The Tamworth Two - A Grown Up Gap Year Tale: January 2014

After a month's lay up in Sydney, it was time to load up and hoist the backpacks again, so on the 15th January, we were back at Sydney airport for the hop down to Melbourne and a 9 day stop, including 3 days driving up and down the Great Ocean Road.

The main reason for our trip, was to see the Melbourne branch of Sue's family, including an aunt and uncle and two cousins. Once again we were humbled by the hospitality offered us and a huge thank you in particular go out to Sue's cousin Steve, his wife Jane and their daughter Sam for making us so welcome in their home for a week. Sue doesn't get to see them very often, so there was much ground to be made up. Here are some pics of the re-united clan!

It was the first time that either of us had been to Victoria, so there was much that we wanted to see and do, in addition to catching up with family. Before we tell you what we got up to though, a word about that English obsession 'the weather'. We arrived, as Melbourne was experiencing an unprecedented heat wave: 5 days of 40+ degree temperatures. Even in the Northern Territory, I don't think we'd felt anything like it, hitting 45 on our 2nd day. Bizarrely though, the wind turned from a northerly to a southerly on our third day and you could virtually see the thermometer gauge dropping: the next day the temperature only got to to 20 and we were reaching for our fleeces!

Our home for 7 days, was Hampton East, a suburb 10 miles south of the city centre and well placed to get in by train and to explore the area. With Steve and Jane as our guides, we headed south to Phillip Island and north to the Yarra Valley - the rolling hills famed for their vineyards. Phillip Island was particularly enjoyable, with its beautiful coastline akin to Cornwall back in England and renowned for the fairy penguins that nest here in their thousands. We stopped at sunset on one long stretch of sandy beach and, as the dusk started to offer them some protection from the sea-eagles that find them a tasty morsel, they waddled out of the surf towards the burrows where their young were waiting to be fed: tentatively at first, then boldly in packs of a dozen at a time. It was a wonderful sight and we were able to follow some of them at quite close quarters as they steadfastly made their journeys.

A young fairy penguin, patiently waits for feeding time.

We haven't seen a whole lot of the city of Melbourne at this stage, though we will be back there for a couple of days in a weeks time before heading on to New Zealand. On our one trip into the city together, the 45 degree heat put us off too much activity, but we took refuge for a couple of hours in the very interesting Immigration Museum. It provided a frank assessment of how Australia has been defined by immigration, from the days of the first European settlers, the shameful treatment of it's aboriginal people and the evolution of policy away from a vision of a 'White Australia' to a modern cosmopolitan country on the edge of Asia.

I also headed into the city for a most enjoyable evening with my old clients at Avatar and my thanks again to Konrad, Ben and Josh for their hospitality. The city was lively that evening, as the Australian Open tennis was approaching the end of its first week.

Probably the highlight of our trip to Victoria, though, was our 3 day excursion up and down the Great Ocean Road, which runs for 150 spectacular miles along the Victorian coastline. The road was built by soldiers returning from the First World War and hugs the coastline nearly the whole way: along miles of golden sand with breakers driven by Antarctic winds; over cliff-tops, with precipitous drops to inaccessible beaches; past massive layered limestone stacks and arches and only occasionally twisting inland through dense eucalyptus forest and rolling farmland. But words don't do it justice, so here are some pictures of the scenery and some of the wildlife spotted along the way.

We're off to Tasmania next for a week, so we will report back on our time there in our next post.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

And finally...not sure the latest Aussie super-hero is going to catch on!

G'day again folks! With 2014 nearly 2 weeks old, we thought it high time to emerge from our sloth and relay what we have been up to since our arrival in Sydney.

After 4 months on the road, we really needed to stop in one place and get our backpacks unloaded for a while. A huge thank you to Dax, Max, Freddie and Joe who were kind enough to lend us their house for a month and stupid enough to swap the paradise of Sydney, for the waterlogged cold and grey of London.

So let's tell you where we have been hiding for the month. Seaforth is a pleasant suburb of Sydney, halfway between the city centre and Manly - the start of the wonderful 20 kilometre stretch of 'northern beaches'. From the top of our road, we have views out over one of Sydney's inner harbours, with calm sparkling blue waters sprinkled with moored yachts. Jagged rocks jut sharply out of the waters, colonised by gnarled eucalyptus trees that cling precipitously to the sides, densely blanketing the hillsides. Wherever there are spots of level ground, houses sit with million dollar views over the bay. Occasionally, the forest gives way to a secret, sandy inlet, populated by sea-dragons baking themselves on the rocks and kayakers who have paddled over from Manly Wharf.

We were lucky enough to find just such a beach early in our stay. We set off on a 10 mile hike from the house to Manly, hugging the coastline as much as we could. A footpath took us through parts of the Sydney Harbour National Park, with thick forest giving way to views out over the bay. Half way around, we detoured via some wooden steps and found ourselves on the largely deserted Reef Beach, with a small strip of sand, shade from the encroaching forest and views across the bay to Manly - for once the grass was truly greener on our side! We later found somewhere to park within a 10 minute walk and a morning swim here has become part of our morning routine.

Reef Beach - our morning swim spot.

It seems like we have gotten rather lazy at times over the last month, but looking back we have actually done quite a lot. I managed a couple of rounds of golf with my old school friends Darran and Martin and a humiliating day at the SCG to see England concede an Ashes Whitewash to the Aussies. For any Australians reading this, I am eating big spoonfuls of humble pie. In an early post, I compared a Chinese vegetable plot to a cricket pitch: in Sydney it looked like England were batting on just such a plot!

Ouch - England are drubbed 5-0 by Australia in the Ashes cricket

We spent Christmas Day with my old school friend Martin and their family and we were treated to oysters and champagne and a whole range of treats that make up an Aussie Christmas. On New Year's Eve, we decided that the logistics of joining a million others around Sydney Harbour was just too much. However, at the top of our road, we could see the fireworks (minus the opera house backdrop) from about 5 miles distance, which was still pretty spectacular.

A Happy Aussie Christmas - Martin, Sophie and Ollie!

Happy New Year 2014 - our view of the Sydney fireworks from Seaforth

We have indulged ourselves with a number of treats since we have been here. Thanks to my friends at Oamps back in London, we saw La Boheme at the Sydney Opera House: Sue's favourite opera and performed beautifully.

Just yesterday, we took to a speedboat around Manly Harbour. Sue chickened out, but I allowed myself to be attached to a 120 metre rope and a parachute canopy and found myself high above the waters and the clifftops - not as frightening as it sounds, but wonderfully serene with views for miles around.

At the end of a long rope and still smiling!

Boxing Day saw the start of the annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race and we hiked up to the North Heads to witness the start. After rain on Christmas Day, the skies had cleared and it was an impressive sight seeing hundreds of yachts, surrounded by their entourage tacking their way out of the harbour for the start of their marathon down towards the Southern Ocean. We will soon be following them, but with the forecast of storms in the Tasman Sea, we most definitely weren't tempted to stow away on one of them!

The early leaders head past the North Heads and out of Sydney Harbour...

We also took the opportunity of getting away from Sydney: heading up to Whale Beach (at the very top of the northern beaches); for a day trip to Katoomba and the Blue Mountains (really beautiful even on a grey day and with much evidence of the bush fires which came through here in October) and a 2 day jaunt to Canberra where we had lunch with Sue's Uncle Mickey and coffee at the National Gallery with Rachael one of my old writing friends: if she's reading, this is a public reminder that we're waiting on the first draft of her novel!

Chips off the same block - thanks for lunch Uncle Mickey!

Back in Sydney, it has been really great to spend a month here getting our equilibrium back. We have re-visited lots of old haunts and caught up with lots of old friends. Most I have mentioned above, but I should just add thanks to Shane and his girlfriend Lisa for a really enjoyable lunch looking out over the surf at Manly and to Charles and Denny for entertaining us at their house at Bilgola - the best steak of our trip, great views out over Pittwater and a visiting possum and brush turkey!

It is my 4th trip here and much has changed since we were last here in 1998. The population of Australia has nearly doubled in that time. With the commodities boom, Australia has also become noticeably wealthier and more self confident in that time. At first glance it has become more American, but then somebody said to me: 'Australia used to just follow the British way of doing things, but over the years we started to look at, and adopt, international best practice, or develop our own ways of doing things'. Well 'fair dinkum' to that!

We were chatting to a couple of older guys at the start of the Sydney to Hobart race and discussing the terrible storms back in the UK over Christmas. One of them raised a laconic eyebrow and said 'Oh, it would be a bit of a shame if the old country were to sink!'. Typical Aussie humour, but also indicative of the fact that the old myth of Australians living in the shadow of the mother country is well and truly in the past.

Which just leaves us to say, we hope that all you Brits back home really are keeping your heads above the floodwaters and that those reading this in North America have started to de-frost. We hope that 2014 is a great year for all of you - and we look forward to seeing as many of you as possible before the year is out.

We are heading to Melbourne on 15th January to stay with Sue's cousin and their family, onto Tasmania on the 24th and then spending February in New Zealand, all of which we are looking forward to immensely. We will keep you posted on all of that here. In the meantime, here are a few more pictures from our time in Sydney (and in case you were wondering after our last post, the old camera didn't survive it's dip in a Northern Territory waterhole, so these pics are taken on a new camera - fortunately electronics are much cheaper here, one of the few things that are!).