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!
