Tiffany and Greg Around the World
They have trains that traverse Australia. One of them, called “The Ghan” bisects the country running from Adelaide to Alice Springs to Darwin and when we bought the tickets online they charged us half of what the website said they would…
…kinda wish we knew that BEFORE our car broke down in the middle of the outback but hey, it’s a better story this way…
So after having our car break down in the middle of an Australian zombie outbreak and narrowly escaping with our lives it was time to seek alternate transport.
But at least now we understood why the koalas hang out it the trees. Apparently zombies can’t climb eucalyptus. Come on, have you ever seen a zombie Koala?
[fgallery id=18 w=450 h=385 t=0 title=”zombie koalas”]
Well, after spending a week with them in the wild as they laughed at our misguided attempt to repair our car we can confidently say that neither have we.
Continue reading “Zombie Koalas”
The Beast in sleep mode
We were asked if we thought we got ripped off and lost money on our Aussie car when it broke down and we were forced to scrap it. Some of you may recall that in New Zealand we managed to sell our car for the same price we paid for it (oh, and NOT spend a few hundred on maintenance in the process…) so at first the comparison burned us a little bit. Then we did the math:
New Years is the closest thing we have to a completely worldwide recognized holiday.
Though some Asian cultures don’t celebrate the changing of the Gregorian calendar (no relation to Greg, but don’t tell him that ;-), the tradition of a time set aside for the passing of the year still exists…even if that year happens to be lunar…and that time happens somewhere in the spring. As humans, we all seem to agree that it’s important we take the time to look back on our past and forward to our future at least once each 12 months or so.
Our Australian New Year found us (probably unsurprisingly) a few hundred miles from, well, basically anywhere.
Take 4 sailors without boats, a bottle of wine, a ukulele without a tuner, a fervent desire to celebrate the holidays and way too much free time and what do you get?
Hi-larity.
It’s time again for another foray into our tiki-style Christmas carol extravaganza!
This time with a little help / good natured tomfoolery from our friends Rod & Elizabeth, who we just happened to stumble across during a visit back to California…
(hey, what!? We all happened to both be back in CA at the same time? As we already told you all, in the sailing world it was just a matter of time and proximity.)
They were even nice enough to teach us that cold war Christmas classic…
There are rules and responsibilities that exist in every band of travelers. These range widely, even sometimes directly conflict, from group to group and can be as simple as “we switch off cooking dinner / doing the dishes every night” to “we only go out as a group so we can watch each other’s back” or even the hotly contested “we pay a little extra for creature comforts like AC” vs. “We live as cheaply as possible.”
Let’s go ahead and just table the “How is air conditioning OPTIONAL in the tropics?!” conversation until later.
Additionally many of these rules are unspoken, which can lead to confusion and occasionally unintentionally hurt feelings when one person violates another’s “unwritten rules.”
Unfortunately we ran afoul of such a situation with one of our traveling companions. A member of our group was, well, not in 100% agreement on what their responsibilities were to the rest of us and without any form of notice, started just slacking off from time to time and not pulling their weight…
(…or our weight either for that matter…)
There have been some…disagreements…of late.
Tons of venomous creatures, the barren deserts, dingos that do in fact eat babies, great white sharks, etc, ad nauseum.
That’s part of the international community’s common knowledge right?
Well, we knew about it before we got here at least. And, you’d think, the Aussies would kinda downplay it right? Bad for tourism and whatnot.
The most common car hanger here fits under the theme “stuff that will kill you” and yes, Kangaroos count
Nope, quite the opposite in fact.
Australia has a lot of coastline. It ranges from swampy marshes, to beautiful beaches, to craggy cliffs and everything in between. Victoria, in the southeastern part of the country, has miles of land that meets water. One of the most celebrated of those regions is the Great Ocean Road. We first heard about it in a travel magazine a few years ago, and Tiffany thought it looked gorgeous so we decided to check it out (via wine country of course! We’ll post more about that soon.)
Little did we know that this was…a thing…that one does. Drive the Great Ocean Road that is. It’s a thing…that Australians ask…if you’ve done. So consequently….
(Hey, who are we to say it’s not epic?)
In Australia, they don’t call it a “bull bar.” They call it a “roo bar”
And it seems like every vehicle over here has one.
And we wonder where they got the idea for Mad Max…
The first thing we did on our great Australian overland excursion was to (inadvertently!!) find out why this is so:
