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| ...Australia Hi guys, so many things happened since the last time I wrote, I don't write very often in the english diary because Soeren gave up with it since a while already (he's such a busy man...) so I write both english and french now. Anyway, we haven't seen much of australia if you think of the size of it but we had a really good time. We unfortunatly didn't manage to get in touch with our friend Dean, so from Maroochydore we moved to Noosa, a resorty town up the coast. There we stayed on a campground where kangouroos were free all around us! it was so nice to open the tent and see them right beside us eating the grass around... we saw so much wildlife in Australia, even more than in the whole of Asia. We saw pelicans, big bats, possums (little mammals they look a bit like flying squirrels), manta rays, sharks, turtles, dingos (one of the purest breed of dogs on earth), multicolored parrots, cuckaburras (an australian native bird, the most funny thing about them is that at dusk and down, the whole family meet on a tree and they "laugh" out loud together for a while), and all of them in nature! luckily, we avoided the most dangerous ones, like the taipan (the most poisonous snake on earth) or the box jellyfish (it is said that if you get stung you might not even make it to the beach because of the pain...) We stayed there a couple of days, and hitch hiked on the 40 miles beach till rainbow beach. In Australia some beaches are considered as motorways, that's great. Rainbow beach got its name because, for some reason, this beach contains 73 differents shades of sand, but we can really see a few. the aboriginal story is very poetic : one day there were 2 men fighting for a woman. One of them got angry and threw his boomerang. but the boomerang hit a rainbow that broke in millions of pieces which then fell down on the beach. Waouh... After that, we went to fraser Island, the biggest sand island in the world. We were together in a group of 8 people, and we had a 4wheel drive to drive around for 3 days. Our team was fantastic, and we had a really good time, pushing the car when it was stuck or roasting the marshmallows around the campfire... When we came back, I made a didgeridoo, there was this work camp and so I got a tree branch that has been emptied naturally by the termites and had to do most of it from peepling the bark off to the final painting. I love it now, it's my first music instrument and I really love it. I didn't get a chance to play much cause I had to carry it around all the time with me and it was wrapped up but I will when I get back home. Afer that it was almost time to leave australia already and we headed back to Brisbane to catch our flight to Sydney. Sydney is a very nice city, I really liked it. We were so lucky because I had never been to the opera before and we got 2 cheap tickets to see romeo and juliet performed by the autralian ballet. Because we had a cheap ticket, they said we would have a limited view. But in fact we were so lucky and had one of the best view of the theatre. It was really special because we hadn't planned anything and for my fisrt time going to the opera, we went to the sydney opera, one of the most famous in the world, got cheap tickets, the best view and it was one of the greatest classics of all times! A couple of days later we were saying goodbye to Australia and were flying to New Zealand. New Zealand 24.04.03 / 30.05.03 New Zealand is so beautiful... to start with we 'worked' on a farm for 2 weeks in the peninsula near Christchuch, in Akaroa, and that was fantastic. Bob and Marylin were so nice that we felt at home for a while again, it was really nice. They live down in a valley that ends in the sea... the place itself was gorgeous. So they had cattle and sheep on about 400ha, and we did a bit a gardening, and things like that, I built a scarecrow, Soren went hunting. Marylin cooked the best food, and we helped here and there. They even left on holidays and left us the farm for 4 days! It was such a nice experience for both of us... One day Bob took us out in the sea to go fishing. He had 2 nets and a small iron boat with an engine so we went out, placed the nets and came back to the shore. A few hours later we went back to get our fish. The sea was really rough, there were huge waves. We got our nets and fish and went back towards the shore. It was tricky because the waves were so big that we had to stay between 2 waves not to get caught by one. Unfortunatly, something went wrong, and a huge wave caught us from the side and we flipped over. I have never been in a washing machine but I think that I kind of get the feeling...We tumbled for a long time under the water and the 3 of us started to miss oxygen. soren and bob got caught in the fishing nets but managed to deliver from it. We all came back to the surface out of breath and we had barely enough time to get enough air that another wave got us. It was really scary. We swam As fast as we could and finally got back to the shore. Fortunatly, we had life jackets, so the story ended well. But we didn't eat fish that night... that was our scary movie. after the farm, we decided to hitch hike around the south Island, we got picked up by 2 very nice american guys who were on holidays in NZ and we travelled together for a couple of days. They proposed us to go for an overnight trek around queenstown and just before we started a local told us the weather forecast was really bad for the evening to come, they forecasted snow. The guy tell us that a couple of weeks earlier, an english man had died while trekking because he hadn't listenned to the locals advice. We cancelled our trip and went for a day walk instead. A couple of days later,while we were hitch hiking, we got picked by a guy who was part of the rescue team to save the english man! What a coincidence! the same guy later on that day offered us accomodation for free in his B&B! It was so nice. then we hitch hiked on the west coast towards the north. It was terrible because there was only one road, and very few cars. but we always got at least one lift per day. Our next stop was the Franz joseph glacier. Now that was fantastic, but we had no idea what a glacier was like and it was amazing. We went trekking for one day on it, we had talons under the shoes so we could walk on the ice. We went up and down, walked through deep crevasses, went trough a tube of ice, it was magic. While we were there there was a ice cave collapsing! That was scary, because we were in one of these crevasses so thin at the bottom that soren had to push me sometimes so I could go through. And suddenly we heard a big thunder, and for one second you think : that's it that's the end. The guide was trying to reassure us but he didn't really manage I think. The coulours of the glacier were beautiful, shiny white, or deep blue, it was impressing. The whole glacier looked like a ice petrified river between 2 mountains. After that, we really had to hurry and go to take the ferry to the north island. from wellington, we hitch hiked to lake Taupo, because we wanted to do a sky dive jump, but we weren't sure really, a bit of fear and a bit broke too. We smashed all our hitch hiking record that day : 5 lifts and 400km! so we got picked up by the rich owner of a tourist center, a computer hacker, a jockey, an airforce pilot and an engineer in I don't remember what exactly. Funny. definitely more interesting than travelling by bus... |