So we arrived in Melbourne, our last stop in Australia. Having slept accordingly, we were relaxed and talked to everyone. We weren’t in a rush, as 1 week to explore a city should be enough time. The two British couchsurfers (one of them Scottish with a really difficult accent) couldn’t find another accommodation in Melbourne due to the Cricket world championship in Australia/New Zealand. All the hostels were booked out. Our Indian couchsurfing host Ajay told us why: on Sunday the match India-Pakistan should take place in Aidelaide. Therefore 20,000 Indians travelled to Adelaide, but, of course, not everyone could find an accommodation in Adelaide, so they had to go to “surrounding” cities. The two stayed for two nights and then went to a hostel. Besides Ajay, another Indian guy lived in this house, who, to make it simple, introduced himself as Harry. Both told us a lot of interesting stories about India, probably we have to travel there as well, one day. In addition a guy from Bangladesh lived in the house, but he moved out the next day, and another Chinese couchsurfer, who left after a few more days. So quite multi-cultural and funny. But we planned to stay longer at Ajay’s place, who lived quite far out of the city centre, but a comfortable 40-minute drive by train took us in the city directly to Federation Square. And then, it was love at first sight! Melbourne is not as touristy as Sydney, but also not as boring as Perth or Adelaide. Simply a million-people city with a very special flair. The city centre (CBD) like in lots of other Australian cities, is geometrically created. That looks quite boring on the map, but has its advantage that it’s really hard to get lost. In this part of Melbourne, there are free trams with really nice looking painted trains. We spent the first afternoon walking along Southbank which is opposite of the city centre along a river. Without further knowledge we had quite a good timing to be there, as the Chinese New Year was happening during that time and there were a lot of activities along the Southbank. Of course we directly ordered our first coffee, especially because Melbourne is said to be the coffee capital of Australia. Tobi found a very good offer for an Indian All-You-Can-Eat dinner in the late afternoon for 7.50$ (or around 5.30€) and that’s to say not per person but for both of us. Of course we tried it out immediately and ate as much as we could of two different vegetable variations, rise and sweet dessert (also included and all you can eat). On our second day we did a 1$ sightseeing tour through Melbourne, organized by Jess through Couchsurfing. The dollar is a donation for an animal we couldn’t see in wild unfortunately, the Tasmanian Devil. The tour lasted for 2 hours and Jess showed as some of the famous Laneways (which were used for delivering goods to the big shops in the front once upon time, and now crowded because of a diversity of hipster café’s, bars and restaurants). One of the bars is in a very weird location, as one has to walk through a street which is mainly used for (and therefore filled up with) rubbish bins (and that’s how it smelled there). Another restaurant is not noticeable as one from the outside, as there is no advertisement at all so you’d have to ring the bell and someone will come to the door and offer you a seat. After this tour we went to the CBD, in order to fulfil one of Kerstin’s dreams since we arrived in Australia. In Melbourne is the one and only (!!!) H&M in whole Australia and that’s why some clothes were exchanged by some new ones 🙂 Apparently the H&M has a very cool location within the old post building of Melbourne directly in the centre of the CBD. We also visited the Tennis Grand Slam stadium in Melbourne, which became our third one after Wimbledon and Paris. Number four and therefore the last one will follow in New York. Additionally, there were some organisational things which need to be done, namely tax return and closing of our banking account. Funny enough it figured out that we will get additional money of our fundraising job, why we couldn’t do both things. Anyway we were able to prepare everything so that we’ll just have to send a letter once we got everything and close the banking account online. One hint for everybody who might have a similar travel plan as we do. The ANZ (Australia New Zealand) bank operates (as the name implies) in both countries and that’s why one can get cash in the other country without paying any fees. We ended up chilling in the park for a couple of hours before we went to the Indian food place a second time 🙂 The remaining days were filled with some culture (Parliament, old treasury and the arts museum) and a visit of the Victoria Market (the biggest open air market in the southern hemisphere where you’ll get everything from fish to souvenirs) and St. Kilda. This dirstrict of Melbourne has some special characteristics. On the one hand, there is a quite nice beach which habits a penguin colony. YES, you heard correctly, little clumsy penguins. It consists of approximately 1200 sakkos and settled in the harbour around 20-30 years ago and are protected and researched since then. Of course the hint wasn’t that secret and the pier filled up with Asians and Indians close to sunset. First we thought “pour little things” but apparently they had fun with all the tourists. If you ever asked yourself if they actually move as funny as you always see in the television, yes they do. The belly-landing is not even the funniest part. One of the guys tried to walk along the stone wall along the pier, and therefore he had to jump over some gaps, which was extremely funny to watch since he inspected the gap accordingly before he found the courage to jump (followed with an “Oooooh” of 100 people who watched him). At least it showed us why penguins are not able to fly. Who jumps like that should just not fly 😉 We also tried another restaurant in St. Kilda which is called “Lentils as anything”. The concept of the restaurant is pretty cool, as everyone pays as much as he thinks it’s worth it or is able to afford. A quite impressive concept which seemed to work out for quite a long time (especially for the artists in the area with a very instable income) but unfortunately it’s almost bankrupt just because it is easy to presume its good nature. Anyway, the food was delicious! We spent our last day in Australia with cleaning duties and some preparations before we could go on our next stop, New Zealand. The drive to the airport figured out to be quite adventurous as we didn’t want to spend money for the extremely expensive airport shuttle bus. That’s why we planned to drive as close as any possible to the airport with train and tram and hitchhike (or take a cab), just to figure out that there was a regular bus going from there to the airport which was even for free. It just took us two hours to get over around 20km beeline from Ajay’s home to the airport 😉 Unfortunately the airline was not Emirates this time, but Jetstar which fulfilled every bad words said about a cheap airline. We had to check-in ourselves, which of course didn’t work and the lady at the counter needed ages to do so. The plane was extremely narrow, but fortunately the flight was only three hours and how we arrived in Christchurch will be part of the next post.

Federal Squre

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After the last night in our camper (again on a parking spot along the highway), we had to clean the camper, do the luggage and drive to Melbourne in order to return our camper. It figured out to be a not too easy process. The poor guy from the renting company didn’t know anything about our story with the broken cylinder. After he told us in the beginning, not too kind, to wash the car from the outside (what we indeed had to do), we let off steam afterwards and the poor guy got to feel our full frustration. We had to pay 100$ for the broken light, but after a couple of phone calls to the central office, he still couldn’t believe it, but he did pay us over 400$ back (costs for the motel, 2 lost days, one full tank of fuel). At least all worked out quite well, although we lost lots of time.

During our drive to Melbourne, we already organised a lift from Melbourne to Sydney. Louis (from Miami) and Kylah (from Brisbane) rented a camper for 6 people (again a relocation) and wanted to start the next morning. They also offered us to stay the night in the camper, in order to not spend money for a hostel. We planned to meet them directly after dropping off our camper, but we didn’t expect the transport system of Melbourne to be so silly. A genius invented the most unfriendly system in the world for tourists: Melbourne operates only a card system. The card is recharged with money and for every trip you tap on and off. Sounds absolutely amazing (and works also in other cities we’ve been), BUT you only can buy these cards at certain places. Unfortunately, tram and bus stops are NOT one of these places and there is no chance to get a one-way ticket in the vehicle itself. Therefore Tobi had to walk 2km one way to the next supermarket, to buy the cards while Kerstin and Vera were waiting at the tram stop and having an eye on the luggage. So we came way too late to our date with Louis and Kylah (after saying bye-bye to Vera). But both were relaxed by traveling and so didn’t have any problem. They directly showed us our vehicle for the next days. A completely new, huge and luxury campervan for 6 people (80km on the speedometer) supplemented with everything you can imagine (apparently it costs 350$/day if you rent it regularly).

We spent the evening with a little walk through Melbourne, which seemed to be quite nice at first sight. A really comfortable and relaxed atmosphere, a nice pedestrian precinct, nice parks AND OUR FIRST SHOPPING IN ALDI AUSTRALIA 🙂 We directly felt like at home. Of course, we didn’t see too much on only one evening, but we will come back before our flight to New Zealand. Definitely something on which we will be looking forward to.

After the night in the luxury camper in a side street in Melbourne, we started the trip to Sydney. We had four travel mates: Louis from Miami is traveling and met Kylah from Brisbane here in Australia. Both are now traveling together, the next travel destination will be Japan. If Louis will be in Miami in August, we will meet him there again (we’re starting to become interconnected around the worldJ). Julie (franko-german) is on a 3-month-trip along the east coast, the probability is quite high that we’ll cross each other’s ways again! Nick is an Australian art student (they are as many of them as jellyfish in Queensland) and was on his way to Sydney visiting his family for Christmas.

We took the street through the inland, stopping in some beautiful Australian cottages. Every here and then Louis was shouting: “I’m driving a fucking space shuttle”. The camper was enormous and just too big for usual city traffic. We encamped at a lake within a national park in the evening having dinner and a refreshing swim in the lake.

At the next day we hit the road quite early and arrived in THE Australian city (Sydney) in the early afternoon…

After visiting the Grampians we drove until late night towards the Great Ocean Road (which was apparently quite exciting because of all the night active animals in the park). When we finally found a good spot to park, it was close to midnight why we all fell asleep immediately. The next morning was waiting with a big surprise. We didn’t realize that we parked directly at the top of a cliff of the Great Ocean Road, why we could enjoy a stunning view during breakfast surrounded by cows 🙂

Since we drove the Great Ocean Road in the reversed direction, all the big highlights were at the beginning and not at the end as it is supposed to be. This part of the coast consists of quite fragile sandstone. The water was able to wash out spectacular bays and some bizarre stone formation. The Twelve Apostles (there are apparently only eight of them left, one was destroyed only 5 years ago) and the London Bridge (which lost one of its bows around 1990) are the most famous ones. The Twelve Apostles are breathtakingly awesome, but are really touristy. Definitely a small minus point that every 10 minutes a further bus full of Asians arrived (where do they come from???). We pointed out the others on the pictures (Murnanes Bay, Childers Cove, Bay of Islands, Bay of Martyrs, The Arch, The Grotto, Loch Ard Gorge, Gibsons Steps).

The road was built after the first world war in order to generate jobs for the soldiers coming home from Europe (very creative the Australians J ). Therefore it’s maybe the hugest war memorial world-wide. With the beginning of the tourism it became a magnet for tourists all over the world and generates constant income for the people living in this area.

Besides the very spectacular first part of the coast, the remaining part we did the second (unfortunately rainy) day may seem a bit tiring but has some impressive highlights. Apparently the part with the sandstone measures only 30km of the track. On the remaining part, the road follows along the coast (with some amazing lookouts) and through the rainforest (yes there is rainforest in this part of the world…). We walked to short tracks through the rainforest (Maits Rest, Erskine Falls) and we were surprised that it was almost exactly as one may imagine a rainforest. Tropical smells, ferns, huge trees, tiny streams, stunning waterfalls and (sit down!!!) WILD KOALAS. There is a quite hidden street through the forest but after a few km there are koalas everywhere! One of them even moved his head and was only 3m away from us!!! (For those of you who are not so familiar with the study of koalas, they are the laziest animal in the world. They sleep around 22 hours per day! Of course they have nothing else to do rather than eating in the rest of the time…)

Vera and Kerstin almost made the trip unforgettable. During a lunch break they were both sure that the other one has the key for the car. So Vera closed the already locked door leaving the key inside the van. After a bit of panic – we didn’t even have a phone to call someone – we recognized that one of the windows of the rooftop was not closed why we just had to destroy the fly screen and Vera could climb into the car. After that we agreed to let the rooftop window open.

Aussicht beim Frühstücken - view during breakfast

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You have two options if you want to drive from Adelaide to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road. One of them is to drive around 600km along the coastline, the other one goes inland before leading to the coast through the Grampians National Park. We chose the second option since Kyle (couchsurfer from Esperance) highly recommended it. Additionally the 200km long Great Ocean was on the schedule. It figured out to be a very good choice!

The Grampians NP is a huge forest on and around a little mountain range which gave its name to the park. Unfortunately we had one afternoon only, so we could just visit the two highlights (even though the girl of the information centre looked very confused when we told her that we wanted to spend only one afternoon there). The first highlight is a waterfall (MacKenzie Falls) which is a bit overhyped in our opinion. Although it’s very nice it isn’t something amazingly spectacular. The second highlight is, however, much more spectacular. The walking trail leads through a little “Grand Canyon” (the name seems to describe the stone formation rather than the size), over hitch and ditch through a small forest upwards the hilltop. In the bush we were able to tick another box on our list of Australian animals. While Kerstin and Vera fearfully looked after dangerous snakes Tobi spotted an Echidna. This unique animal, looking like a hedgehog with the nose like an anteater, is very difficult to spot in the wild. It’s so unique and difficult to classify for the zoology that it became the only egg-laying mammal beside the Platypus (flat-nosed animal similar to a beaver from Australia). At the top of the mountain there was a huge “Pinnacle” over the deep waiting for us to be climbed. The absolute kick together with a strong wind (beware of sarcasm) providing a stunning view over the park!

Mac Kenzie Falls

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It’s quite a long drive from Esperance to Aidelaide, so to say 2268km. Just to set this in a better context, the distance between Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the most southern city of Germany) and Flensburg (the most northern city of Germany) is 1000km. So we crossed Germany twice in 2 days. The difference between Esperance and Adelaide are 3 “bigger” cities, around a dozen roadhouses and 3 time zones. The first day, we started at 5.30 AM, Vera went back to bed after half an hour and kept on sleeping. We crossed big parts of the Nullabor. If you ask yourself now what the Nullabor is, it’s a huge, wide and even area, in the middle of nowhere. It’s just one straight street, from time to time there is a curve, you won’t find plants besides sometimes a bush, to cut it short, there is nothing to see. You definitely don’t wanna have a breakdown. You always need to have enough water and in case of a breakdown, don’t move away from your vehicle, otherwise you will dry out and die. If you’re lucky, you get bitten beforehand by a snake or a kangaroo knocks you out (please recognize the sarcasm). Additionally, you’ll pass the longest straight street of Australia with 146km. When the dusk began, the time of the kangaroos started. Three people in a van driving with 60-80km/h looking for kangaroos eventually crossing the street, and we came closer to a thunderstorm. In the end, nothing happened and we slept on a parking spot (with an incredible view on the stars without any light pollution). So we drove until 11pm (don’t forget the time difference) as we wanted to make our way as quickly as possible.

The next day, we started as early as the first day. Vera just kept on sleeping and we took the first two driving rosters. Et boum, c’est le choc! A bird hit our camper (that is to say we hit him) and this stupid thing got it to hit our front light destroying it completely. That was the ultimate proof that Australian birds are just stupid, since we were most likely the only car within a couple of km!!! Additionally the fuel got more and more expensive until around 1.80$ which costs us more than we expected for this part of the road. However, now we know why Australians usually just fly such ways. It’s just cheaper and faster (but of course not half as funny and exciting! 😉 )

Esperance to Adelaide is one of the routes where you experience the size of Australia and that the Australians are sometimes a bit weird for us Europeans. Just to give you some examples (if you’re Australian don’t be offended we love Australia but it’s just so funny to see all this things in comparison to Europe/Germany):

1. Time zones:

As already mentioned we drove through a couple of time zones on this route. This led us to the situation that we stayed at a petrol station with 3 clocks. For better understanding, there is a 1 ½ hour difference between Perth and Adelaide (who ever invented this stupid idea of half an hour differences…). To make the thing even more complicated there is an additional time zone on the way between the two cities. And now try to guess how much differences that means: One could imagine that will be an hour, BUT NO it is 45 minutes. Apparently there is another half an hour difference between Adelaide and Melbourne…If you agree with us that this is complicated enough, wait for it: Every state in Australia choses for itself if they want to use daylight saving or not. As we said, totally weird 😉 That is the point when you become so happy to have a modern phone, it’ll just show you the current time depending on your location… One thing is, however, very similar to Europe: Everyone wants to have what he doesn’t have. A lot of West Australians we met would like to have daylight saving, whereas people in Sydney and Melbourne tend to be annoyed of changing the time every here and then…

2. Quarantine:

Believe it or not, there is a quarantine zone of 150(!!!)km on the way to Adelaide. Sit down, against FRUIT FLIES… At least the control was not very strict, we just had to open the fridge in the camper to prove that we didn’t have and fruits or vegetables with us. We heard from people whose whole car was inspected while searching for something like an apple…

3. Golf

Australia has an incredible high amount of golf courses, what makes absolutely sense because there is enough space for them. We found it, however, a bit curious to build the largest golf course in the world. Golf “course” may be the wrong word for it, “area” may describe the dimensions much more properly. It has a size of 1365km (no joke) and is built on the way along the highway through the Nullabor National Park. Sometimes there are 100 or more km between two holes…

Finally arrived in Adelaide, we drove to the beach and a camping site. After two days of constantly driving we definitely needed a shower!

The Longest straight road in Australia - Die längste gerade Straße Australiens

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It’s an around 5 hours’ drive between Albany and Esperance which was so far the longest at the south coast, but we’ll beat that, promised. So we arrived in Esperance at around 4PM but since our couchsurfing host had to work we spent the time with a drive on the Ocean Drive. This one makes his way around another Pink Lake (which is apparently not pink at all) heading to the coast with 16 white beaches.

Since we already chose that we wanted see the Twilight Beach, we only stopped at the others for some photos in order to then have a break at the most famous beach of Western Australia. Just have a look on the photos and you’ll know why. It’s unbelievable beautiful although it was a bit too windy to have a swim. However, we should get the chance to swim on the next day… Once it became too windy, we just crossed the road to another beach and watched the sunset (which was apparently a bit strange since we were staying on the south coast of Australia 😉 ) When it became too cold, and it was however already 7 PM, we headed to our next couchsurfer Kyle.

Kyle was again one of these typical awesome couchsurfing experiences with an own story. He is 24, volunteers as a surf rescuer and works at the airport and as a ranger (both part-time) to finance his Outdoor-sport-teacher-studies which starts in February (there are very cool studies over here 😉 ). To save as much money as possible he is a house-sitter since 1 ½ years without interruption!! So we were parking in front of the garage of a house, whose owners we most probably will never meet and had dinner in their guest house together with Kyle (I told you it’s a very interesting story…). Since Kyle is a pure local he had a lot of hints for our day in Esperance!

As we already saw the beaches in Esperance, we drove the next day to the national park Cape Le Grand, which is well known for its beaches (yay!!!) and its 36km hiking trail (we only did a part of it). The most famous beach is Lucky Bay, have a look on the pictures, its pure beauty (even kangaroos come here to take a sun bath). We walked along the complete beach, taking around 2 hours, and as prize we reaches a nearly nicer half bay within the bay. One always hears that you can find the most beautiful beaches in Australia on the north east, but we have no idea how this amazing beach should be beaten…

After having seen Lucky Bay, we went to another Bay, Little Hellfire Bay, on advice of Kyle. To make a long story short, not as awesome as Lucky Bay, but small, white and without any people!

Back in Esperance, we had dinner and prepared everything for our long drive to Adelaide.

Erster Strande in Esperance - Our first beach in Esperance

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When we arrived in Albany we got a bit disappointed. Even though we arrived at the mechanics almost one hour before closing they told us to come back the next day. A bit annoyed, we made our way to a couchsurfing host, who let us stay for one night. Rachel was super kind and helpful (she allowed us to recharge our camper) and she offered us her self-made bread and self-made soup that were both really delicious. But she was extremely shy, so building up a real conversation was quite difficult. In contrast, her 5-year old son Liam was extremely active 🙂 and very clever what we saw. He learned counting in Italian by a former Italian couchsurfer and still could remember it. We tried to teach him counting in German, but after the number two he didn’t want to continue anymore.

The next morning, we drove our van to the mechanics. This time we weren’t rejected, but nobody could tell us when our van would be inspected. So we walked (rainy and 15°C) in the city center, to have a look at Albany hoping to get soon information about our van. We finished our tour through Albany the early afternoon (the city is not too big) and then we had to wait. After a couple of phone calls with the mechanics and our renter, we didn’t get any information until 4pm. Our renter promised us a few call-backs for which we are still waiting. Therefore we made our way to the mechanics to make a little bit of a pressure.

Arriving, we received bad news. One cylinder was broken and as the mechanics neither had the replacing parts nor the know how to repair the motor, it pretty much sucked. Now we were really happy not to have bought an own car. So, the renter had to look after the van, and we made our way to a motel for the night (with hot showers and breakfast), of course paid by the renter. The next day before breakfast, Tobi drove the camper back to the mechanics, where he was told that the renter wants a repair against the advice of the mechanics and the repair would take around 1 week!

So, we had breakfast in the motel and started to call our renter many times to get information about how he will handle this situation. Only in the early afternoon we got new information. We rented a car on their costs to drive to the national park in Albany and the next morning a new camper from Perth should be delivered. This meant we “had” to stay another night in the motel 🙂

With our rented car, we drove to the Torndirrup national park. Albany is a natural harbor and is almost completely enclosed by a half island, which in the same time represents the national park. It is mainly known for its steep cliffs and some of them contain blow holes. What happened is that the rocks were washed out by water up to the surface. If the sea is rough enough the water blows out through the rocks around 50m above sea level. Theoretically spoken. Unfortunately we weren’t lucky and couldn’t observe this phenomenon in live. But the cliffs itself were worth a visit.

There is also a really nice beach in Albany, but due to the bad weather we just spent a couple of minutes there.

The next morning at 8.30, the new camper arrived, with „only“ 550.000km and all 4 cylinders. We had to put all our stuff from the old into the new van, had breakfast afterwards and finally continued our trip towards Esperance, which is well known for good weather and amazing beaches.

The coast line of the National Park - Die Küstenlinie des Nationalparks

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After seeing and tasting Margaret River, we wanted to start our journey towards Albany. We were really looking forward to seeing the ways, because they should lead us through a huge forest area, the Shannon Forest. The ways were indeed really nice, until at some point, we saw thick smoke clouds above the forest. Probably it had been a small bush fire. We still don’t know the exact size of the fire, but as the natives in the small village 5km away from the fire didn’t move and as we didn’t hear any news, it wasn’t a big deal. But anyway, the next adventure in the category: “danger in Australia”. We stayed for the night on a parking spot in Shannon Forest (far away from the bush fire).

The next day we continued to Walpole, the starting point for the Tingledale Nornalp national park or also called the Valley of the Giants. The park is famous for its gum trees, the only place in the world where you can find 4 different sorts of gum trees growing next to each other. Additionally, there is an unbelievable phenomenon: due to smaller bush fires, a couple of trees close to the ground are more or less burned. But the trees survived the fire and continued growing around the burned part of the tree. It looks a like a tree walking on stilts. There is one of these trees, which is so big that once a VW bus drove under this tree.

Having done this impressive walk, we visited the Tree Top Walk, a shaky way through the top of the trees in the Valley of the Giants, in around 40m above the ground.

As it was Monday we were able to talk to the rental company and complain about the camper. The engine still turned off (mostly while switching gears) what almost became dangerous at one time when it happened while driving of the highway and the electronic break and stearing didn’t work anymore (this time we were really lucky that there is not so much traffic on the roads in Western Australia). In addition the car needed more than 20l/km what would have been really expensive thinking about the distance we still had to go. We were told to drive to a mechanics in Albany, who should have a look on the car, why we tried to arrive there as early as possible since the mechanics closed at 5 pm.

On the way we visited two additional highlights, which weren’t too spectacular since the weather was quit badly. Green Pool and Elephant Rocks are located in a bay with impressive rock formations. With some imagination one can see a group of elephants in them.

the road goes through an amazing forest - Die Straße führt durch einen atemberaubenden Wald

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