Have been a bit lax with the blog posting recently and got facebook shouted at by Sarah for not keeping her updated on our shenanigans! So here you go Sarah….
We ended up staying in Coogee – by the beach, 1/2 hr from Sydney city centre – for 4 weeks as we got nicely settled into our house and were living with some fab people. And going to the beach every day is not such a bad lifestyle! It was really nice to unpack our bags for a few weeks and feel like we were actually living somewhere for the first time in 6 months. We were busy applying for any jobs that came our way during those weeks, and had a few promising leads that kept falling by the wayside. So we decided it was time to move on, but keep applying for jobs as we travelled around. We were originally planning on flying to Cairns and driving back down the coast to Sydney, but we both had stuff we’d applied for in Sydney that may have required us to come back to Sydney, so we decided to do a roadtrip down to Melbourne and back so if anything did come up, we could get back to Sydney easier that if we’d been in a campervan somewhere in Queensland.
So we booked a hire car and headed out of Sydney to the Blue Mountains. Our whole trip was really about seeing the landscape so we pretty much took every scenic route and detour there was on the way!
Map of our route:
First stop – Blue Mountains. We stopped in Katoomba for 2 nights and did some walking around the 3 Sisters and some driving to lookouts whenever we saw a signpost! The scenery was amazing, but NSW was experiencing a wee cold snap so the temperatures were down about 9 degrees to normal and the hostel was freeeeeeeezing! We were wrapped up in fleeces and woolly hats – two days before we’d been swimming in the ocean and sunbathing! But when we got walking we soon warmed up. We decided not to walk back up the few hundred steps we’d walked down, so we took the scenic railway. 3 minutes of being terrified out of my mind. I’m not a fan of heights so being pulled backwards up a slope at 45 degrees in a carriage with no sides and no front was pretty darn scary. And we had to pay $10 for the privilege! Saved our knees anyway…
From Katoomba, we drove the scenic way to Canberra through a lot of farming country and bush. The scenery changed almost all the time on our whole journey which made the long driving days pretty enjoyable and not at all boring. We stopped in Canberra for a night in a cabin in a caravan park – so nice to have our own kitchen and bathroom… and 4 bunkbeds we didn’t really need! However, the heater unit broke and it was again pretty much down to freezing overnight so we had to put on the cooker hob rings to heat up the cabin! Worked a treat. We spent the next day exploring Canberra – we visited the Australian Institute of Sports, which was top of my list of things to see there of course. Was great to see the arena and gymnastics hall (made me want to train so much!) and we were shown around by a triple paralympic gold medallist from Beijing which was great.
They have an interactive sports area that we played around in for a while at the end of the tour – they had a bob skeleton simulator and wheelchair basketball (Chris was very pleased when he eventually scored a goal after I had been running around catching the balls while he sat in the wheelchair). Was a really good morning and even Chris ‘Sports Filter’ Davies enjoyed it!
We drove into Canberra city centre and visited the Parliament building and went on another guided tour. Think I now know more about Australian government than the UK one! The Parliament building is a great bit of architecture having only been built in 1989 and completely designed for it’s purpose.
We had a little drive around the city and decided that we’d seen what we wanted to and drove on South to a small town in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, Cooma. We spent the night there in a lovely warm motel room watching films and eating pizza :-) We carried on driving the next day into the Snowy Mountains through some spectacular scenery.
And then we saw… SNOW!
The Snowies don’t usually get snow till late May or June but this year (especially for us I think) it snowed in late April, and not just a dusting – the top of the mountains had 40cm! Not quite enough to ski on yet but it made the drive along the Alpine Highway very very pretty. We passed through Thredbo, one of the few ski resorts in Australia. It was a bit of a ghost town being not summer or winter, but was cool to see the chairlifts and runs – there were a few tracks so someone had been enjoying the snow!
We drove all the way through Mt Kosciuszko National Park into Victoria and through the rolling hills until we hit the Hume Freeway – our first bit of freeway since leaving Sydney. We stopped in a couple of towns along the highway to find somewhere to stay, but unknown to us some big motor racing thing was happening nearby so all rooms and cabins were booked up for miles around. We finally found a spot in a caravan park cabin in a teeny tiny town called Violet Town (or Violet Crumble as I renamed it). It did us just fine and we were closer to Melbourne that we thought we’d get so that meant less driving the next day.
We eventually made it to Melbourne around lunchtime the following day after some GPS navigation issues and driving around the suburbs of Melbourne a little too much than necessary, but we eventually found our hostel in St Kilda – near the beach just south of Melbourne city centre. We spent two nights there and explored Melbourne like true tourists and also met up with one of Chris’ friends from London and had a proper Aussie BBQ with him and his wife and there one yr old.
A couple of snaps of Melbourne:
We both really liked Melbourne, and would have liked to have stayed longer but we were running out of days and so figured we’d come back to Melbourne without a car someday and see some more of it then. So we headed East out of Melbourne and followed the Gippsland Highway along the coast to Wilson’s Promontory National Park – the most Southerly point of mainland Australia. It is a beautiful, rugged and unspoilt area of land, with the National Park visitor centre etc the only human habitation in the park. Unfortunately, the park suffered a lot during the bushfires in February this year and driving through there are acres and acres of land burnt to nothing but black sticks of trees. The colours created by this made the landscape look even more spectacular, but when you get close, it’s lucky that noone was living in there and it’s all decimated. Which can’t be said for other parts of Victoria who suffered even more during the fires earlier in the year.
We did a small walk from the visitors centre up to a hill so we could snap some pictures, and just as we were returning to the car park, had a close encounter with a wombat and then a kangaroo!
We would have loved to have stayed overnight, but we had some more kilometres to knock off that day so headed out of the park and stopped the night in a small hostel in a small town called Foster. The hostel only slept 10 and there were only 4 of us there so it was more like having our own little house for the night :-)
We then had two looooong driving days ahead to make it back to Sydney in time to give the car back. But the road follows the coast and some of the scenic drive detours give pretty amazing views of the coastline and forests. We did a detour through Cape Conran National Park – a very unspoilt bit of coastline in Eastern Victoria.
We stopped the night in Merimbula – a popular summer seaside holiday spot which is pretty dead in autumn/winter so we had the hostel almost to ourselves again. We followed the coast all the way North back to Sydney and as usual took the scenic drives which take longer but travel closer to the coastline. We made it back to Coogee around 6pm on Wednesday and have been staying in a friends apartment overlooking the beach whilst she’s on holiday :-)
We’re still applying for jobs as and when they come up and fingers crossed something will happen soon as we only have 3 1/2 weeks left on our visa so a trip to New Zealand may be on the cards! Watch this space…
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