Melbourne: the characterless city

Woke up in Melbourne, flicked through the Lonely Planet and had this conversation:

Me: so what do you want to do? (I am practising being less controlling and more free, easy, flexible and compromising)

Frenchie: meh... I'm not sure there's much to see here. 

Me: you mean... in Australia's second city, historic, trendy, boho arts town?

Frenchie: meh... It just doesn't have much charm; it's not like Sydney, you know?

Me: ...?*

So obviously, whilst Frenchie was paying toll fees, I mapped out a colour coded route on the town map that included a variety of artistic, cultural and historical sites and Frenchie contributed a pretentious coffee stop (because he loves pretension!) and cross referenced the Lonely Planet information with what I could find on Wikipedia and drafted a set of guided tour notes to keep us informed for the rest of the day.

Flexible, easy, free and entirely uncontrolling. 

Obviously my efforts paid off as we explored a beautiful city full of historical buildings, arts centres, laneways, free self-guided tours of concert halls, awesome wicked cool hip hop dancers and beat boxers and pretentious, expensive but delicious breakfast, lunches and dinners. Have a selection of photos: 

Nowhere was Frenchie happier than the very cool Shaun Tan exhibition at the Australian version of the BFI.  There was quirky animation, introverted characters, imaginary friends and informative plaques, so Frenchie was fascinated and even agreed to pose for an embarrassingly adorable photo with the character he empathised with the most:

At this point I suspected that Frenchie had realised that Melbourne did in fact have personality, charm and character, but I didn't want to push it so I stayed quiet until we'd seen an exhibition on Geoffrey Rush, eaten some more, and spent a lot of money on tickets to see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra play Mahler's 5th. I warned Frenchie that this wasn't easy listening like the Puccini and Brahms that he knows, and he struggled his way courageously through the first half of a modern, Australian composition named 'The Death of Socrates' (they always sell an awesome symphony with weird modern mumbo jumbo to ensure there's an audience and trick you into listening), studiously reading the programme and watching the conductor with a perplexed, scrunched up expression to gain a more informed and educated understanding of this world of classical music I am constantly dragging him into, and exited the theatre at the interval looking very confused:

Me: weird, right?

Frenchie: I didn't understand anything at all.

Me: I know, quite weird. 

Frenchie: I thought you said there were five movements. 

Me: ...?

Frenchie: and where was the trumpet solo at the beginning?

Me: ...?

Frenchie: no wonder that Mahler guy said it nobody understood it at the premiere. A hundred years later and still nobody gets it. I mean, he must have been really ahead of his time. He even had everything translated into English.* 

This is slightly amusing, if you know anything about Mahler's 5th. If not... sorry. 

Anyway, luckily, when Frenchie realised that he'd read the wrong page of the programme, he quite enjoyed the real Mahler and we were both fascinated by conductor Simone Young (woman - hoorah!) and I only got told off twice for using my iPad and camera during the performance. Honestly, the youth of today with their new-fangled technology gadgets, right?

So, just before we left to go to Cairns, Frenchie declared an official, royal republican decree, stating that Melbourne was 'impressive'. Very good!

For those of you who are aware, which is none of you because I kept this story quiet in order to protect my reputation as a Responsible Person: my credit card has finally caught up with me after being left at the hostel in Brisbane, forwarded on to the hotel in Sydney, where we missed it, and then forwarded on to Melbourne. Ahaha. When will I learn, hey?

*Frenchie claims liable and slander as he says I have entirely invented this conversation.  

Sydney-Melbourne

Happily back in Tin Can 2, which is not as nice as Tin Can 1 we have realised, Frenchie and I set off down the south east coast towards Melbourne. We only had three hours of driving to do, but this turned into four somehow, including a friendly stop by a policeman who unceremoniously shoved a breathalyser into Frenchie's face and almost fined him when I explained that he doesn't really drink. In Australia, this is a crime, but they let us off with a friendly reminder that the speed limit in a national park is zero mph because of the abundance of wildlife, and we continued on to our destination of Green Patch, Booderee National Park, Jervis Bay, which - slightly disappointingly - is completely deserted, untouched and looks like this:

Ugh. Life is so hard.  That rock, for example, has absolutely no respect for personal space. 

Only joking. After running around yelling, 'THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!  THIS IS BEAUTIFUL!', we decided to stay the night, despite the fact that there was no wifi or electricity.  What it did have was the grave of a girl named Harriet Parker who, in the 1800s was 'accidentally' shot by her friend Kate in an isolated lodge house nine miles from anything or anyone else. Creepy. 

So we had ghost stories, night time possums, kangaroos, wallabies and morning kookaburras for entertainment, and for food, we had the option of swish flat top BBQ in pitch darkness, or doubtful wood BBQ in the moonlight next to Harriet's grave. Frenchie assured me that he had spent many years as a member of a fascist Vichy Boy Scout group, and had learnt lots of things, including why the French are the supreme race, why intermarriage with foreigners is as good as treason and results in banishment to the colonies, and how to cook on a wood burning BBQ whilst evading food poisoning. Our steak, eggs, sausages and tea efforts were rewarded by the park rangers with two Camp Cooking badges for our sashes. I also earned my Transform the Tin Can badge (Frenchie got his between Brisbane and Sydney) and will be working on my Sunbathing badge, which is a challenge because despite the deceptive brightness of the pictures, it's actually quite chilly and I'm not sure how much of a tan you can get with leggings and a hoodie over your bikini. Both of us wimped out of our Bathe in the Bay badge because the water was really cold, but we did get up to hip height before both screaming like little girls and running back onto the beach. 

We then drove on to Tuross Head, and we weren't really expecting much but we were greeted with a beautiful moonlit beach and in the morning Frenchie made me breakfast (because my life is PERFECT) and we sat on the sand and watched the waves and ate sausages and eggs and all was right with the world. We then did adventure beach/lake shore walking over rocks and collected shells and hung out with sea birds and dreamed of coffee at the end of our adventure but found that Tuross Head is a ghost town in winter and everything is closed and there are no people to be seen other than an obese, toothless fisherman and his big dog... 

So we drove down to Eden through some very pretty countryside and stopped briefly for some coffee and a wedding magazine (gross disapproval from Frenchie) and arrived at yet another beautiful beach-lake campsite with slightly sinister undertones what with there being a graveyard next door and black swans on the lake. Although I am glossing over, slightly, these drives, they have been very entertaining. We have played lots of 'imagine we lived in that house/farm/ranch' and I have taught Frenchie to sing in the round since the radio doesn't work, and after three days he has mastered the words to 'kookaburra sits in the old gum tree' but cannot manage 'seek ye first' and so just sings 'hallelujah' to all the lines. He enjoys making up his own patriotic lyrics to 'London's burning' which included 'British dying, British dying!  Fire fire!  Fire fire!  French are laughing, French are laughing!'  He also insists on making up his own tune to 'gonna lay down my sword and shield', so this isn't working, currently, either. 

In Eden, we'd missed the whales, so instead we went for a walk through the national park of failed Victorian entrepreneur, Ben Boyd, lunched at yet another beautiful private beach and then headed down to Melbourne via a nowhere town called Paynesville. What we noticed on these last two days' driving was the whole lot of nothingness that exists between Eden and Melbourne. We drove for a very, very long time without seeing very much at all, and when we did pull into a petrol station in towns with population 200, the isolation was evident from the $5 they were charging for coffee. I guess it takes a lot of petrol and a truck driver's wage to get coffee beans into the middle of nowhere. 

Pictures to be added later when we (possibly) get some convenient Internet access!

Sydney

After the small-town feeling, sweeping beaches and inbreeding of places like Corindi and Cessnock, driving into Sydney over the Anzac Bridge was slightly overwhelming. So much so that we had to stop for chocolate and swap drivers so that Frenchie, rather than I had to deal with things like traffic lights and gear changes.

The rest of the day was spent doing very little other than saying goodbye to Tin Can 1 and vegetating in a room that was more than 2 square metres large.

The following day, however, we set off on a mission to learn about historical stuff and see impressive and world famous architecture. My agenda was filled with visions of tacky tourist photos in front of opera houses and bridges, whether Frenchie liked it or not and lo and behold, the photos were taken and Frenchie realised that tacky tourism is really fun!

Obviously, it rained for almost the whole day, because I'm British and I'd called ahead to make sure that the weather was to my liking.

Also to my liking was the collection of books in the Royal Mint library:

If you can't read it properly, the big book at the bottom is entitled 'Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls', which is my second favourite book, the first being the third book down, 'Depraved and Disorderly'.

So we walked and walked and saw lots of churches and men playing giant chess and Art Deco type buildings and impressive streets and convict prisons and stuff, and then, with trumpets fanfaring, we rounded the corner to this: aaaaaaah.  Less exciting when it's sideways, but you get the idea.

Have a nighttime one, too:

We tried to get tickets to see Tosca, but since Australia believes that art definitely is not for everyone, we decided to waive the $300 charge and sing to ourselves in front of the opera house instead. It was just as good as the Sydney Opera Company, I assure you. 

We then walked through the pretty colonial dockyard of The Rocks, all the way up to the bridge, which was big and impressive and very high. 

All very exhausting, so the next day we had a museum day and got childish around some exhibitions, and then discovered an entirely pretentious Clapham-come-Islington-come-Brixton street called Newtown with lots of cool and trendy shops on it that I loved and Frenchie rolled his eyes at, though judging from this photo in a very trendy shop, he was loving every second of it:

 

TOO CUTE!

Back in another Tin Can very soon and onwards into the wilderness once more.  Over and out for now.

New South Wales

So, before we start today's blog, please have a history lesson a la Emma Sheppard:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY-u15WmQBE

So that is the extent of my knowledge of New South Wales, and I have to say, that having driven across it, the countryside around here does look a little bit like Britain, but bigger, and greener, and sunnier, and more dramatic, and more how we imagine Britain to look when we're being nostalgic about the rolling hills and meadows and farmlands and winding rivers, and singing 'Jerusalem' and stuff.  Now I love England, but frankly, the countryside here is much, much better.  But still, it does look a little bit like what I know of Old South Wales (c/o Heather Williams).  As a comparison, here is Three Cliffs Bay, which I have visited, in Old South Wales:



And here is Pippi Beach in Yamba, New South Wales, where I ate lunch:

 Give or take 20 degrees, it's similar.  Right?

Anyway, we have had a very fun 1,300km drive from Byron Bay-Bangalow-Yamba-Corindi-Bellingen-Harrington-Cessnock-Syndey, most of which was done in third gear with the hand brake on.  We picnicked a lot:

Took lots of photos of the countryside out of car windows:

Backed into some trees, and stopped for coffee a lot:

Pulled out dangerously onto the highway and watched lots of sunsets:

Ran on the beach and reconfigured the van numerous times, cooked on open air planchas and dressed up in vintage shops we stopped in at on the way (completely appropriate):

Visited wine country:

Refused to pay $5 an hour for internet and gazed, awe-struck at the quality of lifeforms we found in some small towns along the way, and eventually dropped the van back in Sydney:

Entirely devoid of trauma, so I'll aim for more excitement and adventure on the Sydney-Melbourne leg, just to make the blog more interesting.

Byron Bay

So.  After paying a visit to the hostel I'd been staying in without Frenchie to pick up the driving license I'd left there (oops!), we climbed into our new home for five days, and started driving down the Pacific Highway, some of which was very pretty, and some of which looked... y'know... like motorway.  I did some pretty awesome driving, and we arrived in Byron Bay, the town Frenchie lived, surfed and picked peaches in a long, long time ago when he was still young (a long time ago).

Here are some photos of the scene we were greeted with at our campsite to make you sick with jealousy (sorry, but it has to be done):

So the evening of Australian Roadtrip Day 1 (ARD1) was spent walking romantically on the beach, bickering romantically about whether we had driven too far to the nearest supermarket, being romantically misdirected by the GPS to the nearest supermarket and driving down scary roads in the dark, sharing a romantic barbecue meal and stargazing romantically on the beach before bedtime.  Quite romantic.

After all that romance crap got boring, I remembered that I had an agenda for this trip, which is basically a list of all of the most expensive things you can do in Australia, like diving the Great Barrier Reef for a million, trillion dollars.  One of them was to go whale watching, which I thought I could do further south, but apparently Eden in NSW is so two months ago for humpback whales, and they're now hanging out in Byron Bay.  How convenient, as we were planning to stay there for two nights!

Frenchie hates anything that makes him feel like a tourist, and if he'd had his way, he would have built his own raft from driftwood, learnt to communicate with dolphins, befriended them and asked them to tow him out to where the whales were taking part in their annual 'Breach near a Beach' festival, with the most spectacular jumps of the whole season on display for just Frenchie and I.  Frenchie would also have packed chocolate mousse, long island ice teas and candlelight and kidnapped a young, blonde Australian cocktail barman, just a little less good looking than him to surf behind the raft and accompany us to serve us all evening.

The French normally look this unimpressed, right?

Alas, we had to do things my way which involved fluorescent jackets that said TOURIST on the back, lots of money, and someone organising us and informing us how to embark and disembark a small dinghy.  He was far from impressed.

However, this didn't last long, as he was delighted to discover that I get quite seasick, and this kept him greatly amused for the majority of the trip.  He was actually very sweet to me, but his spirits did perk up suddenly when I was directed to the back of the boat by the captain and handed a bright yellow bucket.

In spite of my sea sickness, I was the first to spot a whale spray and shouted and pointed excitedly, remembered myself, cleared my throat and tried to look cool (still clasping the yellow bucket) and then said, 'I mean - I think I may have seen something over there.'

Turns out there was something, but it was shy, and it disappeared quite quickly, so we raced around to a few other spots until I was getting a bit worried, especially when the thing that caught Frenchie's attention was a container ship on the horizon, which was owned by a French-Lebanese company, and may or may not have been holding his recent shipment of crocodile BORING.

Luckily, though, the whales thought the container ship was quite interesting as well, so we whizzed over, with our resident Seagull Woman squawking 'there's one!  There's one!' and Frenchie rolling his eyes at each of her simpleton tourist outbursts.  Once we got there the whales were very, very awesome and not only did they wave their tails at us, and get super close to the boat and swim underneath and around, and smack their fins on the surface, they also breached (jumped really far out of the water like on David Attenburgh) ten to twelve times, which was super, super, super cool and even Frenchie had to admit that it was incredible, especially when they hit the water again and go kashploom!smack! like that.  Cool.  Have some photos that we've just discovered Frenchie did manage to take before his camera battery declared it was 'exhausted'.

Wow.

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary

So I couldn't come all the way to Australia, be told that I had no identity and be robbed of all my hard earned cash without seeing some unique-to-the-continent wildlife. So whilst Frenchie went to visit some mad crocodile scientists, I took myself off to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and almost wet myself on the bus there, which took quite a long time and introduced me to 'real suburban Australia', which is filled with trees and jungle and impressive bungalow-type houses with balconies that Bridget says you're not allowed to call bungalows. 

Anyway, this sanctuary was pretty cool. It was all about touching animals - appropriately of course. I got a bit snap happy and took a lot of photographs of kangaroos, and in the process, I did not figure out how to buy them food to feed them. Four year olds figured this out, but not me. After watching them for a bit - especially the big ones when they jump about - I decided that kangaroos are a bit creepy because they're a little bit like humans would be like if a mutating nuclear bomb hit the planet and we were somehow hybrid with mice. 

I stroked one or two (very soft) and hung out with some emus, and then joined the informative talk about koalas. Have some more photographs of Australian native wildlife before I tell you something shocking about koalas:

So.  According to the nice keeper lady, koalas are prone to few diseases, but one of the ones they do get is chlamydia!  Chlamydia!  The disease that leaves you a) blind and b) sterile. Not one of the 6-year-olds in the audience asked their parents what a 'sexually transmitted disease' was, which was shocking, frankly, because it shows that they clearly weren't listening. What have the youth of today come to?  

Anyway, whilst I was feeling slightly uncomfortable with the x-rated nature of this presentation (I am British, after all), it also occurred to me that cuddling a koala for a cool photo would be a minefield of risk-of-infertility (and it also cost about $15, damn Australians) so I just stood next to one called Gandalf (cool) instead in order to get the photo I had promised you all in my last post. That was just about Li Hi enough for me for one day. Taking risks with your ovaries is never a laughing matter, guys!

The photo I took in return for the lady who kindly took this one was infinitely more impressive, less blurry and generally better, but there you go:

I explained to Gandalf that I would stroke his back (soft) but that our intimacy would go no further because motherhood was a calling I was yet to fulfil, and seeing stuff was a privilege I was currently enjoying (not enough to avoid stepping in his poo though. Ironic.)

The other species that Brisbane was proud to have on loan from the US was a shipful of US marines who are currently living on a boat in the harbour somewhere. The informative talk told me that you can differentiate them from their civilian cousins by the length and style of their hair:

 

So instead of cuddling a koala, I ate chips and drank coffee whilst watching other people cuddle koalas, which is the same thing, really. It also meant I got to do some prime eavesdropping of conversations, my favourite of which went thus:

Squaddie 1: dude, I wanna see some f*cking enchiladas. 

Squaddie 2: would you rather see enchiladas or hold a f*cking koala?

They reached a compromise by going for drinks and then rejoining the queue with sustenance, so clearly the enchiladas could wait. You've got to admire US Marine commitment to a cause. 

Watching the koala queue was as fascinating a social observation as sitting in the arrivals lounge at any international airport: people - children, dads and US Marines - love to cuddle koalas. Every time one of the keepers handed a koala over, everyone looked so happy!  Only I knew that this was the delirium before the onset of chlamydia. 

Not a laughing matter, guys.

To finish, here are some photos of snakes that Frenchie probably makes into bags:

This one has no start or finish. 

And a quiz: which Disney/Pixar films have characters based on these animals:

  

All answers in the comments box, please!