Six weeks ago two fellow travellers recommended to us: “When you go to the Great Ocean Road, go to Bimbi Park!” With cheap accommodation prices and the prospect to see lots of koalas, we gladly took their advice.
And it really paid off, even when our necks were aching a little from constantly looking up: Koalas, Koalas, Koalas! And most of them to our surprise quite awake and in comparison to their mates born and living in captivity almost hyper-active!
On the Great Ocean Road there are also 12 apostels (supposedly after Uluru the second-most photographed sight in Australia) and a spectacular coast.
Not so nice: in a parking lot somebody drove into the rear side of our car. We had to pay the excess to our rental company (AUD 3000) even though we didn’t do anything wrong. Now we hope for a quick processing with our insurance and hope that our rental company will send us the required documents as soon as possible.
We are currently succeeding in not thinking about the whole thing in the south pacific paradise Tonga and enjoy sun, beach and sea, watch huge butterflies fly by and whales swim by 🙂
Was what we heard from every Australian when we told them about our travel plans to Tasmania. Looking back we can only agree!
We spent our first week in Tassie working for accomodation and food on the beautiful Brockley Estate. On this huge and secluded sheep farm Julian & Chaxi are running a B&B, also offering Spanish cuisine (Chaxi is originally from Teneriffe).
The work we did was diverse: mowing the lawn, weeding, painting cupboards, cleaning windows, tidying up the garage and clearing up the remains of the old chicken shed. For us, it was also interesting to see what life is like for B&B hosts: not only romantic but also quite challenging at times. There is always something to do!
Our home for the week at Brockley was the cosy Shearer’s Quarter (the sheares that stay here for one week every year kind of leave a distinct smell) with an open fire. When we weren’t working or sleeping (nice to know why you’re actually this tired) we explored the area around the farm by foot or took the canoe, looking for the resident platypus – which however we didn’t get to see, but spotted possums and kangaroos instead.
The second week we hired a car and drove up north to Launceston and then to the east coast. The Bay of Fires was the most beautiful beach we’ve seen so far – white sand, orange granite rocks and turqoise water ?UR” even though the sky wasn’t blue but rather cloudy.
In Freycinet National Park we took a quite ambitious hike to Wineglass Bay and around Mount Marlow. Being rather exhausted by that we might rethink our plans of hiking for 3 days through Torres del Paine in South America.
After that we headed further south to Bruny Island which we explored mainly eating and tasting oysters, fudge and cheese. We also got a bit upset about the small dent we got into our bumper – well, back then we didn’t know what was to happen to our car on the Great Ocean Road…
We have now returned our Camper in Sydney, we go quite attached to our mobile home. Sydney is a city that suits us, there is more than enough to do in the 4 days that we spend here.
For already three weeks we are now on the east coast of Australia with our camper and our heads are buzzing a little with all the things that we have seen and experienced: we sailed through the Whitsundays, watched whales and dolphins, celebrated birthdays, rode horses to muster goats, petted koalas and lost at horse racing.
But one thing after the other. As if we had planned it, we came through Ingham on August 31, the day the Ingham Gold Cup took place. Horse racing was on our Oz-todo list, so off we went. Though, finding the track turned out to be more complicated than expected: Eva’s brilliant idea to simply follow that car with the horse trailer didn’t quite work out because the driver didn’t know how to get there either (and must have felt tailed our Apollo does stand out a bit). Whatever. At the racing track it proved right what we had heard before: regarding fashion a horse race is the place to show off, we felt as if we were attending a royal wedding. Of course, our suitcase didn’t quite provide the appropriate outfit. Clearly we aren’t good at betting either: When in the third race even Little Miss Eva ridden by Jockey Kirk lost, we gave up on it.
For sailing to the Whitsundays we stretched our budget quite a bit (thanks to our birthdays) and booked with I Sail. Originally we were to go on a 2 days, 1 night trip, but as it turned out we were the only guests on that boat, so our booking was changed to the deluxe catamaran ?URoeOn Ice?UR? and a 2 days, 2 nights cruise 🙂 It was a great group on board (5 Spaniards, 2 Brits, skipper Ben and cook, also named Ben) and we had two lovely days, even though the weather was mixed. Whitehaven beach is as corny as it looks on the photos and the sand really white. And when you encounter 2 meter large fish while snorkelling, it is not as terrifying as one would think.
For Alex’ birthday we went to the Kroombit Lochenbar Station for horseback riding and goat mustering. You need to start somewhere for your outback qualities: for two hours we rode around in the bush, searching for lost goats, only to then yell at them to get them moving back to the farm. You don’t have that every day, do you.
We skipped Fraser Island, instead we went to the coast opposite of it, to Inskip Point and strolled through knee-deep sand, waded through tide land, watched dolphins jumping around just off a sand bank and walked upon the dune “Carlo Sandblow” in Rainbow Beach.
At the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane everyone can see how to live the most comfortable life: sleep, eat, sleep. Here we have a selection of photos from the series “Just hanging”:
In between, we walked on many beaches, played embarrassingly long games of pool, cooked extensively, talked a lot to Grey Nomads (actually mostly listened to them), built a sand castle, developed a new longing (who needs Nutella when there is Lino lada; we heard it can also be bought in Austria, let’s hope so!) and enjoyed camping in general 🙂
We have our camper for almost another week, then we stay in Sydney for 4 days and on the 24th we fly to Tasmania where we’ll work for a week. Looking forward to that!
From Alice Springs we took the 2400 km to Cairns on the Australian east coast by plane, where we stayed at Ursula’s through Airbnb (thank you Ursula, we had a great time with you!).
