Adelaide - Tgon's Travels

Last weekend I arrived in Adelaide after a quick dash across Australia, north to south. We were lucky to find a cool place to stay in Adelaide for a few days. Ryan, who I travelled from Carnarvon to Broome with, was still in Broome as I was arriving in Adelaide. He had met a couple who were from Adelaide, so he asked them if they could recommend a place. They suggested that we went to stay in their house because all the housemates were in the process of moving out. We stayed with the remaining housemate, Mazair, an architecture student from Iran, and had frequent visits from Mark who was moving the last of his stuff out and let us stay in his room. We spent the days exploring the city and visiting the beach, then on Friday we picked up our next relocation vehicle.

Our new car was a 2 wheel drive camper-van, we headed out towards Melbourne, along the coast, so that we could check out The ‘Great’ Ocean Road. I didn’t think it was all that great, but the Australian department of tourism had definitely invested a lot of money in creating a view point every 300 meters along the road. It is a beautiful place, but after hearing so much about this stretch of coastline, I was expecting it to be amazing. The main attraction along the road, is a place called The ‘Twelve’ Apostles. As strange as it may seem that these stacks are so popular, the strangest thing is that there isn’t, and never has been, twelve of them. This is because the tourism board started calling them ‘The Apostles’ but people just started calling them ‘The Twelve Apostles. I would say that the coastal road is worth visiting, it has some really beautiful spots, but try not to get too excited about it before you arrive.

I thought that the best part of the road was the last section (coming west to east). The road actually moved away from the coast, and instead took us through some beautiful hills and farmland with lots of cows and forested areas. This part of the road reminded me of places in the UK and Europe. We stopped off at a few rest areas in the forests and saw my first wild Koala. I arrived in Melbourne this afternoon and I’m staying with a friend of the girl who gave me a place to stay in Carnarvon. I will explore the city tomorrow and try to get an impression of the place, as I might be living and working here for the next 3 months (after I get back from Tasmania) to prepare for Asia.

At the start of week 117 I arrived in the last town before the border, leaving Western Australia, Kununurra. We met up with a couple that we had been travelling with through the Kimberley and headed out to camp just outside the town. The next day we spent the day in the library, trying to arrange our separate plans from Kununurra onwards. In the afternoon we dropped Marco off at a hostel and then the five remaining people of the group (me, Ben, Lucie, Jono and Yumi), set out to Lake Argyle. The lake is man made and covers around 1000 square Km. We stayed at the official campsite and watched the sunset from an infinity pool which looked down over the lake.

The next morning me and Ben got on a bus which took us 830Km, over the border into the Northern Territory to Darwin. We were planning to stay in Darwin for a while but would then split, so that Ben would fly to Melbourne and I would travel down the east coast. But the morning after we arrived in Darwin we managed to find a lift from Darwin to Alice Springs (that’s 1,500Km) for just $25 each. So we decided at the last moment to change our plans and got a lift with this guy. That night we stopped at a small town about half way down our route and got very drunk with a friend of Joel (our lift). We had decided to change out plans because it is the school holidays in Australia at the moment, so flights are very expensive. As an alternative to flying Ben was looking into ‘relocations’. This is basically driving a rental car back to a city after someone has finished renting it. It’s a cheap way to travel.

So, when we arrived in Alice Springs, we picked up the relocation vehicle, a 4×4 camper, and drove out towards Uluru. I was expecting Uluru to be rubbish, and in truth it wasn’t really all that good, I know that it is the largest rock in the world and that it also has some interest as an Aboriginal spiritual site, but I don’t really care about seeing the biggest of any specific kind of thing if it’s not interesting in the first place and I visited a lot of areas in the Kimberley which were Aboriginal spiritual sites but were also places of amazing natural beauty. Not that I am saying Uluru isn’t a nice place to visit, but I don’t think it deserves the publicity it gets. But I guess you have to go see it while you are in Australia. I actually thought that Kata Tjuta was better, these are the big hills that are shown on the picture above, they are in the same national park as Uluru so we visited them in the morning and moved on to Uluru for the sunset.

From there we headed the rest of the way south to Adelaide where the relocation needed to be returned to. So this week we travelled 4,500Km, from the top of Australia to the bottom, along a lot of long, straight, dry, hot, desert roads. But now that we are in the south it is starting to become summer and although it is a lot cooler than it had been in the north, it is more comfortable down here. My plan is to work in Melbourne for a couple of months, while I get my bicycle and everything prepared for Asia, then I’ll see the east coast of Australia just before my visa expires and I leave Australia.

Tag: Adelaide

Week 118: Adelaide to Melbourne – The ‘Great’ Ocean Road

Week 117: Darwin to Adelaide