Honeymoon Extravaganza - Australia

Where: Sydney, Adelaide, Whitsunday Islands

When: July 2008

Highlights: Surf Lessons, Diving With Sharks, Wineries, Great Barrier Reef

We flew Qantas from LA to Sydney, a grueling 14 hours!  I was really dreading this flight, but it turned out to be my best international flight experience yet.  Possibly because I was completely exhausted for this flight, and slept 9 hours!  We flew coach, but on Qantas, it doesn’t feel like coach.  The meals were great, they offer snacks and beverages and hot fragrant towels throughout the flight.  We also had in-flight entertainment, a MUST for long international flights.  You can watch tv shows, movies, listen to music, or play games. 

SYDNEY

We arrived in Sydney around 7am, groggy, disoriented and HUNGRY.  You stumble off the plane, and eventually are forced to wander through the duty free area.  I noticed something they do a bit different down under than we do.  Above the cigarette stands were HUGE signs stating how TERRIBLE cigarettes for you, and basically that you will die a slow and painful death if you smoke.  There were also huge labels on the cigarette packs.  I thought this was entertaining, and awesome.  I am a cigarette nazi… none for you! Anyway… 

Aus has a great train system, CityRail, and it has a dedicated Airport Line.  We got off at Sydney Central to trek to our hostel.  That’s right, a hostel.  My first thoughts of hostel accommodations were quite appalling.  I pictured a large gymnasium type room, full of bunk beds with undesireable people coming and going at all hours and making all kinds of unpleasant noises. Luckily for me, that was far from what we have found staying in hostels abroad.  I really liked our hostel we stayed at in Sydney, “"Wake Up! Sydney".

1^st item on the agenda upon checking into our private room at the hostel – SLEEP!  After a nap, we walked around the area near our hostel, and I had to track down some allergy medicine, because my sinuses did not like the local vegetation (hence my travel tip of bringing your own medicines).  The medicine did not help as much as I would have liked, but I would make due.

That evening we had tickets to see a magic show called Holy Cow at the infamous Sydney Opera house.  We had drinks and some food before the show outside the opera house.   The show was good, and husband got picked to go on stage, which was hilarious. 

Our first full day in Sydney was a busy one!  We were crazy jet-lagged due to the monster 14 hour time differences, and woke up, ready to start the day, at…. 4AM.  So we stayed in bed and watched a movie on our Ipod.  We got up a few hours later, had breakfast downstairs at our hostel, and headed out to catch a boat to Manly beach.  We are not normal lay on the beach type tourists, oh no.  We headed over to Oceanworld Manly, to do their "Shark Dive Xtreme".

The shark dive was pretty cool.  They outfitted us with wet suits and all our gear and tossed us in the tank.  We had fun waving at the dry visitors walking through the shark tunnel. We didn’t have fins, we were just sunk to the bottom and climbed around the tank.  Our first visitor was Big Bertha, a huuuge ray .  She is friendly, even too friendly, and she crowds you expecting a treat.  Hold on to your reg people, she may try to grab it!  The guides just push her off of you and we were on our way.  They had pretty big sharks in there, but the staff assured us that they have big bodies, but small mouths and they know they couldn’t eat us.  Some of the sharks had visible scars because they were rescued.
 Here are a couple videos from our dive
1. This one shows Big Bertha-

2. This one shows more sharks, the first one has scars on his mouth, they had us kneeling behind a metal screen because they were going to feed the sharks -

After that was done…. I was tiiiired!  But the day was not over.  We had surf lessons scheduled in the afternoon.  So we walked over to the beach near where our lessons would be and had a snack and a small siesta on the beach.  Although I was still tired, surf lessons were a blast!  Its quite hard work, but we both were able to stand up fairly quickly and catch a few waves before the sun set.  It was a blast!  We headed back to the pier to catch a boat back to Sydney, and we had yummy gourmet hot chocolates while waiting to depart.  The next day we flew to New Zealand, exploring the north and south island before returning to the great land of OZ!  To read about our adventures in NZ, go Here!

ADELAIDE

After New Zealand, we flew to Adelaide, and we just loved it there.  We actually stayed in a hotel in Adelaide, which was a nice change. We walked around the local shops, I bought a pretty blue gemstone ring and some other souveniers.  The next day we took a bus out to Cleland Wildlife Park.  From their website - park provides 35 hectares (86 acres) of open bushland habitat where visitors can interact with Australian wildlife, where you can wander at your leisure among kangaroos, wallabies, emus and waterfowl.  And that we did!  We got to feed and pet kangaroos and wallabies, and hold a koala.  It was so amazing!!

 This Tasmanian Devil was doing laps around his enclosure

I gotta include the Dingo

 Here is a hoppy kangaroo video - 

We also visited the remarkable Adelaide Central Market.  Its an open-air market with tons of stalls selling produce, meats, nuts, coffee, cheese, and it has restaurants too.  They also sell a variety of jerkey, including emu and kangaroo.  I tried the Emu jerky and thought.. Meh, it was jerky.  Kinda pricey too.  Anyway, the whole market was amazing!  I basically want to live there.  In the market. Forever.

Yet ANOTHER highlight of Adelaide is their Barossa Valley Wineries.  We hired a driver with Barossa Epicurean Tours http://www.barossatours.com.au/  and visited various wineries including one of our favorites, Penfolds, and we even stopped for a delicious gourmet lunch.  Our driver was amazing, apparently he was a professional wine tester, and can taste minute impurities in the wine.  He was a wealth of knowledge and a joy to have as our tour guide.

Our last evening in Adelaide, Hubby got a great sunset pic - 

WHITSUNDAY ISLANDS – GREAT BARRIER REEF

We were sad to leave Adelaide, but we were most excited about the last leg of our trip, the Whitsundays and the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)…. which actually turned out to be extremely disappointing.  Husband and I really love scuba diving, so of course the GBR was on the must see list for our OZ trip.  There are 2 main reasons why this portion of our trip sucked 1. Drunken Irish Floozies  2. Crappy dive sites.  Yup, that about sums it up. 

We flew to the Whitsunday Islands and took a bus to our accommodation.  We stayed at a campingish place, we shared a small bungalow with a mother and daughter from Denmark, and they were awesome!  The place wasn’t the Ritz, but it would do.  We wanted to dive the GBR but we also enjoy sailing.  So we stupidly “killed 2 birds with 1 stone” and booked The Atlantic Clipper, which advertised both activities.  We chose the clipper because a lot of the other sailing/diving options were really expensive.  It is always a mistake to go with the bargain option, right? Right!

The clipper has aged significantly from what the pictures online indicate, our travel partners consisted mainly of young college kids wanting to have a good time.  There was a large group of Irish college kids, and the girls were rough in the morning!  They stumbled around with cigarettes and messy hair grilling each other on the previous nights conquests.  Awesome.  And the rooms.  I mean tiny bunk beds with a disgusting brown crusty blob in the air vent.  Did I tell you about the bathrooms?  There were 3 on board for about 30 people, and consisted of a small room, with a toilet, a shower head and a drain.  It was lovely.  We also had crap weather.  And the worst part, yes even worse than hung over floozies, was the crap diving.

You will find this portion of our trip on my list of “Do-Overs”.  The diving sites they took us to were some of the worst we have ever been to.  The visibility wasn’t good, and the coral and aquatic life were certainly lacking.  This is the best picture we got, when we returned to the dinghy.

Upon returning to land, we did some research and found that the best diving is out on the “outer reef” and we were at the “inner reef”.  We were so upset that we tried to book a quick helicopter flight to do a quick dive in the good spot, after all.. we came all the way to Australia.  But it would have required us to change our flight, which required us to upgrade our ENTIRE TRIP, including flights we had already taken.  Seriously? Forget it.  So… we plan to return to the OUTER REEF!

SYDNEY

The next day we flew back to Sydney for our last night in The Land Down Under.  Our trip appeared to take a turn for the worst after the GBR incident.  We had a hostel booked in Sydney, and it was coined “The Original Backpackers Hostel”.  The pictures online made it look like a cute, clean house. But we discovered quite the contrary.  It was loud, dirty and sparse.  I really do not have high expectations of a hostel, but cleanliness, and a relatively comfy bed are my pre-requisites.  I really hated this place but it was our last night.  I would survive.  We had a nice dinner planned at a restaurant called Bilsons.  Husband is a foodie and has converted me into one as well, and he did some research and we were looking forward to this dinner.  If we only could get there.

You see, upon our return from the disappointing Whitsundays, we returned to gobs and mobs of people. Everywhere. Streets were closed, transit was diverted.  What the heck is going on here?  We, clearly, had missed the memo that World Youth Day was currently taking place in Sydney.  What is World Youth Day, you ask?  Well, it’s the LARGEST youth event in the world, specifically, a gathering of catholic youths.  That year it attracted 223,000 registered “pilgrims”, including 110,000 from 170 nations making it the largest event ever hosted in Australia.  We made it to dinner after multiple failed attempts of city transit.  It was good.  I was exhausted.  The next day we flew home to Puerto Rico.  More specifically, Sydney to LA to Houston to Puerto Rico.  It was brutal.  But I was excited to see my dog the Poodle Rican.  But he was not excited to see us, because he had been spoiled by our house sitters who treated him like a grandchild by giving him 3 beach walks a day starting at 5 am with accompanied ice water.  I guess I would be pissed if I was him too. 

Until we meet again, GBR.

Maine Girl