NiRoNi World Travel 07/08

Australia is the place for friends and relatives...meaning we saw more Irish people here than Australians! This, of course, had plenty of benefits: free accommodation, free drinking buddies, free tourist information...
A big shout out to: Cara in Sydney (where we thrust ourselves on her flatmates for a week), Ella and Evelyn in Brisbane (where we made poor attempts at fancy dress), Uncle Jimmy in Perth, and Aunt Breda in Melbourne.

In between, we managed to not strangle eachother in another camper van, travelling from Cairns to Brisbane (although you can all breathe a sigh of relief, we sensibly upgraded to a slightly larger model than in New Zealand - we could all fit in this one without suffering severe leg cramps and neck pains, and most of us (bar Ricky) could roll over without waking up the entire car park!!). We also visited the Whitsunday Islands for some excellent snorkelling in the Great Barrier Reef...

We did some more surfing (and head banging...of the painful kind!) in Noosa and Surfer's Paradise and saw some sunsets and lots of waterfalls. Half of us obtained our advanced scuba diving certificates and 4wheel drove around Fraser Island, while the other half of us travelled around the town of 1770 on chopper motorbikes, and saw...some more waterfalls!

And so, some highlights of the trip...and some colourful quotes to paint the picture!

A Skittles tasting competition! Does everyone know that Hega's previous job partly involved making decisions based on tasting? Well, after completing the red and green pepper challenge in New Zealand, we decided to up the ante, and test her again. After failing miserably in Round 1...
Hega: "I bet if I did it again I'd get all 5 right"
right before she DID do it again...and correctly guessed two. (I won't boast, but my incredibly tuned taste buds managed to correctly identify all 5 flavours of the delectable sweet. Years of dedicated Skittle eating finally paying off!)

Ross: This is the life, huh? Surfing on Bondi" Ross, out on the water, doing exactly what he said he was on the tin.

Woman: That's a nice elegant pre-theatre dinner you've had there"
The usher at the door of the Sydney Opera House, as we stuffed our McDonalds cups into the bin on our way into the ballet. The Sydney Opera House wowed us by day and by night.

And yes, you're not seeing things, I did write ballet...Ross' idea, and, though we were all suitably entertained and impressed by the lithe legs, supple bodies and impossibly tight men's buttocks, we still slagged Ross for the next week.

Woman in a dress shop: "As I was saying to the bride..." Referring to HEGA!!!

Hega: “And how about Emu Park, what would we see there?”
Woman in tourist office: “Actually Emu Park is a housing estate...” One of our many interesting conversations in one of many tourist offices!!

Ross: "In the 1972 World Cup, Gert Muller scored 14 girls." Ross pining for the scoring ability of some soccer stars, following another adventure with some Goon. Goon is an interesting invention, no doubt thought up by some engineer on the last Friday of the month, with nothing but fish eggs and some grapes in the fridge...it's wine, somehow fermented using many strange ingredients, enabling it to be sold cheaply...very cheaply. 4 litres, in a cardboard box, for $10. That's infinitely better than any amount of Dutch Gold, and came to our rescue many a night in the camper van, when a slightly heated game of Rummy required a little defusing...

It must also be noted that, to prepare for our 17 days in the camper van, Ross managed to procure 200 teabags. With 4 of us at our tea drinking best, that would have meant almost 3 teabags each, every day. Considering I had about 5 over the entire trip, and Ricky and Hega contributed only slightly more, Ross made a valiant effort, and we estimate that Ross managed to drink a (dangerous?!) amount of tea. If Ross had a teabag and a potato in each hand, he would desire nothing else in life.

Along the way, there were lots of strange animals seen in the wild (not counting us four, who managed to avoid campsites for 17 days - when the camper battery ran out, we simply drove until we could turn on the lights again!).

Woman: "Watch out, there's a snake there. Right there by your foot"
A not so clever warning, resulting in Ross stopping right next to the snake!!

And more animals we didn't see...