressive. Moreover, we went to the annual cattle auction which was a true experience of the culture in the bush – the smell, the dialect with which the men speak, and the way they all dress with cowboy hats, checked shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots.
Our stay at the farm gave us a whole other side of Australia and it was so much fun to see and experience ‘the bush’ as they call it. In a way it seemed to be more ‘real Australia’ than the touristy route along the east coast.

Now we just left the farm and we are heading to Byron Bay again and thereafter Surfers Paradise followed by Brisbane. We look forward to learn surfing and to go scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef further North :)

We send you all our best thought and we look forward to seeing you when we get back in a little more than a month’s time! Miss you!

Elka & Tinna

From kiwis to kangaroos :)

We just arrived to Sydney in Australia – what a beautiful city – we can’t wait to explore it and the rest of aussie-world! The last time we left you was in Queenstown, New Zealand, and the day after our last blog we went paragliding… Great fun! And actually quite relaxing ;) Jumping off a mountain - not as scaring as we thought it would be! Really nice views of the colourful New Zealand landscape from up there :)
Queenstown is cosy little touristic town with lots of things going on all the time, we strolled around the streets, enjoyed the good nightlife and had some good fun there :)

Next stop on our NZ roundtrip was Milford Sound, one of the touristic hotspots in this country. Milford Sound is a fiord settled in absolutely unique scenery, with tall mountains peeking high above the water, powerful waterfalls twisting down the black rocks and glaciers and forests nearby. The gateway to the fiord is just a harbour with a couple of houses, two hour’s drive from the nearest town. But since the cheapest boat trips on the fiord are in the morning (before the major tourist buses arrive) we wanted to stay near the harbour so we drove there the night before. Luckily, we found a lodge in-the-middle-of-nowhere where we could use bathroom and kitchen, and then we rolled down the seats and slept in the car :) The following day we had a very nice cruise around the fiord on the small boat “Friendship” and we went very close to the cute seals sleeping on the rocks.

After Milford we drove off towards Dunedin, a city known for its nearby easy access to pristine wildlife. Here you can go see penguins, sea lions and albatrosses on the beaches (but you have to take a tour). Unfortunately, Dunedin greeted us with endless amounts of rain and we never got off to see the animals :( But yet we had already seen penguins when driving down the west coast. Luckily, Dunedin also showed to be hometown of NZ’s largest chocolate factory “Cadbury’s” :P Hence, we went for a pleasing factory tour! Another thing we did in this city was to see the world’s steepest street – quite impressive! And Elka took the walk up in the rain while Tinna waited in the car ;)

Last stop in NZ was Christchurch where we stayed at the Icelandic couple Svava and Hilmar’s place in the mountainous suburb of Lyttelton. Svava, Hilmar, their two kids Birna and Arni, and Svava’s brother Sibbi were very welcoming to us and we enjoyed our stay there a lot! Among others we went to the cinema with Sibbi and to the local pub Wunderbar, which must be the craziest decorated bar ever! Dolls hanging from the ceiling, gasmasks within the light bulbs, hidden bathrooms, a lamp made of hair curlers, and a lot more... But it was cool! In Christchurch we also went sightseeing in the atmospheric city centre, went swimming in the sports centre and finally, went to a climbing centre with Svava and Hilmar. This was our first time climbing, so we got some instruction and then we just went climbing on our own. It was so much fun! We liked it a lot and vowed that we will do it again, and again... ;) Really good exercising as well – you should try it! :)

Well, this morning we left our car in Christchurch airport and flew into Sydney with really beautiful view of the harbour and the opera house from the plane! So now our 2 month’s adventure in Australia is about to begin, but we have made no plans yet – as we like it :) First we will now take some days exploring this seemingly very interesting city...

Hasta luego amigos!

Elka and Tinna