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