SURFERS PARADISE, BRISBANE AND FRASER ISLAND

Heyyy guys. Lets get on it. Here's some more experiences, and the rest will be up soon as well. I'll just continue where I stopped I guess.

The next morning we got up, checked out and walked to the bus stop. Christina mixed some cereal in a bottle of milk we had.. Looked funny haha. We were then off to Surfers Paradise, a 5 hour bus trip away. When we arrived we were both chocked. I don’t know what I expected Surfers Paradise to be, but it was definitely not what it was. Coming from Byron Bay I thought it may have been something like that, but maybe a bit bigger, but that was far off! Surfers is a big city, or at least it’s got some really tall hotels – and that’s all there is. It’s very touristy, something I don’t like that much. The beach was gorgeous though, and there were plenty of stores to look at haha. We stayed at a place called Backpackers in Paradise, which was located very central and had a pool, weeee. Here we actually had a 20 people dorm, which more or less reminded us of a scout camp haha. But it was not bad at all, and it was a really nice place. We went for a stroll down to the beach, got a smoothie and just hung out. We made pasta with meat sauce for dinner, which was awesome, since it was the first real meal we’ve had in a while ish. It felt like it anyway, and it was really good. We stayed at the hostel that night and just chatted to the people in our dorm.

The morning after (I have no idea what the days were anymore, I’ve totally lost it…) we went for a run around surfers paradise. It was really nice to get some exercise again and I felt aesme after running about 7.5 km. After that we just went down to the pool to chill for the day. We also bought a bar crawl for the night, which included some free drinks and free entries at different clubs and stuff. For dinner we went and got pizza since we didn’t feel like cooking anything. This is bad thing about me and Christina traveling together. We both love food. We both love sweets. We both love ice cream. So we’re really bad at coming up with excuses to why we need this food and are allowed to buy it hahaha. Usually it is “we haven’t bought something in a while” – which usually also is a lie. But oh well, we’re on holiday. We got ready for the bar crawl, had a few drinks at the hostel bar, and played a fun drinking game with some other people from the hostel as well. We then headed off with about 100 other backpackers, and went to the first bar. Here we randomly ran into the English group from our dorm in Byron Bay, who we had no idea was there as well. It was quite fun, and we partied with them all night. We went to several bars and just had a really good time. On our way home we decided that we needed another pizza (see we’re even worse when drunk), so we got another one and went back to the hostel to eat it haha.

Next morning we had to check out and we didn’t feel too well.. We decided to stay at the hostel by the pool until my mom’s cousin Karen, who lives in Brisbane and who has offered us to stay with them, came and picked us up around 3 pm. Karen lives here with her husband Neil and their daughter Sophia. They came and picked us up and we drove to their place a bit out of Brisbane. I then spend an hour or so skyping with my great grandma and Karen’s parents, which was really nice. It’s hard to talk to her when you’re that far away, so it was really good to have a chat. We got chicken from the BBQ for dinner, and oh my… it was probably the best thing in the world. Proper food is so good when you’ve been living of crap for so long haha! Before we went to bed we got some washing done, which basically included our entire backpacks. And then… here we go… the best thing ever… we went to bed in a nice bed in our own bedroom with no snoring people (or more than that…). It was so good.

The next day was a Sunday, I remember that haha. We slept in a little, got up, got a nice breakfast and talked for a bit, and then we caught the train into Brisbane to see the city. We walked around for a bit looking at stuff, then walked down to Story Bridge and walked next to the river where you could really see Brisbane’s skyline – it was quite beautiful, but I must say that when you’ve experienced one big city in Australia the rest of them are quite similar. We went and had a nice lunch with a view of the river and the bridge, and after that we went to catch the train back home. Before dinner we went and had a swim in the pool attached to the place Karen and Neil are staying at, and we then had dinner with Karen and cute little Sophia.  

Monday we got up early to go to Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin’s zoo). It’s located a bit out of Brisbane and is kinda hard to get to without a car, so Karen and Neil let us borrow their beacjh car for the day, and we then drove up there. We spend the entire day in the zoo, which is huge. Christina got to feed kangaroos and we both got to hold a koala. I haven’t done that yet mainly because I didn’t want to pay for it but also because I don’t know if I think it’s good for the animals to be photographed like that all day. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to support it, but I did anyway. I excused it with the fact that koalas sleep most of the day anyway, so whether they sleep on a human or in a tree doesn’t matter thaaaat much I guess hah. I still don’t like the thought of it though. We watched a show with crocs and birds and just walked around and looked at all the animals. I really wanted to hold a red panda, like so badly, but apparently you couldn’t do that anymore :( we also watched a tiger show, and Australia Zoo is one of the only zoos in the world where they get so up close with their tigers and have such a strong bond with them. Oh my god, watching it my heart was bleeding. I want to do that so bad. I actually think training a tiger is my biggest dream. That is the ultimate dream job for me. I honestly felt like crying listening to how they raise them from 3 weeks old and build such a strong relationship with them. Also the only reason they have them in captivity is to raise awareness about tigers and how they are becoming extinct. There’s less than 3500 tigers left in the wild! Isn’t that crazy?! It makes me hate humans so much, how can be so greedy and cruel? I donated money and decided that at one point in my life I will fight for tigers, help raise them and raise awareness too. I would be so happy doing this and feel so good because I would wanna make a difference.

Okay enough about tigersss. We got to see the animal hospital they have attached to the zoo as well, and there was some nice quotes and stuff in there. There was a box which on the outside said “Open to see the most dangerous animal in the world”. When you opened it there was a mirror inside and you saw yourself. How good is that!? It’s so true.

We then had something to eat before we drove back to Karen and Neil’s place. We went for a swim again and then had another really nice dinner with the family. We then packed our stuff because we were on a bus at 7 am the next morning. So we had to get up at about 4.45. Neil took us to the bus terminal in the morning, and we then had about 5 hours in the bus until we would hit Rainbow Beach.

When we arrived at Rainbow Beach we quickly checked in and found our room. We then had a safety briefing for our Fraser Island tour at 2 pm. The trip to Fraser Island was the main reason we were in Rainbow Beach, which is a smaaaaaall town with nothing to do pretty much. There are two hostels that both have tours to Fraser Island, and because one was booked up we stayed in one hostel but were with the other hostel on the tour. We went to the briefing and got assigned the groups we were gonna drive in. Fraser Island is the biggest sand island in the world and on the tours you drive jeeps with 8 people in each across the beaches and the inland tracks, which are all sand. We had to watch a safety video that sucked, but we had to, and then we went to have a good nights sleep, since we were leaving at about 8 am the next morning. But that didn’t happen. We had a guy that snored so loud you would think he was about to die every two seconds, and we didn’t really sleep the entire night. Holy shit I’m so tired of snoring people. So so so sick of it.

The next morning we were off. There is 4 cars in each group and one of them is the lead car with your guide/driver in. We had a driver called Muzza and he was absolutely awesome haha. Our group was so good as well, we had two English guys, two English girls, two Swedish girls and then me and Christina. We had so much fun on that trip. First you caught the little ferry thingie over to Fraser and then we started driving. We stopped and had lunch, and then Christina was going to drive. These cars had gears as well so it was a bit harder than what we were used to, but we managed. Christina drove the first and hardest bit on the inland tracks. Then I took over and drove on the inland tracks as well, and it was so much fun! Like you really had to push the car and work the gears to not get stuck and it was just amazing. We went to a lake called lake Mckenzie, which was so beautiful. We stayed there for a bit swimming and just enjoying. The weather was good as well, so it was so good. We then drove back to the beach and continued to our camp of the night. The camp is where everyone else on the tours stays, so we were a lot of young people. We had to cook our own dinner and stuff in the groups and afterwards we had a few drinks and then went to bed early. The next morning we got woken up by 7 am, made our breakfast and then got going. We drove to the Maheno shipwreck that’s on the beach and then to Eli creek, where you float in the creek for a couple of hundred meters. We stayed there for a few hours and then went back to camp to have lunch. After that we drove to India head, which is a view point and is very beautiful. We continued to champagne pools, which are rock pools by the ocean. The waves break over them and fills them with beautiful, clear water. We swam in then for a bit as well, and just enjoyed the sun. Afterwards we drove back to the creek to have a rinse (these were our only showers for the 3 days haha). We headed back to camp, cooked our dinner (steak, it was so good), and then played drinking games and drank goon. Muzza took his car down to the beach and blasted music, so we all had a giant beach party in the moonlight. It was so good, and we danced in the sand all night haha.

The next morning we had to get up even earlier because we had to go back that day. Oh I forgot that my sleeping bag had been soaked wet from something the first day, so it was all nasty and I threw it out (yay, first thing thrown out!). In the morning I was standing next to our tent and was brushing my hair when I felt something on my arm. I brushed it away and looked down. Meh. Can you guess what it was? A huntsman. A giant spider. I almost had a heart attack. It wasn’t really big though, but it was big enough.. ewwww. Bvadr. We had our breakfast and left to go to a huge sand dune and a lake in the middle of the island. It was a 40 minute walk there and we were all hungover, so it felt so horrible. We stayed a bit at the lake and then walked back. We had lunch and then drove back to the ferry. Driving on the beach was so much fun as well, just going 100 km on sand in a four wheel jeep. Oh my, so good!

We both agreed that we had now had enough sand for the next many years. We had so much sand everywhere, it was crazy! When we came back we had a shower (it felt so good), a nap and a cheap burger at the hostel, before we went to the other hostel to hang with the people from our car and have a beer or two.

The next day we checked out and spend the day at the pool until we had to catch out bus at 3.30 pm. Then we had 2 hours in a bus, 4 hours waiting and then 12 hours in a bus again haha. So much bus riding. When we waiting for the second bus we had wifi and talked to people back home, which was nice. 

I'll post the last 1.5 weeks as soon as I have it written down....

NEW ZEALAND, SYDNEY, BYRON BAY

Hey guys!

First I just wanna say that I’m not gonna post photos here anymore, because it takes take forever, but all the photos are on my facebook, and you get to it if you click HERE

Alright let’s get started..

We arrived around 6 pm and tried to find a hostel through the airport’s free wifi. Buuuut smart as we are we did not check that the exact week we were going to Queenstown was the same week the New Zealand Open golf tournament was held there as well.. Sooo any free beds? Nope. We chatted with a really nice guy, Ty, behind the information counter and he spend about an hour calling every single hostel in town to find us a place to stay. We had almost given up when he managed to get us the two last beds in town for the night (Holy shit, thank you Ty, we love you and I will always owe you big time). This is where our lucky strike for this trip starts. You’ll hear more about that later.

We knew that our week in Queenstown had to be filled with cool extreme stuff, since this is the number one place in the world to it. So the following day we went and booked river rafting, a day trip to Milford Sound (to see some more of the country), skydiving and canyoning. We were set, and excited. However the weather was shit, and neither of us had brought any clothes that fitted 10 degrees and rain. First we went for a hike to one of the great view points. Half way it started porung down though so you couldn’t see shit. We decided to turn around, since we were soaked and freeeezing, and we wouldn’t be able to see anything after all….We went out that night and had some fuuuun, and some not so fun, since Christina lost her phone. We don’t know how we managed, I mean, it is me and Christina… But we had to go to the police station and filled in a lost phone form thingie and could just hope. We stayed at a hostel called Xbase, and it was our first hostel experience. It was a bit hard for Christina especially to get used to the dirtyness of these places, but obviously we survived ;-) it was good though! We stayed in a 8-person dorm for the week and we had bunch of nice people coming in and out. Although I must admit that I’m so excited to come home and sleep in a room for myself. Them snoring people are driving me freaking crazy, oh my…

Monday it was veryyyy cold. That means 4 degrees, not really what we expected and we were both a bit scared of river rafting in 4 degrees and rain. We drove for a bit to go to the river, got in our wetsuits and then in the water. I’ve never done river rafting before, so it was quite an experience. So much fun! Even better because you’re in control and actually have to work to make it through without tipping the boat over. It took around 2 hours, and at the end of it we couldn’t feel our fingers. But fun fun fun. There was a sauna afterwards and that was probably the best part haha! Monday evening we just chilled, cooked our dinner and relaxed. Tuesday we had to get up super early, since we were going on a day trip to Milford Sound. We got on the bus before the sun came up, and slept for the first couple of hours. Then we started getting to some really stunning scenery, and it was just amazing. We arrived to Milford Sound around the afternoon and oh my god. It cant be described, you’ll have to see the pictures. It was amazing. We went on a boat cruise and sailed around there, and it was absolutely amazing. We drove back the same way and we were exhausted haha. Back in Queenstown around 7 pm, and then crashed in our dorm with chips and sweets ;-)

Wednesday was the most exciting day of all. SKYDIVING! We had amazing weather, so clear and the sun was out. We went to the place and sat and waited for a bit like “what the hell are we doing?”. We got our gear on, and said hi to our instructors. Mine was Will and he was pretty cool. Then we all went in the small plane, took off and we got tied up and ready to jump. Will tried to scare me bunch of times to see if I was nervous, but I think my excitement ruled over every other emotion at that time, I never got to feel nervous haha. Christina was the first to jump.. or more like getting pushed out the plane, and hahaha so good to just see her fall. I started laughing at this point and didn’t stop until I hit the ground again. Then it was my turn. Will placed me with my legs and feet hanging out the plane, and the feeling of just sitting there knowing that you had 4.5 km under you until you would hit the ground again, it was just so awesome. Then he pushed, and we just fell. I WAS FLYING! IT WAS SO AMAZING! We had about a minute of free fall just flying through the air, through clouds, like holy shit it was the best feeling ever. I’ve never felt anything like it. That’s the most alive I’ve ever felt. We had a second jumper that was there to take photos (hahahaha, I look like a bald albino black person with asian genes), but as Will was about to release our parachute the other guy was right beneath us. So when he released it kinda pulls your entire body, so my legs went flying and hit the other guy right in the face…. I just looked down and saw him spinning towards the ground thinking “shit, I just killed the guy…”. He was fine though, but haha. When the parachute was out we were just flying over the amazing landscape. It was so amazingly beautiful, snowy mountains and crystal blue lakes underneath you. Breathtaking. I was laughing the entire way screaming “I’M FLYING!!”, it was so amazing. Then it was over. But seriously, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

Wednesday night we were supposed to go to a bar crawl, and we went to the place to meet up. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough people to actually have the bar crawl, but the 6 of us that showed up still got the discounts and we all went out together. Ended up at Buffalo’s, which was right next to our hostel pretty much and got prettyyyyy drunk. It was such a fun night. And so much easier to sleep in a room full of people when you’re drunk haha!

Thursday we woke up pretty late, and actually had no plans. That was good because we were both hungover and just wanted to relax. The weather was good and we went for a walk and then just chilled in a park and listened to some live music with a coke next to us. We then decided to go to the police station just to check up on Christina’s phone that we had been searching for the entire week. And the lady comes out with what? Christina’s phone. That’s our lucky strike here. Someone had handed it in 3 days after she lost it, so who knows where it’s been. If phones could talk…. We had another early night, because Friday morning we were going canyoning! It’s a thing where you jump/zip line/slide/swim through a river/waterfalls that goes down a canyon. It was honestly so much fun. The water was 7 degrees, but we were packed in wetsuits and everything, so the only place it could be felt was your hands and your face. We went with a group of 8 danish guys, which was a complete coincidence, but fun. The scenery was so beautiful as well, it just looked amazing, and riding down natural slides backwards was a great way to experience it. Definitely worth it! This was a day trip as well, as it was an hour away, so when we got back we cooked some food, packed our stuff and got ready to go to the airport on Saturday to fly to Sydney!

Oh there was also two really drunk guys that decided to wear my bikini bottom and then lift one of them in them… they ripped. I had to sew them back together.. And they were not working very well after that hahaha.

We flew over Auckland to Sydney and arrived in Sydney around 7 pm. You would have thought that we would’ve learned from our last hostel experience that you should book ahead (and we actually did try), but we didn’t have a hostel booked when we arrived in Sydney. After a chat to the information guy and countless calls to different hostels we concluded that our best option was to spend the night in the airport (oh well, didn’t have to pay for accommodation then haha). We had a shower and wanted to lock up our bags and go into town for drinks, but we found out we couldn’t really get back, so that didn’t work.. Well we found a nice spot in a designated area and actually got to sleep for some hours (thank god for our sleeping bags), so it wasn’t too bad! Of course we booked our hostel for the two next nights so we knew we had a place to sleep the next few nights haha. We woke up early Sunday morning, had a coffee and tried to figure out where we were going. A nice couple then approached us, asked if we were gonna stay in the city for a few days because they had transport tickets (bus/train/ferry) that lasted for a few days more, so we could have them. See that was really awesome, since now we didn’t have to pay $63 each for one, and also it expired the day we left soooo.. see, we’ve been lucky. After that we took the train into town and found our hostel, which was called Maze Backpackers. We then headed into town to see some of the stuff you have to see when visiting Sydney.. Opera house, Harbour Bridge etc. It was fun to finally get to see it. However it looked nothing like I thought. Oh well I guess it looked like the pictures, but the surroundings and all? Yeah, no. I don’t know, but it was still a really nice place. We walked the Harbour Bridge to get to the other side where North Sydney is situated and found a market with all sorts of stuff (+ a clothes sale thingie with stuff for $5.. My heart was bleeding…). We visited Luna Park, a small amusement park, and then took the ferry across to the other side again. When we got back we went grocery shopping and went back to the hostel and talked to the families back hoooome, which was good.

Monday we got up early and went to Bondi Beach! Weee, our first real beach day on our trip. The weather was super nice, and we just chilled there for the day. Christina got suuuuuper burned, like it was super bad. Several days of pain. Poor thing haha. We took a stroll in Bondi and I found myself a new bikini weeee (after the Queenstown incident, I kinda had to…). We also got frozen yoghurt, because it’s so good. When we came back we bought some goon (cheap “white wine”, if you can even call it that… papvin) because we were gonna go out with the hostel that night. There was a free BBQ at the hostel as well, and free food is greatly appreciated when backpacking. We sat for a bit and got prettyyyy drunk, and then we were off to the club with one of our French roommates and his friend. We just got in, had our free drink and talked to some people when Christina turns to me and goes “Tanja, I wanna go home… I’m not feeling too well”. And then she was gone. When walking back to the hostel (which luckily was very near) she said “I don’t even want food. I just want a bed”: See when that is said by either Christina or me in a drunk state it is reallyyyyy bad. She didn’t feel too well in the morning either, and we had to check out at 10 haha!

So yeah, next morning we had the entire day in Sydney before we had our first bus trip, and started our trip up the east coast for real. We spend the day walking around town, getting more frozen yoghurt, having a nap in the botanic garden, took the ferry to darling harbor and went to Sydney Aquarium (so gooood), had a nice dinner (=steak and ribs) at a nice little restaurant at the harbor (we decided that we wanted to have at least one really good meal while traveling), and finished the day off with the sunset over Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. A really nice day considering the night before! Our bus left at 11pm, and we then had to drive the entire night (about 13 hours) to Byron Bay.

The bus trip was nice, we both got some sleep. I really enjoy riding a bus and could do it for days I think haha. Just listening to my music looking out the window and thinking about life. It’s so good. We arrived in Byron Bay (and had of course booked our hostel in Sydney – we did learn after a bit!). Byron Bay is a really nice small surfer town that has a bit of a hippie vibe to it. They don’t want any tall buildings or stuff like McDonalds there, so it’s a really cool place. First encounter after getting off the bus was a small group of people sitting on the side walk playing music and singing. Quite an experience, but a nice one! It made you smile and was a good welcome I think haha. After finding our hostel we went to figure out what else we wanted to do on our trip. We decided that we would like to plan the rest of the trip, since we had found out that backpacking Australia in summer/autumn means that you can’t really just go with it, go wherever you want and just find somewhere to sleep. We also found out that our “hop on/hop off” bus really wasn’t living up to its name, since there’s so many people travelling with Greyhound at the moment that you have to book your buses several days ahead. So we went to an agency to see if they could help us arrange the rest of our trip including and we spend a couple of hours organizing and booking everything. When we were done we had everything booked including trips to Fraser Island, Whitsundays and scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef. We also got all our accommodation sorted out and the next day we booked all of our buses. It felt really nice to have it all planned, and we could both relax a bit more and just enjoy it, which was really nice. So even though we don’t get that really spontaneous experience, I’m really glad we did it this way.

The rest of the day we spend on the beach and checking out the town. At night time we went to a place called Cheeky Monkey since we had a free backpacker meal there. It was super small though, so we ended up buying another meal for $5 – backpacker specials. We loved it so much we came back the next day for dinner as well. I mean $5.. You can’t make it cheaper yourself haha. We decided not to go out that night because we were both so tired, so we just went to sleep really early. The rest of our dorm (mainly an English group) felt the same, so we were all pretty much asleep when to german girls arrive around 11pm. They quickly get into their tiny tight dresses and high heels and then leaves. At 3 am we wake up to the entire room shaking pretty much, and a bunk bed across from ours that sounded like it was gonna break any moment. First I didn’t realize what was going on, but after a few seconds the rhythm in the squeaky bunk bed noises mixed with a German girl screaming made it pretty clear what was going on… So the entire dorm (10 people) are awake and Christina and I start having a loud conversation to make it stop, but apparently that didn’t bother any of them, so they just continued on. We decided to go to the toilet and hoped the guy she brought home was a premature drunk so they would be done when we came back. And yay, all asleep when we got back haha. The next morning the girl left at 6 am, and apparently changed dorms. Hahaha, I would too if I had been her. According to a guy in our dorm both girls were actually in the bed at one stage.. So, it’s not just snoring you have to deal with staying at hostels. We learned that in Byron Bay hahah.

Next day we got up and went to the beach for a bit, and then we had a surf lesson booked for 4 hours in the afternoon. We all got in a bus and drove to another beach, got suited up and got out surf board (which is huge by the way…). We had a few instructions and then we hit the waves. It was so much fun, and not at all as hard as we both had imagined. We were both up on the board the first time, and rode the waves like pros! (okay, maybe not exactly, but it felt like it). We surfed for some hours, and then we went back and decided to go back to Cheeky Monkey for dinner. Haha hurray for lazy people and cheap good food. We went out for a couple of drinks with the people from our dorm as well, but had to go back to pack our stuff and get a decent sleep haha.    

ADELAIDE & THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD

Heeey guys.

As you probably know I have now started my amazing journey with Christina, which is absolutely awesome. She arrived Thursday the 20^th, and the days leading up to I was just hanging out with people and enjoying my last time in Adelaide. The Saturday before was my last shift at the Elephant, which was so weird. I didn’t like it.. I still don’t haha. Aaron made me my last knock-off drink which was a small inception-bomb ish thingie (look it up), basically energy drink in a pint glass, two shot glasses balancing each other on the top of the pint glass. This is a very bad explanation, I apologize in advance. One of them had jäger, the other one had a “slippery nipple”, which is ¼ white sambucca and ¾ baileys. What you do is you take the slippery nipple, then the jäger falls into the energy drink and creates a jägerbomb that you then drink. It knocked me out a bit haha. Well afterwards some of us went to Tan’s, woke up Jay and continued drinking until like 10 am. It was a good night. A sad, but good night.

One of the days we went for my last vege burger at the ele as well. So sad. I could really eat one right now… Tuesday night we had the Stella Artois pouring competition at work. So Stella does this every year, a lot of bar people compete to be the best to pour the Stella in the 9-point-pour they want and then in the end represent Australia in different Stella events for a year. So the ones of us that wanted to do it did it, and it was a lot of fun. Obviously I couldn’t really compete, since I’m not even Australian, but it was fun to try. Both Koji and Caroline got picked (yaaay, good job guys), and they’ll be competing against other bar people from Adelaide soon. The finale is in France at Cannes film festival, so I expect one of them to win and then I’ll come watch hehe. After that we had our last staff party before Kristian and I would leave, so we all went to Koji’s and got wasted. Basically. It was a lot of fun. Pictures will follow once I get time to go through them haha.

Then Thursday Christina arrived. I was late to pick her up because apparently you can’t count on buses in Adelaide, you just have to yolo it pretty much. It was so good seeing her again! We went home for a shower and a nap, because Thursdays are PJ’s nights, and we wouldn’t want to miss out on my last one. We met up with Blake at the Ele and then we went to a drive-in theater and watched Wolf Creek 2. Of course we had to watch a horror movie about backpackers in Australia, what else. Blake has put mattresses in the back of his pick-up car thingie, so it was awesome. Afterwards we dropped the car at Tan’s and then went to PJ’s. Many vodkas later we ended at Sugar (as usual), and then Hungry Jacks for night time snacks. That’s basically our going out agenda, so nothing unusual to that hah.

Friday was hungover day. We couldn’t do much at all, just slept and felt sorry for ourselves. We went into town to go to the Garden of Unearthly Delights, which is part of the fringe in Adelaide at the moment, and has a lot of food, rides and shows. Festival atmosphere. Well, it was impossible to get in, so we went and had yiros with Jay and Sean (Tan’s friend). And then we went back home haha. Saturday we went to pick up our rental car from Wicked Campers. It was reallyyyy dodgy looking when we got there, but we got a car and that was all good. It had a tent on the roof though, not really what we ordered, but whatever, it worked out fine. Next step was driving. In the wrong freaking side of the road. I started, it was horrible for about 2 minutes, and then it was actually all good. We went to get food for our trip, took a look at the hills and Mt. Lofty, and then stopped by at Tan’s to drop some stuff. Later that night we went into town and sat at the Ele for some drinks. It was Saturday night. First Saturday night in about 5 months that I wasn’t working. It felt so weird, and I just wanted to go to the other side of the bar and help out haha. Collect the glasses, put the stools back, oh all them habits. I felt sad, it was my last night in Adelaide, my last night at the Elephant and I had to say goodbye to people. It was so horrible. The world would be so much better without goodbyes. Oh and we actually went to the Garden before, so we still got to enjoy that!

Sunday morning we woke up, had a shower and packed the car. I said bye to Tom and then we were off to the hills to see Aldo, Jen and Mia one last time. We had lunch and just talked for some time, and I got to see the house one last time. How I’m gonna miss these guys, my Aussie family. I’m already excited for when I get to see them again, and I can’t even imagine not being able to just go and see them when I want..

Then we went back down to Adelaide to Tan’s so I could say goodbye to Tan, Blake, Jay, Lachy and Kristian. We spend a couple of hours there just chatting, but yeah. We had to leave, and it was so hard. I wanna say I’ve never cried that much before, but that would be a lie, cause we all know I cry a loooot. And this was definitely not an exception haha, I felt so horrible, you have no idea. I miss them so much already, it’s hard leaving best friends behind. I will see them soon again, I know I will.

So that was Adelaide. Another chapter of my life written down, finished. Another chapter that I’ll look back at with the biggest freaking smile on my face (that is when I stop crying because I miss it…). I mean, looking back I had no idea how it was gonna turn out. It became so much better than I could’ve ever thought it would be. It made the thought of going home, start studying and moving into Copenhagen horrible and not appealing at all. That takes a lot. Now it’s one of the best memories I have, and I’m glad I can call it my second home. It was some awesome months, and they will always make me happy thinking back at J

Sooo, that turned into some deep shit, and now this post is taking me so much longer to write… haven’t even gotten to our travelling yet haha, oh god.

Well off we go. We left Adelaide around 2pm, and our first stop on the way to Melbourne was gonna be Robe. A small fishing town a couple of hours down the coast. We found a nice little spot in the middle of nowhere and decided to stay the night. The tent on the roof was really easy, but we still consider ourselves masters of camping because of that one. It was really windy and pretty cold, but we got through the first night, which was goooood. Monday we were off at 10 and our first stop was Mt. Gambier and the Blue lake, which is formed in a volcano crater. It was stunning, and we stopped to have lunch there and chill for a bit. We also bought a cord for the car, so we could blast our awesome music real road trip style, oh yeaaah. There wasn’t a lot to see on this part of the trip, basically just trees, desert looking stuff and the road. We stopped in Warrnambool, found a big playground and stayed there for a bit (swings are the best, just saying), and then we tried to find a place to stay the night. We ended up in Port Cambell on a camping spot, where we met a nice police officer. Well, he came right as we were cooking our food in the womens toilets (it was warmer in there….), and told us that the spot was actually closed and the restrooms were supposed to be locked. We freaked a little, since we had an open fire in the restroom, and Christina decided to hide stuff in one of the showers because I yelled she should get it out of the way. We had an awkward encounter when he found it, but he was a nice guy and let us stay, so it was all good hahaha.

Tuesday we hit the Great Ocean Road for real and it got a bit more exciting. We saw some of the amazing rocks/cliffs in the water off of the coast like thunder cave and the twelve apostles. It was absolutely amazing and completely unreal. So beautiful. We also saw a brown snake, which scared the crap out of me being like “Christina, don’t move!! It’ll kill you!”… but we survived. On our way to Apollo Bay we went through some rainforest and had a walk in there as well, and it was pretty awesome. I like the rainforest, it’s really cool. There were heaps of huge trees, and it was just kind of amazing. We then drove off to Apollo Bay, Lorne and Torquay, small surfer towns that are really nice to just have a walk in and chill for a bit, so we did that. We then continued towards Geelong, a bigger town about 100 km away from Melbourne. This was where we wanted to spend our last night. As we were driving in the middle of the town I looked out my window and saw…. A huge huntsman (spider) sitting on the window. Or it was its freaking hairy legs just sitting there on the window and then it crawled away. Needless to say neither of us dared to leave the car, and when we finally got out to take a look at it, it was gone. Gone. Aka inside our lovely tent on top of our roof. We freaked for a bit, and then continued.

As we had found free camping spots the first two nights and therefore hadn’t had a shower or anything, we decided to stay at a caravan park for the night. We got all set, made our dinner (pasta and ketchup, because we’re that awesome… basically that was all we got, and it worked out fine). We had a good sleep, and actually stayed in the tent, convinced that if I woke in the middle of the night with a giant spider crawling in my sleeping bag I would have a heart attack. Luckily that didn’t happen. Or I didn’t wake up at least, haha. The next morning we were off pretty early. We had two older women as neighbors. They looked pretty strange and we think they actually lived in their tents. As we are packing up one of them comes up to me and says “that’s a pretty cool tent” (you couldn’t understand her very well, but I managed). I just replied very quickly as it was awkward. She then goes “uhm… do you girls do heroin?”….. uhm what?! Hahaha. “No, we don’t do heroin”. “Not just a little bit?”. “No, absolutely not”. “Alright… well it is very bad for you too…. I was just wondering if you girls wanted some drugs”. No thanks, I think we’re good. At that stage we concluded that ending our camping adventure that day was a really good idea, since we apparently looked like we did heroin hahaha. Just as a side note, the old lady then got into their car and reversed straight into a really nice car on the other side of the path leaving a huge dent, and then she ran down a tree pole…. So we left.

We then drove towards Melbourne and found a place to clean the car. We cleaned it as well as we could, but it was kind of hard and must have looked really funny. Driving into Melbourne was actually alright, and we were surprised that we actually handled all that “driving-in-the-wrong-side”-stuff so well. We handed the car in at about 1 pm, and the guy didn’t even check it… So much for that cleaning!

Alright, that was the great ocean road. Melbourne will be up as soon as I can get it done – so hard with no wifi haha. And then New Zealand afterwards!

PS. This backpack of mine…. Holy shit. I would laugh if I saw me walking around with it, it’s practically bigger than me. I have absolutely no balance whatsoever wearing it. It’s a struggle in itself, if I lean a few cm back or sideways I will fall over. Hahaha, imagine that. I’ve also knocked a few people over with it because in my head it’s not that big. But it is. I look forward to coming to Cairns and being able to throw some stuff out, because this is absolutely ridiculous haha.

See ya peeps