Oz part 1

Following on from leaving Singapore we boarded our overnight plane to Melbourne hoping for a good few hours kip on the 7 hour flight. The gods of air travel were not smiling on us however, and the resulting seven hour flight was sleepless for both of us. We got some ok movies in though, but the screaming babies at the back of the plane managed to keep us awake despite the ear plugs. We were starting to realise we were in a bit of state, as we wondered off the plane into Melbourne airport the time zone shift had propelled us into the morning - our bodies were saying 3am, but the clock was saying 6am. We sleep-walked through the airport and into a taxi, and made it too the hostel we'd booked only to be told by the really grumpy receptionist guy that the room wouldn't be ready until 2pm. Arggggggg. We were used to the hostels making a bit of an effort to find a spare room, or get the cleaning gang in early, but this guy wasn't budging, and was being really rude with it too. Welcome to Australia...

The guy begrudging let us store our bags, so we set off to discover Melbourne at 6am, after being awake for approaching 20 hours. It turns out Melbourne is freezing cold at this time of year, so our thin shirts and shorts didn't really stand up against the 9 degree chill. We ducked in to the only place that was open at 6am on a Sunday morning and got some fried foodstuffs for breakfast from Hungry Jacks (is this the Oz version of Burger King?)

After barely making it back to the hostel alive, Mr Cheery let us in to get changed and told us we could sit in the hostel lounge upstairs. We took this as a great opportunity to get some sleep, but within about 30 minutes another overly officious chap came in and turned on the lights and told us he could let us sleep there, only sit. We were quickly realising the Oz wasn't going to be quite as chilled out as we'd become accustomed too.

Having been turfed out of the lounge, we headed back out to kill some more time. Fortunately Melbourne is a lovely place to stroll around, especially on a sunny crisp morning (now we had our warmest clothes on - hoodies/fleeces, jeans and trainers, heaven!) We found a lovely row of street cafes and had some breakfast, possibly the best fry up in the world so far. We then took a stroll down the river and watched the crazy Australian's rowing, running, cycling and their way through early Sunday morning. We were shocked to see so many people out and about - I swear most people in London would still be nursing a hangover at that kind of time on a Sunday...not that I'd know :)

So we were up to 10am by this point, 24 hours on our feet and feeling pretty spectacularly tired. I'd done some pretty hairy all nighters at work in the past, but they didn't really prepare me for this kind of tiredness. It got to the point where we decided to go and pay to watch a film in the cinema just so we could sleep for a couple of hours... the only thing on was "An Education" - we were hoping for something a bit lighter to sleep through, but it turned out to be a pretty watchable film and neither of us managed to get any sleep. But it killed another couple of hours and by 1pm we wobbled back to the hostel to see if they'd managed to clean up the room yet. Kicking out time in Oz hostels is 10am, so you'd think they might be able to prioritise cleaning a room in the 4 hours they have between 10 and 2pm... but no. They made us wait until five past two before they finally let us into our room. We were a bit annoyed to find out our twin/double room was actually a bunk bed, but to be honest who cares when you've been awake for 27 hours and travelled thousands of miles.

We slept for a good few (beautiful) hours - ironically making ourselves completely jetlagged despite only making a timezone shift of three hours. So for the record - overnight travelling is a spectacularly bad false economy: first of all you have a half wasted day because you can't do much carrying bags on the day you leave. Then you may or may not get a jot of sleep on the bus/train/plane. Then when you arrive in the morning you are more than likely going to have to wait for check in at your next hotel. By the time you make it to bed, you are so knackered you write off the rest of that day. When you wake up at 6pm you've got no idea what time it is or even what country you are in, wander around like a zombie then go back to bed. It then takes another twenty hour hours to get your head out of zombie mode. So by all accounts you've wasted half of the first day, the whole of the second day, and pretty much all of the 3rd day... just to save one nights accommodation costs. Bonkers. So if you are like us and really need your sleep, make damned sure you are going to be able to get some sleep on the transport, or our advice is forget about the overnight trips, it doesn't save you anything.

Ok rant number two is officially over. Back to Melbourne.

After a couple of days we started to feel human again and started to really enjoy Melbourne. Its a great little city, its small enough that you can get around most places in the central area on foot, and there are trams and buses to get further afield. We soon realised our diets were taking a bit of a dive, as instead of the cheapest food being the healthy stuff (rice or noodle dishes in Asia), the junk food was now by far the cheapest thing on offer. We had so many Subway rolls for lunch that Alex has all the choices memorised, ready to go at a moments notice. Dinner was at Hungry Jack's again, but we were still feeling a bit sorry for ourselves so didn't care!



The next day we hit one of the skyscrapers in the Central Business District for the viewing platform which was great. The weather was picking up nicely and the view was amazing.



We'd done most of the sights in the city, so we signed up for one of the more popular day trips - a days sightseeing up the Great Ocean Road. This is a long strip of coastal road running west along the coast, with a load of sights to see on the way. The price of the day trips was a real eye-opener for us - at this point we'd kind of been on auto-pilot, spending whatever we needed. But at 92 oz dollars a pop each - 53 quid with the lousy pound/strong oz dollar - we were spending more than our entire days budget just on the tour. Add on the accommodation and food and we were starting to realise we were spending money like there was no tomorrow. We decided to think about the budget another day and hit the tour - it was a nasty early 7am start, and we hadn't woken up before noon for two days running thanks to our jet lag/laziness.

The tour was amazing - or more specifically the scenery was amazing. The tour was just driving us down the coast and back, with really rubbish rolls for lunch (gah 106 quid!) The highlight was the national park containing the Nine Apostles, which apparently are Australia's second most iconic image after the Sydney Opera House (what about Ayers Rock/Uluru we thought, but apparently not. We kind of felt bad for never hearing about them before - bah.) Enough waffling, here are the pics :



The whole place was amazing, but this is probably the pick of the scenery photos:



The final stop was a place called London Bridge, that turned out to be a Durdle Door-esque rock which used to be two arches next to each other. The bigger of the two arches famously collapsed, trapping two tourists on the end of the rock. Their rescue was televised across Australia, but it turned out they were having an affair and had lied to their respective partners about where they were going that day. Or so the story goes...



It makes for nice photos no matter what they tell you =)

The next day we had a planning summit; we hadn't really figured out at all what we were going to do in Oz. Our first plan was to meet Alex's friend Hayley in Melbourne, but as (bad) luck would have it she was back in England when we arrived. The only other plan was to meet up with some of our other friends in Sydney, but we had this pencilled in for the end of the month as we fly out from Sydney to New Zealand.

So we hit the guide books and came up with a list of places we like to go. Our best guide book was a sheet of A4 that Bekka had scribbled down for us in Thailand. She'd gone through all the best backpackers things to do and to be honest was ten times better than the rough guide in figuring out what to do. The bad news for us was that our useless travel agent at Trailfinders (he of the overnight-travel-is-good fame) had led us into booking a flight into Melbourne, and then another flight to Sydney, and then our flight out of Oz from Sydney. This meant we'd have to stay around Melbourne for a fortnight, then spend a week travelling out of Sydney and back. (For our geographically impared readers, Melbourne and Sydney are pretty close to each other in the south east of Australia, whereas most of the places we had on our list were on the east coast.)

It quickly became apparent that we'd need to change our plans to get up the east coast, and looked into flying from Melbourne to Cairns (in the north east) and then travelling back down the east coast to Syndey (in hindsight this is what the Trailfinders chap should have told us, but I guess we were lazy and should have planned it more ourselves.) The flights were silly money though - because we needed them short notice I guess - so that was ruled out. Then we turned to trains, which were crazy money too, leaving buses as our last hope. Unsurprisingly these were crazily expensive too, but not quite as bad as the other two.

A trip to a travel agents later and we were the proud owners of two east coast coach tickets that would take us all the way from Melbourne to Cairns, with as many stop as we wanted - all for the bargain price of 550 quid. (2797 km and about 35 hours driving time.)

We also sorted out the flight from Cairns to Sydney, which set us back 330 quid. So in the blink of an eye we'd spent the best part of a grand sorting our the mess we'd got ourselves into. Not a great start, but having come all this way we figured we'd not forgive ourselves if we didn't at least see some of the country. We were in a bit of a daze after all this (I'm not sure we spent 900 in total in the whole of India, let alone on a single day) but went back to the hostel to pack for the bus trip to Sydney the next day.

In order to cram everything in we decided to only stop over night in Sydney and head up the coast straight away the next day. This meant a 13 hour bus ride from Melbourne to Sydney, followed by a 14 hour journey from Sydney to Byron Bay the following day. Mission. In hindsight I think we tried to cram too much in to too shorter time, but we were keen to see as much of the country as possible despite the crazy coach times. To be continued...