My Kiwi Quest: In A Sunburned Country: Australia from the view of an American living in New Zealand

"Unless we're there on one of those freak days when it rains, it will be sunny and warm- and surfing!" I remembered Wells saying as we walked into the Christchurch airport in the dark early morning. Famous last words. Just yesterday we had dropped Brady off for his flight back to the states and now there we were ready to start a whole other adventure in Australia.

"They have 287 days of sun a year."

I thought about this statistic as rain spattered against the plane window. Welcome to Surfer's Paradise. It looks like we brought the Christchurch weather with us. We made it to the hostel while it was still really early due to the time change. We filled our empty stomachs and killed some time with an all you can eat pancake breakfast. The weather report was looking like rain so we booked a ticket to nearby Byron Bay for the day after next. Plus, it could have been the weather but this city was seeming a bit... Grunge... Seedy. It looked like it had been set up to be a small but bustling city and maybe the wrong people came. Or the surfers just weren't concerned with how it turned out. The next day we decided not to sit around and made it out to the sea even though the sky was grey. Wells rented a surfboard and I borrowed a boogie board from the hostel. I had forgotten how fun that is! Even though it wasn't a picture perfect day it was so much fun to be in the water and enjoying the waves!

Beautiful rainbow over Byron. Photo: Wells

The next day we took a couple hour shuttle to Byron Bay, a small hippie town down the coast and it WAS a picture perfect day. The water was warm and crystal clear, Wells had the best surf day of his life and the sun was so warm, perfect for soaking up. Bliss. Florida, I will never take you for granted again.

I'm glad we made it here in time as the next day was cloudy and the next, rainy.

I later learned that the country had recently overcome about a decade of serious drought and that the past couple of years had brought, in natural contrast, floods. Now if I was basing my sunshine statistics mostly on a drought season, I'd expect 287 days of sun as well.

Colors everywhere!

Our second day in Byron we took a bus tour out to Nimbin, a small hippie village lost in time. It started with the Aquarius Festival held there in 1973. Since the dairy business there collapsed, many people stayed behind and built communes for an alternate lifestyle. Think of it as Woodstock if the people had never left. Today, the area is a big supporter of legalizing cannabis, especially hemp which is free of THC. The cops have turned a semi blind eye, ignoring sales of marijuana as long as it is not on the street or in front of children. It was definitely a way to spend a few hours and see the remote rainforest area that it is surrounded by.

Nimbin area rainforest/waterfall

Ahoy!

After a rainy day surfing in Byron, we boarded the overnight Greyhound to Sydney and arrived there the next morning (gotta save on those hostel costs). Since our room wasn't ready we explored the city a bit, toured some awesome old boats and a submarine (!), then went on a free walking tour of the city. We learned how the nation really pretty much was founded by convicts and some history into the iconic opera house and bridge. It was kinda funny being tourists again. In New Zealand, we lived in Christchurch. It was like traveling around a place we lived in and would for a while. Here, we were back in the tourists category, just touring the country for two weeks. I wondered if this was what it was going to feel like when we got back to NZ and moved out of Christchurch. For some reason it feels so different, people seems to have a different reaction depending on what you tell them. Truth be told, sometimes it is nice to play the tourist card.

Emerging from the sub!

Speaking of being a backpacking tourist, I have never been so bombarded with travel packages and travel booking stores. New Zealand and Australia are the most tourist-centric places I have ever been. New Zealand has a government I-site building in cities and at most attractions with information pamphlets and people to help you book. In Australia however there are competing companies with flashy stores offering free Internet and/or surfboards if you book through them. The are hundreds of package deals that teach you how to surf over three days, spend a couple nights on this island or a trip to Ayers Rock. I though about how this contrasted with our backpacking trip around Europe where we pretty much figured everything out ourselves.

Our second day in Sydney was a lucky sunny day so we climbed up the bridge lookout and took the ferry across the harbour to Manly Beach where Wells did some surfing. The city is really very beautiful when the weather is nice, with so much of the city by the water.

Our last day in Sydney was spent on a Blue Mountains tour. Made of sandstone plateaus and deep valleys the are is covered with eucalyptus trees. The oil they disperse into the air gives it a blue tinge. We got to take in the sights, have a nice long bushwalk and also stopped at a conservation zoo where we pet koalas and were surrounded by wallabies and kangaroos. Or course there were also penguins, crocodiles, crazy colored birds and wombats. Australia really has the coolest animals. The wombats are a bit weird though. We wrapped up our Sydney trip with another overnight trip, this time by train, to Melbourne.

Awesome animal photos:

Gotta love those grass filled cones!

So cute!

At the Blue Mountains

You really realize how big Australia is when you see the travel times. It was about 13 hours from Byron to Sydney by bus and 12 or so by train to Melbourne. Although it is pretty expensive to travel like this, it is definitely not as easy to caravan in as New Zealand. This picture might help.

By the time we ran away from the bad weather and made it to Melbourne, we had a week left in our trip which was great since we really enjoyed Melbourne from the quirky shops and street art to the diversity festival with lots of food, the super cool Australian Center for the Moving Image, and of course having friends! Wells had a high school friend studying in Melbourne and our Texan friend we had met in Christchurch lived there too. Plus we made some friends with a couple Australian Fulbrighters! Two things you won't leave the city without doing are visiting Chinatown and drinking coffee.

Chinatown is always a good bet for bustling place with cheap and different foods and other quirky things. One night out we had an all you can eat BYO(wine) dumplings meal followed by a photoshoot in a store that somehow survives on only Asian photo booths. And these are not your average mall photo booths. You get hats, choose your backgrounds, and after get to add silly clip art. So Asian.

Number two, coffee is really big in Melbourne. And by that I mean, independent coffee is really popular. Its the little tucked away shops that everyone likes and they are everywhere-if you know where to look. We went to one hidden place called 7 Seeds that a friend took us down an alley to. They roast their coffe in house and have free cuppings every week where you smell the grounds dry, in hot water, and sample them. You have a sheet to mark down tastes and smells from woody to milk chocolate to stone fruits. Learning about where all the different coffees come from and how their tastes are different felt a lot like a wine tasting- and from what we hear, that is the future of the coffee world. Here's to sophisticated palettes making us strain for those faint qualities of dark cherry.

Wells and the 12 Apostles in the early morning haze.

Part of our Melbourne experience also included a tour of the Great Ocean Road. There were plenty of day trips available but we decided on a two day trip since we heard it would not be as rushed, plus it included a nights stay. It was definitely a full couple of days but we got to see everything and we stopped and a pretty cool volcanic park where we could walk around and see koalas, wallabies and kangaroos all in the wild. We did have a pretty crazy encounter with kangaroos jumping right toward and past us. In the end, we decided that the rock formations of the Great Ocean Road reminded us a lot of Lagos, Portugal and made us extra glad that we had that awesome experience with Brady those few years ago when we explored the coastline ourselves. There is something great about being able to find and experience something on your own, though sometimes it makes more sense to do a tour like the one we did. Someone else to drive and give you information you might not have otherwise figured out (like the naming of the 12 Apostles was really just a big marketing ploy). The Blue Mountains tour was also this way. Yes, we could have spend much more time walking around the trails ourselves but our guides very informative (taught us how to throw a boomerang) and we wouldn't have seen all those awesome animals! I still think that self exploration is the way to go when you can though, and it was nice to know that Wells and I would be doing that again in New Zealand with the freedom of our own car :)

London Bridge over 'London Bridge' (which ironically half of did fall down)

All in all we had a great time in Australia and packed a whole lot in. Similarities and differences abound between the Aussies and the Kiwis. They are both fairly new countries with vast differences in terrain. Australia, however, is huge. Everyone knows where it is and where it is located. I don't know if this is the reason for it but New Zealand can feel more isolated and the people in turn have a more isolated viewpoint. I guess these things all depend on how much one has traveled as well. It should also be noted that Australia hands down has cooler animals. Koala, kangaroo, etc versus the Kiwi, a flightless bird. It's nice what the bird has been able to do for New Zealand identity, but then what? Prices, like in NZ, are pretty high- this was an expensive trip. Though I did see something I was not expecting: lower priced boxed wine($14 for five liters) and higher priced liquor ($58 for a bottle of Smirnoff).

One of the biggest differences I saw was the difference in the attitudes and reaction to the native cultures. Even though both had their basic rights severely violated, the Kiwis still hold the Maori in a higher respect than the Aussies do the aboriginals. The Maori have their own TV channel and their language is considered an official one and one that appears under official signs. Even if there is some social discrimination, I have never felt it like it was in Melbourne concerning the aborigines. You learn about how they were killed and pushed off their land and how they may detest the area and not wish to ever return, but the tension truly becomes palpable when a cultural diversity week celebration is held in the city with food dance and performance- none of which displays a trace of the traditional culture. In this regard, New Zealand, you have shown us all up.

To end, some fun Aussie signs: