Sebastian Heise :: Blog :: Photos

You didn’t think there were more?

Well….

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Our time in Darwin was brief – we just had two nights here and since it was wet season even that seemed to be too long. Nothing was going on…. ;)
We hired a car to drive to the closest National Park (Litchfield) and spent a day there. Unfortunately there was soo much water in the streams and rivers that we couldn’t even go for a swim. Infact, we had a few spots where the water was flowing over the road or walkways.
We saw giant termite mounds, some of them almost not visible because of the grass which was about 2 meters in height itself.

When pulling up at one car park we noticed that the air was especially smokey and then we heard some sizzling and cracking… Bush fires during the wet season? Apparently. There was a ranger looking at the area and he wasn’t really concerned. “That’s what we want.” he said. The fires would thin out the vegetation and it was cold enough with some rain coming, so it wouldn’t spread too wide. For us it was impressive anyway and we decided to leave the immediate area and head on to the next waterfall. :)

We will be leaving Darwin in about an hour and fly over to Bali. We are staying in Kuta for the night and head on to Gili Trawangan tomorrow. After a week on Gili T we take the boat back to Bali where we will spend another 3 days in Ubud. It’s going to be interesting to experience “Nyepi Day” – the “Day of Silence” or Balinese New Year. On this day no one is allowed to go on the streets. Actually no one is allowed to do ANYTHING. Traffic is stopped, the airport will be closed, no public transport, no TV, no nothing. The evil spirits shall be fooled into thinking that the Island was abandoned.

I don’t expect to have any internet connection, so don’t expect any updates for the next 2 weeks.

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Here are the pictures that I didn’t upload with my last post.

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I finished my last post with “The Great Ocean Road is waiting for us!” – well….. it still is! And it still will for quiet a while, because we didn’t make it: We messed up our route. Apparently our brains were on holidays (or rather one was, the other one was way too busy working), but we booked a motel on the direct route. The “Western Highway” runs inland between Melbourne and Adelaide – about 200km from the coast and thus the Great Ocean Road.
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We’ve been back to Wellington this week.

It was fun to stay in our old flat – this time in the guest-room, as Tina – a sailing mate of Babs – moved in back in December.
It was good to catch up with everyone even though I’ve been working for the week and some of our dear friends were touring the south island and missed us by a day. I also took my full motorbike license test on Tuesday (successfully of course)!
Barbara took the chance to get her indefinite (permanent) residency visa as well as her NZ international drivers license.

We will be picking up some stuff that we left with a friend of ours (plus a new lens that I ordered to his address: 100mm/2.8L Macro) and then head of towards Adelaide tomorrow morning.

The Great Ocean Road is waiting for us. :)

We made the 5 hours from Batemans Bay to Marlo (where we were very nicely welcomed by our next Courchsurfing hosts) in one single bit. We stayed in Marlo for 3 nights and Andrew and Debra were really good company. She’s a teacher and he’s got his own photo studio at home. He gave us a brief introduction to studio flash photography and also took us out to the beaches and his favorite spots to take pictures. There has been a large bush fire in the area just the week before we arrived, so we got a change to see some burned – and still smoking – trees (and wildlife) as well. It was a very impressive and frightening experience.

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Remember the Creepy Crawlies Sand-sculptures from Melbourne?
Well, Australia does have quite a few real Creepy Crawlies, Hoppies, Flyies and Swimmies. Here are some of them:
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After leaving Sydney we made our way down south on the Princes Highway. It’s the coastal highway going from Sydney to Melbourne. It takes much longer than the direct route, but it offers stunning views and sleepy little villages.
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We met up with Anna – a friend of mine from Frankfurt, who just came over to Sydney a week ago – to live and study here.
She joined us for a weekend trip to the Blue Mountains where we visited the Three Sisters at Echo Point in Katoomba, took the Skyway Gondola at Scenic World and rode on the Zig Zag Railway.
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After ending our stay in Maitland (near Newcastle/Hunter Valley) with a great family BBQ at our lovely Couchsurfing hosts (unfortunately you can’t read about this in detail as the MobileMe notes synchronization decided to delete my blog post), we headed straight on for Sydney to meet up with a very good friend of ours from Auckland. Barbaras ‘New Zealand Dad’ was visiting his son who is living in Sydney with his family. They welcomed us to their home and invited us to stay with them while we were in Sydney which was really generous of them and we were quite thankful not to have to stay in a youth-hostel.
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Well…. stupid Apple-Mail-Notes-MobileMe ate my blog post after typing a few pages for about 1.5 hours! :(
So for now here’s just the short list and a few pictures. A text-update might follow if I feel like it.

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I bought an USB card reader that actually still can read SmartMedia cards.

Here are my pics:

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Last weekend we went on a 2-day “sail & snorkeling/dive the Great Barrier Reef”-cruise departing from Cairns. We originally were booked on the “Vagabond” sailing boat, which we specifically chose because it’s a sail boat and Barbara wanted to sail a bit. They promised hands-on sailing which sounded like a great opportunity for her. A day before the trip they called us to cancel the cruise, because we were the only two people booked and they wouldn’t go out with just too people. Fair enough. They offered to put us on an other boat, which sounded okay, but turned out to be close to a disaster. The boats name was “RumRunner” and that pretty much says it all.
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Jetstar managed once again to take off an hour late despite everyone being onboard on time. “Missing freight and paperwork” was the official excuse… Sound a bit like they need some thorough process optimization…
Since Cairns is so close to the equator, it was already dark when we landed (7pm) – no daylight savings here. We immediately got slapped into the face by the hot, humid air. Still 31ºC and at least 300% humidity: liquid air.
The drive into town took about 10-15 minutes and we seem to have picked a backpacker that was pretty much in the center of everything. We spent the evening walking around, having pizza and walking around a little bit more. We also got the first impression of the current monsoon season: Short, heavy rain showers – At least at that point we thought it was heavy.

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Our second day in Australia started with a nice walk though the southern parts of Melbourne from Elwood towards the city.
We went through Acland Street (Greetings to Tom, Anna & Otto ;) ) in St. Kilda towards the beachfront. Barbara was impressed by all those bakeries, cake shops and almost german looking butcheries.
From St. Kilda and its Luna Park we headed on to and through Albert Park (where the annual Formula One Australian Grand Prix happens).
We had lunch at the South Melbourne Market, which isn’t as touristic as the Queen Victoria Market. Most people we asked found the later one to be highly overrated.
After strolling along the Yarra River we met a sailing friend of Barbara who moved to Melbourne last year. He took us through the botanic gardens and we sat the better part of the afternoon in a nice shady place near a café. It was 38 degrees after all.
We spent the evening playing Wii, doing all kinds of dancing, boxing and balance exercises.

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