2018 October 28th, November 28th The Antipodes, Revival 👍

 Dateline: Wednesday, 28th November 2018

October, November: Sydney Australia, South, East, North and West

Hmmmm, maybe a little too dry for my taste. Very green

The route: Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide

Hello old friend.

The "Old Gal" as Annie would have it. 
Our alter ego Australian home away from home is ready to go

We negotiate the duty free and the SIM process and out onto the train towards the deep burbs where Annie & Gary reside.

It was only a 5.5 hour flight, without much sleep, plus, Sydney 7:30AM is out 5:30 AM.

Get the message? I guess thats our new motto

Annie eventually finds us and is delighted to take posession of a few gallons of duty free.

We get back to the homestead, and pretty much crash. There's nothing quite like laying down with your legs out after an international Red Eye flight

Yep, this is what passes for excitement 
when you get as old as we are

I inspect the grounds and am delighted to find that Gary has once again, got everything ready for an immediate departure. The old gal is kitted out with the tent, and apart from a few nuts and bolts I've brought from Toronto, we can go.. Thanks Gary!

Annie, organiser (and retiree that she is) has organised a full house of activities for us.

I have a request to supply 
dinner.  
A Guinness Beef stew
in 32C?  

The immediate destination for the evening, is a night of trivia. Hey! I know this sort of stuff is incredibly dull, but some of you keep asking fopr all of this detailed crap.

There were "plans" to head to Bondi beach for some form of Art festival, but it falls through. We're still too jet lagged to worry.

A few mates and family are invited to Sunday (?) lunch. We mingle

Some of the locals. Annie & Gary's 
mates and family for lunch

Gary caught in the act of enjoying
shopping at Costco

Yes, $AUS12.00 for 1.5litres,
and that includes tax at the local Costco

We are charged with picking up Kayla's gear from Melbourne, including a delicate portrait of her
Here's the box I made for it

Come Monday, we entice Gary to the local Costco. Annie certainly enjoys the outing, me too as I drive the cruiser for the first time in years. Nobody dies and we decide to return for a tank fill up on Gary's "camper" van as they are into a smallish road trip with us.

Have tent, will wander. Maybe, we're getting 
a bit old for this sort of thing you know

On the road, complete with camper and

family dog

On the road.
It's something like 37C. 
Can you spot the whales yet?

Kayla eventually gives me some info on the bags that we are contracted to pick up from her ex friend near Melbourne, so I spend a mosquito filled morning whipping up a carrying box for one of her bits 

There is a production of "Madiba" opening on the Thursday night in Sydney. Annie and I have some connection to South Africa, so are maybe sort of interested.

A few friends join us 
for a few minutes

Our freeloading residence for a few whale
watching days

It's downtown.

It's also terrible. The choreographer should have been dumped in Hillbrow and left to fend for themselves, and the writer should me forced to forfeit any method of writing further trash forthwith.....

Awful rubbish.

Celebrating the Eden Whale 
watching festival, in style

Annie has a cousin in Bega, about 300Kms from Sydney. We head out after a few days with the specific intent of watching whales leaping just off the coast.

It's a really hot drive, about 37C for most of it. We eventually meet and camp. Our first post knee surgery rooftop adventure.

Complete with GnT's and a bottle of wine, no one dies or even gets slightly damaged.

Our destination works very well. We all arrive here and head off to Eden, for the "Eden Whale Festival". This, my friends, is what we have come for. Yep, our entire trip was predicated on getting here, just for this weekend festival.

It turns out to be pretty pathetic, so I do a quick gnashing of teeth that we rushed to get here, and move  on

A well hidden viewing spot near Merimbula. 
Fantastic whale spotting all day long

Annie & Gary are on mother watch, so can only spare a few days, and head back on Monday.

We have no such limitations and wander the coast until we cash in on an incredibly spectacular display. It goes on for hours. There's a mother and baby who gently pass us at our viewing point. Mum is showing offspring how to breech, baby tries.

Mum shows how to dive, flip over, lounge on her back and baby tries to follow. All the time, there's another mum and babe gently meandering past, plus two individuals near to us and a few farther out, all breaching and having a great time.

Kayla's house mate (Nadja) in front of her
accommodation when she came back to Oz last year. 
Wow, it must have been rough!

For the first hour, there's a whale watching boat that gets really close, totally against local laws, but eventually, after an hour, time is up, and  the boat heads back. We have another 3 hours of show to come.

  

Here it is

The day winds down, and they all  pass off into the distance south towards Antarctica for their summer feasting.
We head back to Bega, likewise, knowing that this time, we've achieved exactly what we came for.

Next day, we depart Bega for the bright lights of Melbourne

Supposedly an Aboriginal Possum cloak. 
Melbourne Museum Aboriginal exhibit

An easy jaunt down the coast and we're in Lakes Entrance where its bloody cold and windy. Nothing much happening here except the weather.

Torres Straight Dancing Mask

 Our secondary reason for being in Australia (apparently), is to do the parent thing and retrieve Kayla's abandoned belongings here. She spent an execrable 3 months here looking after her then friend Nadja

Pacific Islands Canoe and sails
Sydney to Hobart 
22nd August 1770

It must have been a hardship posting for her. The house and local environment are truly disgusting.

 It's worse than a trailer park inside
Can't get out of there fast enough

Anyway, we meet Nadja and pick up her piles of stuff and somehow, get it into the truck.

This is Kayla's detritus of
a previous stay in Oz

We have 3 nights in Melbourne, partially to see the place, but also to rationalise Kayla's gear.

$5 for an easy solution to
Kaylas (aka my) freight woes

There's about 60Kgs of this crap.

Luckily we don't have much and the cruiser is up for this type of abuse

Typical pedestrian area
Melbourne CBD mean
streets
Quite civilised in an
Oz kind of way

Melbourne is, according to Kayla, the only inhabitable place in Australia. She feels very much at home here.

"Cooks Cottage" in the local green space
- there's lots of that

Aftermath of the "terrorist" attack in Melbourne

We don't get much of the individual characters in our meanderings. Occasional insights, often about immigration and how there's too much of the wrong sort, is countered by talking to people about the red necks here in Australia, and we always get total agreement. Hmmmm

So, we are on the outskirts of Melbourne CBD (Central Business District). There's an amazing amount of parks here. Green parks too. We pass through several, one of which has an old English cottage. Apparently Captain Cooks childhood home. It's very popular with the Chinese hordes.

A typical "cool" bar on Melbourne's Yarra River

We end up at the Melbourne Museum to see the Aboriginal exhibition. Well worth the time.

It's brilliantly curated and a lot of fun. I also got to see most of the rest of the museum, but got kicked out eventually

We notice 3 helicopters, stationery over the downtown. Seems like some schizo waving a knife (killing at least one) just about where we had our morning coffee. He was of course, Muslim.

Looks like everyone wants to blame the Islamic Terror network, and reap more budget (for helicopters etc?). 

I search long and hard for a beer by the river
I'm rewarded for my efforts

Melbourne can rightly claim to be in the top 3 "best cities in the world". It's perfectly suited, lots of outside bars and restaurants, a well developed and used waterfront, and of course, a temperate climate.
We wander around. food and coffee is very perfect and no
disappointments anywhere. It's great not having to find parking (as I remember from our last 2 visits here)

 That's it. I've completed and exceeded expectations
So, now off westish, looking for whales

What we came for? 
Not too remote Australia

All Victoria museums are free to old folks, even foreigners, which is very pleasant if you go to a bummer place that shouldn't even charge, like the Immigrants Museum in Melbourne. Really just a collection of old photographs and documents. There was one though that detailed the "sale" of 600,000 hectares, now Melbourne and huge surrounds, from the Aborigines to one John Batman for a few suits, cooking pots and a blanket or two. For this, he is hailed as a national hero for being "humanitarian" to the local indigenous.

Hmmmm.You decide.

 The coast is pretty spectacular, and remote
Here heading into Blanket Bay campground

The randy one is
lower down

Otway Park. Remote and beautiful. 
Plus cold & windy (Hmmm. Familiar?)

Our very own on site Koala. 
Cute, but watch out
for those claws

Come Sunday AM, we are heading (as it turned out) to Otway Park. I've just noticed it on the map, so we head there. It's actually remote camping, even to the point of bringing water and bog rolls.

This mother just walked
through
our camp area.
Very nonchalant

The route, the "Great Coastal" or some such, is quite spectacular as we take the roads, always closest to the coast. Slow, but beautifully remote. The sea is an incredible emerald

Being in the remote areas, finally, I get to try out our cooking processes.
It sort of works.

Mum and baby just wandering
through our camp site

We don't starve, or vomit...

We were told that these trees were all
destroyed by koala's stripping the bark.
There's a lot of them!

Next morning, we get to watch our own camp site Koala's.

There's three or four of them here around the sites.

We find mum up the top of the tree, and dad, or at least, wannabe dad, up another one.

They appear to be totally oblivious to us people. One comes down his tree, passes within 2 metres of us up the other. He means business, like reproductive business but mum isn't having any of it. There's quite a fight and the prospective suitor is suitably repulsed after much screaming and biting and ripping of the tree they are climbing in.

Outback art of the grain silo's. Quite common now

They wander around our site all day. It's lovely, and incredibly unexpected.

As you can see, I dedicate myself to catching up with my 2 month old Economists.

Some of the "12 Apostles" or 
Pig and piglets etc. We've been here 
before, but it was raining last time

After a few days of being cold and windswept, we move on up the coast

One of Australia's last Volcanoes

It's still pretty civilised around here. Endless fields cultivated with wheat and barley. Hay and probably soy beans, wheat and barley are everywhere, as far as you can see

A night stop in Warrnambool. Great Fish & Chips here

As per Kayla's recommendation, we head North 
to the Grampians for the night

Our routine is now pretty much a daily grind: leave the motel/ accommodation at 1 minute to check out time,  Google the best coffee around (or sometimes drive a ways to it), decide where we are heading off to during this, drive for 200 - 350Km's, looks for a place to stay, negotiate, move in.

One of many wineries near Mt Barker in Adelaide Hills with two ageing and willing samplers

Dinner is sometimes eat in, fish and chips, or barbecue, typically with something from the local Woolies or Coles

Biking around is De Rigueur, as are the helmets

We get updates from our hotel manager on places to see, where to eat etc and find the best fish & chips in town.

ViticultureHolics hard at work

Dull isn't it?

Luckily, we had a lift from the manager
of the camp area

A lot of the biking was downhill on the way
there

I never thought about the "Hills" 
part of Adelaide Hills

We have no discernible destination. Our original one was way down past Adelaide, but the whales aren't there this time of year, and we pigged out on whale watching in Murambula, so, I'm just following the coast north, maybe to Port Augusta, for no discernible reason apart from waiting for a time share in Hawaii. Ho Hum you say. Just another day for these ageing hippies in a 4 x 4 truck.

The truck sits on the road and just cruises along. It's quite a pleasure. The weather comes and goes, some hot, some wet, occasionally cold.
I have become quite a wizz at driving on the left. Zero casualties so far.

There's a lovely bike path to the 
wetlands area. The bike shop opens 
late on  Sundays, so we splurged

I do some extensive research to find wine sampling, a bike shop with hire ability and accommodation. It's actually rather difficult in these small communities to get all of them

The local bike shop in Mt Barker gets 2 21 speeders bikes in specially for us (thanks Peter), and, most amazing, at the camp site in Mt Barker, when we arrive and ask Wayne the manager of the camping area for a map of the local vineyards, he is all for us biking around and takes us about 15Kms to some of the better places. He also, after our extensive research, drops his guests at his Christmas party, and comes and picks us up! Incredibly hospitable this lot.

The Hills are a great place to try the wines, except here, they charge for the experience and are super pretentious.

Mt Barker street scene. 
Best croissants this side of Paris

We bike around the hills. It's actually quite hard work. Far more difficult than McClaren Vale or the Borrossa Valey. We really need to work at this until the last place in  Hahndorf at the Adelaide Hills wine centre, which, thankfully, is all down hill from The Lane Vineyard.

We make 4 all together for the day. Two charged, two did not.

We both agreed that we prefer the non charging places for atmosphere and real people. We only find wines we actually like enough to buy at our final stop at the wine centre

Mt Barker is such a lovely place. We extend our stay and soak up the sun and laid back genteel atmosphere

Our trek from Adelaide back to Sydney 

Sigh. We leave Mt Barker with such lovely memories of the people there.

Still totally clueless about general destination, we head toward Port Augusta.

The landscape, up to now based on agriculture of some sort, becomes barren and devoid of just about anything except scrub. The wind is incredible strong when we get out for the bog at Port Wakefield, about 100Kms from Adelaide.
I've located this place as a possible picnic spot.

We are heading into the real outback now: 
Heading towards the Flinders range

Well, I'm sure all you readers of previous ramblings remember our various attempts to camp, or make sandwiches in the outback on the Nullabor.  Well, this place was even worse.

Literally, a cloud of flies around you, landing up your nose, on your glasses, skin etc etc etc.

We run away, but wherever we stop, there they are.

Eventually, Ilge tries to make a sandwich as we drive along. We've done it before, but this time, still with flies inside the van, and the sandwich dripping mayonnaise and tomatoes all over me as I drive. Well, lets say that I'm amazed that we are still alive.

An Echina. Very shy, 
not unlike a marsupial hedgehog

Here's Ilge's take on it all:

Picnic in the Flinders. It's howling and
 we have to tie down just about everything

"Russ you will be happy to know we found the flies again after leaving Adelaide. They forced us into the vehicle and as we drove along, I had my knife and cutting board out as Jim drove along splattering his sandwich on his clean shirt and shorts! Has been worse but..... "

It was another sticky hot day and we found solace in a bakery in Port Pirie with iced coffees.

The Flinders Range. Cold really windy and misserable
It's supposed to be summer!

I'm not sure where to go from here. From Port Augusta, there's only North or West.  It's time for us to find a place to stay. I call the best looking motel in town, get a price and find that its 30% cheaper on the web. I use Agoda, almost exclusively as they have an amazing selection, and good prices.

The manager told me his was the best deal. No it wasn't. He's magnanimous about his loss of income.

As we leave in the morning, he recommends the Flinders, a real Australian pursuit it seems.

We head North through ever harsher landscapes. It rains and as we pass north, we see dozens of Kangaroos out on the road.

Roo burgers and Shiraz for old farts. 
Aren't we getting a bit too old for this lifestyle?
It's really cold, but gets even colder

This is why there are always so many kangaroo roadkill on the roads, some huge, some small, mostly bags of bones. They come out at night to lick moisture off the road, and are too plain stupid to get out of the way of the night traffic, typically road trains that don't stop for anything in the road.

Eschewing the local lodge, we camp out and have our Roo Burgers washed down with a very fine Adelaide Hills Shiraz

Not bad.

Guess what? It's cold so we head over to hang out at the lodge where they have WiFi, and finally snag our place in Maui where I've been trying to get a timeshare.

I send out the invites

I'm not sure what the 4 x 4 tracks are like, but we book a remote camp site anyway. The route is actually quite spectacular, but it's not such a big deal, or hard on the van.

We get to our chosen destination and it's shit, so we relocate to a slightly better one.

Us versus the wilds in the Flinders. 
Yep, it's cold and very windy, again
One of the worst nights I've spent camping
in the old Gal

The park is very Australian. Lots of  austere visages, rough and tumble outdoorsman type of environment that Australians love to pit themselves against.

We drop into all of the camp sites. Yep, all remote. Lots of places, but now totally empty of anyone but us. it's off season here folks

We find the "best" camp ground and settle down for the night.

After the night of the howling winds 
and end of the world  blood red sunset

I adjust the van for the best protection, but really to no avail. The wind is howling around us, far too strong to even put the tent up.

The evening glows orange with all the dust in the air.

It's official, see Australia dust storm: Health warning as skies change colour -

Not being able to cook in the wind, we live off of our emergency stock of chips and dips 

We settle down to economy seats in the van until the wind drops, sort of around 2AM.

Hirsute look with a view after a
Night on Cold Campground.
I doubt if I'm really smiling

We are fucking cold, but once the tent is up, and we're in it, occasional gusts notwithstanding, we get some sleep

In the morning, its calm and cool.

Pausing only to take some self obsessed pix, we head off.

The 4 x 4 track ends in about 10Kms. Not exactly a challenge for the old gal, but I'm happy not to have had any punctures this time around

The end of the road, 4 x 4 style. 
I didn't even need 4 wheel drive

So much for the excitement of the outback.

Many many more carcasses on the road and off. Mostly fresh, a lot of huge big reds.

They are probably here because of the rain on the roads tempting them out to get zapped by passing vehicles

No one cares about the about the Roo decimation, just the damage their soft stupid bodies do to the Roo bars on the vehicles

An Australian tradition no doubt

As there is only a road south, or north into the real wildlands, the way back is the reverse of  our coming. The landscape slowly becomes more viable, occasional sheep gives way to some forms of plants and crops. Lots of outback, scrub and flat emptiness.

Around 2PM, it's cold and pissing down, so we hide in a motel in Peterborough.

Tesla power centres - the future in Clare Vale

Nothing much happens

We are heading back to Sydney, day by day.

We are heading East when we see a sign for Clare Vale. Wine country, so we head down south.

Arriving about 1:30, we suss out the locale, book into a local motel and start walking to the tastings.

On our walk around Clare Vale 
for yet another wine sampling by your dedicated team

Just keeping up appearances. 
Cheese and Adelaide Hills wine. 
Fabulous Darling

We get to two. Enough to identify the region. It's free here. I guess they are not as insecure about their wines as Adelaide Hills are.

Sculpture, bronco C1930.
Small town NSW

Clare Vale is probably 20 Kms north to south, and has the magic ingredient for all biking wine enthusiasts. A disused, reconstituted rail line. Yep, a bike path travels through all of it, and being an old rail line, is relatively flat. We hold back our tears (the place is totally booked tonight for an "MG" vehicle owners rally.

And guide with loaf of bread

Renmark, NSW with possums

Malesh.

We are now about half way back to Syndey, searching for reasons to stay somewhere. Renmark provides some for of answer. Possums up trees.

Seems like some old lady has been feeding generations of these wonderful coat making animals for 20 years, so humans are now imprinted on generations of possums to accept bread as a handout. They are certainly cute, and probably have a major dietary imbalance.

Swan Hill golf club plus local residents. Dusk

Annie provides an extensive list of stuff to do, but by the time we get it, we are well past several options. We end up at a golf course where we have our G'n T's and watch the kangaroos sample the golf course' grass.

Very placid. Constable without the horse and cart.

I think it would be fun to check out Canberra and all the government sponsored culture there.

Heading toward Canberra - over there, the hard way
We get there and I just say lets get back to civilisation again

We head off and I follow the scenic, or at least most indirect and difficult route up hill, down into valleys and out again.

We finally arrive in Canberra, exactly as Google predicted, at 4:50PM. About 50Km/ hour.

Time to decommission the ole Gal once again

The forecast is ugly, accomodation is between $400 - $800/ night. Weather is closing in.

We pause only for (dreadful) fish and chips, and beat a hasty retreat back to Sydney

Andof course, we find the time to revel in a rubber

So, to all you aficionados of this boring mundanity. If you are still here you should seek psychiatric help. I know I need to.

I'm not sure I enjoyed this trip, actually, I'm sure I didn't
Certainly too bloody cold most of the time,
and occasionally dire

Our last day. Flight out to Hawaii around 9PM
Gary decides we need a good long run in his recently upgraded hot rod
Somewhere south I'm incredibly claustrophobic in the back
On the way back it stops

We all live to drive another day. Aloha all!

From your correspondent