Canberra

After deciding we’d maybe visited enough Australian beaches we headed to Canberra for a bit of culture and evidently cold weather! We left Coffs Harbour at 27 degrees, and having driven for 10 hours found ourselves in 14 degrees, which hurt just a little bit! Apart from the British weather Canberra is a really nice city, being quite similar to Washington DC in that it serves the purpose of the capital city politically, as opposed to being one of the country’s largest or busiest cities. As a result Canberra is really green with wide tree-lined streets everywhere, and all the government buildings are set in vast parkland plots – the parliament building even has grass growing on the roof!

Our first stop in Canberra was the War Memorial, which apparently is the world’s largest. As with much of Canberra it is strategically placed and designed, with the entrance way in complete line with the main doors of the parliament building. The buildings are also in plain view of each other, with a wide mall stretching between them. As well as serving to remember all Australians killed in conflicts, the memorial also houses a museum presenting information on Australia’s involvement in both the first and second world wars. After visiting the memorial we headed up the mountain behind it, Mount Ainslie, which is also perfectly in line with both the memorial and parliament. The mountain gives a brilliant panorama over the city, although we didn’t stay long as it was freezing!

We also visited the Parliament building itself; Australia’s most expensive building costing 1.8 billion dollars! Here we had a guided tour of the building, visiting both the Senate and House of Representatives which mirror our green and red colour scheme in parliament. We also saw the world’s second largest tapestry, after one in Coventry apparently – not really the highlight of the trip! After visiting parliament we headed to the High Court, where we watched an incredibly dull 30 minutes of a finance case. On exploring the rest of the court however, we found a bored guide who firstly congratulated us on visiting Canberra and then more than happily explained the case to us, making it sound quite interesting! Finally in Canberra we visited the Museum of Australia, which explained a bit more about the history and founding of Australia by the Europeans. So after busy 36 hours we’re feeling a little more cultured and a little less sandy!

Byron Bay

Firstly, apologies for a very short and rather boring blog! There’s not much to do at the moment apart from go to the beach and explore beachside towns, which is lovely for us, but not so interesting to read about! Sorry!

Anyway, the beachside town we’ve been exploring at the moment is Bryon Bay, a town regarded by Australians to be small and untouched by the tat and skyscrapers of Surfer’s Paradise a couple of hours up the coast, despite developers best efforts. Unfortunately, the tat has not been kept quite at bay, and the locals have filled the town with the typical surf and didgeridoo shops! The surf shops can be explained however by the fact that Byron Bay is the most eastern point in Australia, apparently making it excellent for surfing (don’t ask why!). Taking advantage of this, we hired boards for Ryan’s birthday and caught a few waves! After a lot of falling off and drinking ridiculous amounts of sea water we managed to stand up for more than two seconds, and on more than one occasion! Consequently, we are officially surfers – gnarly dude!

Koalas!

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary was the first, and is the largest koala sanctuary in the world. They have over 80 koalas of various ages, all with separate living quarters, including the ‘bachelor pad’, ‘nursery’ and the ‘retirement home’! They also housed the world’s oldest koala, who was a record breaking 23 when she died in 2003. Although this may sound young, apparently koalas typically only live to 10 years old in the wild. After looking at lots of koalas in various states of snooze (Koala’s sleep on average 23 hours a day!), we were able to hug a koala and have our picture taken (see below!). They were surprisingly heavy, and extremely soft, with very sharp claws, which Carrie’s koala decided would be best placed in her arms! When holding the koalas it is apparently really important to stay really still, as they think you are just another tree, and if their tree starts moving about they cling on for dear life! Ryan performed an excellent tree impression, Carrie’s was apparently not as good! After being detached from our furry limpet friends we fed some of the kangaroos they have at the sanctuary. Clearly it wasn’t Carrie’s day, as the kangaroo she chose to feed had some issues controlling its saliva, leaving a lovely slobbery mess in place of the food! Also at the sanctuary we saw two keepers walking some dingos, which Ryan got to stoke; they looked much nicer than the one we saw on Fraser Island a few days ago. We then saw a Tasmanian devil (the splatted black and brown creature below!) and a keeper taking a wombat for a walk! We’re not quite sure whether that’s how they exercise in the wild, but never mind!

PS. Font big enough for you old man??!!!!

Fraser Island

Today we visited Fraser Island, an island completely made of sand 175km long and 25km wide. The island has a number of lakes and is covered to a large extent by eucalypt forest and rainforest. As the island is completely formed from sand it is only accessible by 4 wheel drive, consequently our tour bus looked like a converted lorry, with giant tyres (see the picture below)! We started the day on a barge travelling the 10 minutes from Rainbow Beach (where we’re staying) to Fraser Island, and then driving the 30km to our first stop, Lake Mackenzie. The lake is completely filled from rainwater with a number of beaches surrounding it. After taking a dip in the lake (up to our knees!) we headed into the rainforest for a walk along a creek, which runs silently as it runs over sand. Also in the rainforest we saw lots of epiphytes, strangler plants and white trees which strip their own bark! In the afternoon we drove along the beach in our lorry to see a 100 year old shipwreck which sits on the beach – apparently the boat was used as a hospital during WW1. We also saw a dingo (the wild ‘wolves’ that live on the island) eating a fish, which apparently is something we should have been excited about! What we did get excited about was seeing a shark! It came in really close to the shore, so that as the waves rose we could see it swimming just below the surface about 5 metres off the beach. Surprisingly enough swimming off the beaches of the island is not recommended! After our shark encounter we visited a fresh water creek which we waded down before relaxing in the pool at its mouth. Luckily we made it back to our hostel before a horrendous storm that has lasted for the last hour or so – the lightening looked like strobe lights going off every few seconds, and the thunder made Carrie jump every time it sounded! A scary end to the day!

Cairns

So far in Cairns we have celebrated Caroline’s 22^nd birthday and had a day tour to Cape Tribulation with various stops on the way which included a wildlife park that had kangaroos, crocodiles, emus and wallabies. They also had a family of kola bears, a tree kangaroo and 2 cassowaries (see the picture below) which are very large endangered birds that are endemic to the region - they have also been responsible for causing a few deaths. Our next stop was a cruise along the Daintree river to spot some wild crocs, or snapper bags as the Aussies call them. Our safety announcement was not to hang limbs over the side of the boat as crocs can jump up and bite them off for din dins. We saw a few small crocs but as the cruise was finishing we saw a large crocodile sunbathing on a sand bank. After lunch we had a guided walk through the rainforest and saw an array of spiders, birds and another endemic species, including the peppermint stick insect – it gets its name from the spray it emits when it feels threatened, which unsurprisingly smells of peppermint. We were also given the opportunity to have some bushtucker, it involved sucking the bottom of an ant to gain a refreshing lime taste - we had only just finished lunched so we passed! 

Our main reason for visiting Cairns (along with everyone else!) was to see the Great Barrier Reef. Each morning from the apartment balcony we could see hoards of people being packed onto boats, some carrying 300 people. We took a day trip, with luckily only about 10 other people, out to the outer reef, roughly an hour and a half offshore. We spent the day snorkelling around a couple of reefs along the outer edge of the site and saw some pretty amazing and colourful fish, including plenty of Nemo’s (clownfish), angel fish and rainbow fish. We also saw massive clams that could fit a human in, and masses of beautiful colourful coral. At the first site we stopped off at we spotted a turtle on the ocean floor in amongst some of the darker coral. After watching it for a few minutes we were lucky enough to see it start to come up to the surface, with it swimming right past us as it broke for air. Its shell was roughly the size of a human body, and it could swim pretty fast. At the second site we stopped at we saw a white tipped reef shark swimming along the ocean floor, it was about 2 meters in length – so a pretty good day all in all!