DAY 70: Reflecting on our Great Antipodean Adventure

When I was younger, I never expected to travel, it was not a personal ambition and my parents had never left the UK, other than for my father's brief time in Italy towards the end of WW2, nor did they encourage me to undertake foreign travel. My first trip abroad was in my mid 30's to Boulogne on a day trip in a coach with the family on temporary passports. I was in my early 40's before I flew for the first time to Menorca with Lesley and 3 of our 4 children for a week's holiday at a self catering beach resort.

Since then, I have embraced foreign travel, visiting many places, mostly in Europe both within my former professional life and for leisure. Being a former member of many project teams and the programme committee of a large American based educational computing organisation, resulted in extensive travel opportunities including to many North American cities and sometimes Lesley was able to accompany me including to Hawaii, Rome, Budapest, Prague, Malta, St Petersburg, Tallin, Helsinki, Vienna and Cyprus to name just a few of the places we have been privileged to visit.

One aspect of all foreign travel that has interested me is seeing and, where possible, experiencing how other people live. We promised ourselves a visit to Australia once we retired, wanting to spend more than just a few weeks during one of our country's education vacation periods, which would have been the only opportunity when Lesley and I were both working.

Our time 'down under' has been truly amazing. We have seen so many unique things including endemic species of flora and fauna. We travelled to parts of Australia that are often not included in typical itineraries and repeatedly met Australians who professed not to have visited somewhere we had just been!

Our Ozzie friends, Carmel, John and Gennelle were very helpful in suggesting optimal times to visit and then were generous in hosting and taking us to lots of interesting places. Our travel consultant, Tina at Trailfinders, was really professional and with her help we put the final itinerary together over a period of about 3 months.

Everything about our GAA, minor illness, mosquitos and humidity aside, has been wonderful. Every day has been a new adventure. The Australians we met were always friendly, personable, happy folk, in fact we never met a grumpy Australian though two came close and both were in Sydney, probably my least favourite city of those we visited.

The country is huge, Europe will fit into it with a wide margin around the edges and even America does not compare in size. This vastness means getting anywhere involves quite long journeys. The longest where we drove ourselves to visit the Red Tingle trees in the Southwest, involved an eight hour journey. But these amazing trees exist in that part of Australia and nowhere else in the world and walking amongst them at both ground and treetop height on a suspended walkway 40 metres above the ground was awesome.

The longest coach trip we undertook lasted for 13 hours but enabled us to visit Wave Rock, East of Perth. It was a long day but we got to see this amazing phenomena and to travel through the varied bush of that region with one of the most chatty, informed and informative driver guides we have ever met.

Many folk include Uluru in any visit to Australia, though many Australians we met had not been there. It is a magical place and we were lucky to have hot, but not unbearable weather, that made walking possible even though we had to leave our hotel at 0405 one morning to undertake the rim walk at Kings Canyon. Watching the sunrise and sunset over Uluru and Kata Tjuta was also an experience not to be missed and despite the presence of a large number of people at sunrise there was a respectful hush as the sun rose and a wave of light crept across the land, striking the rock and making it glow.

I was asked what was the most memorable experience of the whole trip and without much hesitation I identified the night we were on the beach at Mon Repos and watched hatchling loggerhead turtles dig themselves out of the sand and head inexorably for the dim light on the horizon indicating the sea! After a wait of some two hours, we saw a duck billed platypus in the wild which was just incredible. Lesley kept a list of birds and animals we had never seen before, the list is quite long. The birdsong everywhere was just so different to anything we have experienced anywhere else in the world and being in a tropical forest with that constant drip of water, croaking frogs, wave upon wave of chirping cicada was almost overwhelming.

Despite some long distances, driving in Australia was a pleasure with most roads being well surfaced and with low levels of traffic. Sometimes we drove for an hour or more without passing, or being passed by more than a few vehicles. The speed limit is lower than in the UK and to our surprise most folk seem to observe the limit and showed considerable courtesy and patience in situations which at home would have people honking horns, getting cross and accelerating hard to overtake and/or making dangerous or at the least, foolish manoeuvres.

On our adventure within Australia we visited every state apart from Tasmania and travelled more than 10,400 miles. Almost half of these involved flying between cities with Qantas Link. We drove ourselves using three hire cars and a campervan for some 3650 miles and were driven on various coach tours and by friends for about 2000 miles. Flying from the UK to Perth with a stopover of a few nights in Dubai reduced the overall flight time to Australia and made for a very pleasant journey. Returning to the UK from Sydney with a few nights stopover in Singapore also made it more relaxing though I did not enjoy the high humidity of that country. Travelling from there overnight via Dubai was achieved in two 8 hour flights punctuated by a short stop to change planes.

I have previously suffered from jet lag when travelling back to the UK from the USA. I am very pleased to note that travelling from East to West does not appear to have affected me in the same way and I have slept well and not felt drained the next day. Does this mean we may visit Oz again? Well, if we want to explore more of what the country has to offer and visit those parts, including Tasmania, that were not on this itinerary then I guess the answer is yes. We certainly intend to spend some time in New Zealand, probably in 2015 and maybe we will stop off in Australia on the way. But here we are at the end of our 10 week Grand Antipodean Adventure with lots of memories and experiences to reflect upon and share with family and friends and then there are the 2000 photographs to review, edit and post, probably to Flickr in due course with a selection being printed to go into a rather smart album we purchased at a craft market in Port Douglas.

Thank you again to everyone who helped us with the planning, wished us well when we set off, followed our adventures via Facebook and/or this blog and commented and liked as appropriate. I do not think I have ever written so many words in such a short time or in this focused manner. It was sometimes difficult to find the time each day especially when we were being picked up early and getting back late to our hotel but I have enjoyed the experience and am pleased to have a personal record of this life time experience.

 

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