The end of 80 Days around Oz

Well we made it. We circumnavigated the continent of Australia ending in we city where we started 35 years ago, Melbourne. We made connections with some friends from long, long, ago. We were surprised how much they had aged, we hadn’t – ha ha! First we toured the city, much is the same and much is very changed. The river Yarra is now a pleasant place to stroll and dine. We drove by the house, in Hawthorne, where we rented a flat many years ago and it is going through a major renovation. The suburb is now a million $+ area to live in. Many of the Melbourne’s surrounding suburbs have been refreshed and upgraded with nice shops and restaurants. There are many freeways now, 35 years ago there were none. The airport is going through a major renovation, probable the second or third since we last flew into or out of it. The biggest change was how Melbourne, and all of Australia, was so much like the USA. When we lived here in 1971-73, the country was 10 years behind the USA in social and technological areas. Today the country is equal or ahead of the USA in many areas.

The best part of our trip was the people. This country is so friendly. The locals were very helpful to lost strangers. That was important because directions and road signs were at best confusing if not non-existent. We only got really lost once and that time even the locals had trouble helping us.

The scenery, the cultures, the food, the people, the motor home, the history, the diversity were all wonderful. We are so thankful that we were able once more to visit Australia and see some of what we missed the first time.

We traveled12,000 kilometers or 9,000 miles of driving, 2,000 miles by train, 6,000 miles by air during our Aussie Adventure. Thank You Australia, for allowing our “Planes, Trains, and Motor homes” trip of 80 days around Oz possible. We have had a lot fun sharing our experiences with all of you. We return stateside on Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Mike and Karen Wraight

Big Australia

May 14, 2008: Big Australia

Wednesday – we are in Darwin and enjoying a relatively quiet day of walking and riding around this nice city. The weather is very warm, so our activities have been limited to short walks and a ride on the local tour bus. We saw much of the city and local surrounds. It is a very modern city, basically all new since 1974 when cyclone Tracey roared through and destroyed most of what existed then. Tomorrow we head to Melbourne, we don’t think that we will do much more sightseeing, but will spend our time visiting with our friends from our earlier time in the Land of Oz. We thought that we would post a few photos of the BIG THINGS that we have seen throughout our travels. Our trip has certainly revealed to us the huge size of this country, the large and warm hearts of so many people that we have met along the way and the enormous set of memories that we have made while on this adventure. Oh yea, who can forget the gigantic VISA bill we will have. Cheers!

more fun photos

May 9-13, 2008: Top End Adventures

Friday, we left Broome and flew Darwin. The flight was from Broome to Kunanurra, then on to Darwin. We were amazed that there were snacks and beverages served on both flights, each less than 2 hours long. We almost missed both flights. Flight # 1 we were told to wait at gate #2, our flight departed from gate #1 and we didn’t hear the announcement. Flight #2, they told us to get off the plane and they would have us re-board in 20-25 minutes. So we sat down right outside of the gate that we came through. We sat there for awhile, when we realized that there was no one else sitting with us. We had to go inside to the terminal and go through security again and board through a different gate. Gee, one would think we had never flown before. J We arrived in Darwin too late to really see much of the city that evening. We will hopefully spend Wednesday doing some sightseeing; it looks like a very nice city.

Saturday morning we boarded a big coach and joined about 20 others for a 3 day tour of the Kakadu National Park. This amazing place covers a huge portion of the Northern Territory. It is jointly run by the national government of Australia and the Aboriginal people of this region. We enjoyed this very rugged area of woodland-savanna scenery as we drove throughout the day. We started this adventure by taking a cruise on the Adelaide River seeing the jumping crocodiles. What a sight to see these big creatures leaping out of the water for the chunks of pork meat that they hung out over the boat on a big pole. My favorite was old Bogart; he must have been 12-15 feet long. His teeth were pretty snagily looking, his skin was quite scared up and he only had 1 leg. The other 3 were stumps, had been bitten off in skirmishes to assert his dominance of the area he lives in; looks like he has had a pretty tough life. We then went out to the airfield and boarded a small plane for a 30 minute flight over the park. We flew over the huge sandstone rock escarpments; along the Adelaide River, and the Alligator River (misnamed by an early explorer who thought that the crocs were alligators); over many billabongs, and across the fields of trees, bush and wet lands. After our flight we headed to Ubirr and walked among the rocks and saw some very outstanding examples of ancient Aboriginal rock paintings. Many of these are thought to be in the area of 10,000 years old, some right next to those might be less than 100 years old. Each picture had a story to be used by the locals to teach their children the morals of life. Each mural has up to 6 stories, but only the first and most primary are ever told to the “white man”. The walk was a bit taxing, steep climbs over rocks and weather was very warm, but worth the struggle and sweat. We spent the night in Gagudju at the Crocodile Holiday Inn. This hotel looks like a crocodile from the air, very unique indeed.

Sunday – Mother’s Day, we rejoined our tour mates and drove through the Nourlangie Area and saw many more of the rock paintings. We also enjoyed some beautiful views from the top of the rocks that we hiked. As we drove along the roads there were a lot fires burning. These are purposely set by the parks people to burn the grass that grows up and poses a bigger fire danger if it is left to grow. The Aboriginals say that this is just “cleaning up” the bush land. The parks attempt to burn the grass every 3 years to try and keep it in check. Today’s cruise was along the Yellow waters Billabong and River. We again saw quite a few Crocs and an amazing number of birds. We saw the Jabaroo, which is Australia’s only stork. We stayed in the town of Katherine in a small little hotel.

Monday morning we headed for Nimiluk National Park (Katherine Gorge). We had another great boat ride. This was a breakfast cruise; we saw the sun rise up over the beautiful red sandstone walls of the gorge. We spent the afternoon taking a cooling dip in the beautiful Edith Falls Billabong. We drove back this afternoon and spent the night in Darwin.

Tuesday morning we set out on a day trip to Litchfield National Park. This is an area west of Kakadu. Again amazing bush land. We saw more termite mounds. The large cathedral mounds were incredible. The tallest ones appeared to be 16-18 feet tall. Even more amazing is that there is more of the structure under the ground. The mounds are made from the soil that the termites excavate out of the tunnels that they dig. The mounds serve as air conditioning and food storage. We also saw magnetic termite mounds, which looked more like flat panels, 4 x 4 feet in size – with their walls getting the morning and afternoon sun. There are more termites by weight than any other living creatures on earth. We took in 3 waterfalls this afternoon, we went to Tolmer and Wangi Falls; we couldn’t swim there because of Crocs. We did take a quick dip in the Florence pool, felt really nice and cool because it was very warm this afternoon. We got back to Darwin this afternoon – we are finished with this wonderful Top End Tour.

Broome, WA

May 5-8 2008 Broome, Western Australia

Monday we left the beautiful 80 Mile Beach and drove our final leg north to the city of Broome, a very interesting drive. We left before 7:30am and saw 20-30 eagles and other birds of prey along our route. They were feeding on the road kill from the night before, mostly wallabies. It was very impressive these huge birds winging up just in front of the moho as we drove along. We saw more birds that we did oncoming traffic. We got into Broome (situated at the southernmost tip of the rugged Kimberly region of Western Australia it is only 18 degrees south of the equator), in the mid afternoon and it was very HOT. The campsite that we got had no shade, so we decided we would drive downtown and see if we could find something to do with air conditioning. We walked along the shopping area they call Chinatown, although there are very few shops that are owned and or operated by the Chinese as they once were. We saw the famous Sun Cinemas, the oldest running outdoor garden theatre in the world. They started showing silent movies in 1916. You sit outside in canvas lawn chairs and watch the movie on the big screen. Unfortunately they were not showing a movie that night, but it was very intriguing. We saw a lot of interesting shops, most selling the pearls that Broome is famous for. Because of the heat we felt it necessary to go to Matzo’s the local full mash hand crafted brewery. It was a nice break from the heat.

Tuesday morning we packed, cleaned and turned in our little Maui Motor home and checked into The Cable Beach Club Resort. What a beautiful place, tropical gardens, beautiful pools, luxurious rooms, and interesting artifacts from China, India and other exotic places around the world. Well, now I can tell you, this is the LIFE! This is what traveling should be about. J Call me spoiled, but one could really get used to living like this. Of course had we stayed many nights here, our trip would have been considerably shorter and we wouldn’t have seen as much. But we definitely enjoyed this nice change of life style. We spent the afternoon by the pool swimming, sunning and generally unwinding.

Wednesday we went on a city tour of Broome and saw more of this beautiful beachside community that has become very popular and expensive. The employers have trouble finding enough people to staff the resorts and tourist industry because many, who would ordinarily work these jobs, work for the mining industry and make a lot more money. The young folks that are traveling around Australia, called “backpackers”, often stop and stay for a while make a few dollars. This does lead to a lot of turnover and can be problematic especially during their busy tourist season when the population swells from 15,000 people to over 50,000. We went to the Lugger's Museum (the old wooden pearling boats) and saw examples of the old pearling industry and gained much more respect for the difficulties that this early industry encountered. Up until the mid 1940’s the pearling was done for the mother of pearl found on the inside of the oyster shell. We are talking big oysters; the “Pincada maxima”, the largest oyster in the world, many large ones measuring 10” or more across. The Second World War had about destroyed this industry and it was dealt a final blow after the development of plastics as mother of pearl was no longer needed for buttons. The Japanese that had been imported and worked as the divers in this trade strengthened the industry with the introduction of cultured pearls. This breathed new life into the trade and has put Broome on the map. We went to the Japanese Cemetery where over 900 young men are buried. Most of them died while working on the Luggers. Many died from the bends or resulting disabilities, drowning or being caught in cyclones. Many of the graves are made from the beautiful red rock that is found in the area. Gantheaume Point was our next stop. We walked along some red craggy rocks and enjoyed the contrast with the beautiful turquoise blue Indian Ocean. There are supposedly dinosaur foot prints to be found in the rocks at very low tide – guess the tide wasn’t out enough, because we didn’t see any. We did find Anastasia’s pool, a place in the rock where the light house keeper had dug out for a soaking tub for his wife with arthritis. The pool will fill during high tides. The tides in this area are amazing they can vary in depth up to over 30’ in less than 12 hours. The best part of the day was our camel ride. We rode in a train of camels on a great big “ship of the desert” named Ezrah. It was quite an experience riding on these plodding guys along the sand at the water’s edge watching an incredible sunset. We rode for over an hour and it was one the highlights of our time in Broome. Even Mike said he liked it, after originally thinking it was just a “touristy” thing to do.

Thursday morning we went about 30km/20miles out of town to Willies Pearl Farm, had a informative presentation on how cultured pearls are made, then a nice boat ride out on the estuary to see oysters as they are hung on long ropes in the water. It is quite a labor intensive industry, after seeding the oyster the shells have to hoisted out of the water every 2-3 weeks and scrubbed clean. Backpackers can get up to $1000/week for this seasonal job that for up to three months. This goes on for 2 years while the little pearl is developing. Guess that is why these Broome pearls are so expensive. We have really enjoyed our time in Broome; have felt quite pampered and rested. Tomorrow we head to the “Top End” portion of our trip.

Karatha to 80 Mile beach

May 3-4, 2008 Karratha to 89 Mile Beach Western Australia
Well here we are again; reporting to you on the wonders of this amazing country and the fantastic adventures we continue to have. We left Karratha on Saturday mid-day and headed to 80 Mile Beach the only place we could really see on the atlas that we could possible camp and break up the 680km/450m drive to Broome. It was another interesting day, driving through a desert like area, somewhat reminiscent of driving through our southwest region of the states. This Pilbara Region has some of the oldest geological rock formations and life forms. These formations were created billions of years ago when the land mass was the ocean floor. As you are driving you will go for miles where the scenery is flat with some green low growing plants, then the next minute you see in the distance these up thrusting of rocks that seem to just come out of nowhere, and you then will drive for a few miles looking from left to right and back again at these colorful red rock formations. It is amazing the number of miles we have driven and I can honestly say it has never been boring. We stopped mid afternoon in Port Headland. It is a big mining town and we took a quick “drive by” so we could say we had seen it. It is a major mining area. In the 1960s the production of the locally mined iron ore saw the population boom from 1,200 to the 15,000+ that live there now They also have a large solar salt facility where we saw huge mounds of Dampier Salt that are sent all over the world for industrial use. The most interesting thing that we saw was the incredible infrastructure of transportation that they have to move all of the products that they have to ship. Port Headland is one of the biggest ports on the East Coast. It set the record for the longest train 7.35km/5miles; it had 8 locomotives and 682 cars. Boy one sure would have not wanted to get stuck at the train crossing when that was passing. Next year they hope to make the train unmanned and totally computer controlled. We are definitely back up into the warm climate, as the thermometer on the Maui said it was 40c – or about 110 F. Now I am not sure it was quite that hot, but it was definitely VERY WARM! Driving along the highway there are no towns and minimal services, so for fuel on Saturday afternoon we drove about 10 miles up a dirt road to the Pardoo Station. This was a cattle station that also had 2 fuel pumps, a little connivance store and few camping sites. It was really quite a pretty little sight. We might have stayed there if we hadn’t had our eyes on 80 Mile Beach. We pulled into the caravan park at 80 Mile Beach at about 5:00pm. We parked the rig and ran up the road to catch the sunset on this amazingly long, beautiful and very un-crowded beach. What a wonderful end to a day. You might take notice of the picture of the "road train", these are huge in every way.
Sunday we took the day off. We had really planned that we would do this every 3 or 4 days, but we seem to find so much that we want to do and see. We spent the day walking along the beach collecting an incredible variety of shells. It will be a feat if we are able to get them all home. On our morning walk we saw a dozen or so surf fishermen for as far as we could see. They weren’t catching much but one could hardly beat the view. We enjoyed a social time with a few of the other campers. They were Australians about our age, and for the most part were on 12 month or more “drive-arounds” of their own country. It was interesting listening to them tell about the places they had been. Really made it hard on us to think we weren’t going to get too many of the places they were talking about. We were very relaxed and enjoyed our day being beach bums. Tomorrow is our last day in the little caravan, hard to believe that we will have made it from Cairns to Broome, some 12,000 K, or 8,000 miles.

Carnarvon to Exmouth WA

April 28—May 1 The North West Coast Highway: Carnarvon to Exmouth
Hello out there in “Blog Land”. We have been struggling make entries to our 80 Days Around OZ travel blog . There has been limited access to Wi-Fi connections and even when we have had them they have not always been cooperative. All of you who know Mike and I understand our limited computer prowess, and then to have difficulties doing what we try to do, well you can probably read the frustration in my words.  Anyway when you are reading this you will realize that we found a link once again. If there are no photos, it is because we struggled and lost the battle to get them to “down load”. We will continue to write and edit past blogs, try and add the photos, so stay tuned to our attempts and see what happens. Breathe deeply, count to 10 and don’t throw the lap top!
We left Monkey Mia on Monday and headed back on our route along the west coast. We stopped at Shell Beach, which was truly amazing. As the Aussies would say there are “heaps” of shells there; little tiny white cockle shells that are layered up to 20-30 feet deep along this beach. As you walk along you see where the shells have been crushed by people, but when you scratch down below the surface there are millions of the little shells. Scientists are puzzled as to why they are along this small beach and how there continue to be so many of them. By mid afternoon we got to the town of Carnarvon. We took a walk along their 1 Mile Jetty that was built in 1877 to load live stock and materials on to ships to be sent to Perth. The jetty is in pretty rough shape, I felt like I needed to keep my eyes on the boards so as to make sure I didn’t step through into the ocean below. There were quite a few fishermen out on it, supposed to be good fishing there. We gave the caretakers, (that were sitting there collecting the $2.00 a head fee), a bit of a tip to try and help them with the rebuilding fund, it will cost about $2,500. for each of the 200 pylons that hold the structure up.
Tuesday we are off to Exmouth. The scenery along the way is dotted with very BIG termite mounds. They are home of the spinifex termite who lives there with 1000s of their family members. The mounds are so well built they last up to a 100 + years. We took a lunch break in Coral Bay, it was drizzling so the ocean wasn’t as beautiful as pictures has led us to believe, but there were a lot of people there, so must have been a good spot to stay. We had our eyes set on Exmouth and got there by about 3:00pm. We called and confirmed our Ningaloo Reef glass bottom boat and snorkeling tour for Wednesday and then read about the tour that will take you out to swim with the Whale Sharks. We were hooked, whipped our plastic money card out and before we knew it we had spent a chunk of change and we were going to be swimming with the biggest fish in the ocean!
Wednesday Morning was cloudy but calm, and warm. We were picked up at our camp site and driven to the boat launching area in Tandibidi Beach a few miles across the North West Cape from Exmouth. Along the way we saw some interesting sights. We drove past these enormous transmission towers that been put up by the “crazy yanks” in 1967 during the cold war, there are 13 of these incredibly tall antennas. The tallest being 387 meters or about 1200 feet tall. That one also now serves as the light house, with the light being installed only about half way up the tower, because any higher and it might be obscured by the clouds. We also saw the remains of the wreck of the Mildura, in the Exmouth Gulf; she went down in 1907 during a cyclone. We got to our boat and boarded for a nice 2 hour cruise. We really enjoyed snorkeling the Ningaloo Reef. The ocean was quite calm and there were some areas where we were only a couple of feet above the reef so it was great. We saw a lot of colorful fish, corals, and plant life. We saw a very large cod fish, and a sea turtle. It doesn’t quite look like what one sees on the Discovery Channel, because the ocean blocks out the color of red and so unless you use artificial light under the water everything is a bit grayer and duller than might be expected. It was a great morning. We then were delivered back to camp where we cleaned up and headed out for our own tour of the area. We drove down the peninsula to see the other beaches including Turquoise Bay in the North Cape National Park. We ended our afternoon up at the old light house hoping for a good sunset, but there were too many clouds so we headed back to camp.
Thursday – day # 60; how quickly our trip is going. We woke up to gray skies and winds, hmm not quite the picture perfect day we were hoping for being out on the ocean most of the day. We met our bus and were driven back out to Tandibidi Boat Launch. We took a small rubber tender out to the boat that we would snorkel from. There was a very friendly group of about 20 of us snorkelers plus a very friendly and helpful crew. We sailed out past the area of the reef that we had visited previously and we were invited to take a morning snorkel. Oh my goodness, we had seas reminiscent of the Pacific on the Great Barrier Reef. Very rough water, choppy with white caps, not what I like to swim in. Because we are good sports, because we will only be here once, because we spent a lot $$$ on this adventure, we jumped in. We swam, we swam and we struggled to get out to see the reef and struggled even more to get back to the boat, because of course the current had swept us further away. Well barely breathing and our arms and legs shaking from the work-out we huffed and puffed our way back up onto the boat. Oh my! What had we gotten ourselves into? The staff then served a very nice morning tea: coffee or tea and a nice assortment of sweet and savory type of snacks. That helped to wash away the salt from my mouth and replenish our strength of what was to come. The boat then lifted anchor and sailed further out to sea. The captain of the boat was in contact with a spotter air plane that flew over the Ningaloo Reef looking for Whale Sharks. The Whale Shark is not a whale, but a very large fish (the largest fish in the ocean) that eats only plankton. They can grow up to almost 60 feet in length. These “gentle giants” are incredible, they have 1000s of tiny teeth in 300 rows that they strain their food through. It wasn’t more than a half an hour when the crew gave us the heads up that one of our desired Whale Sharks had been seen and we would be getting our chance to swim with it. We were poised on the back of the boat with our masks and fins on; given the command we jumped into the water and swam some 50 yards or so to see our target. Remember again choppy seas, very fast fish – you get the picture, we swam for all we were worth over to our guide, we saw this very big fish; we saw the very big fish swim away. Wasn’t quite what I had expected, guess I was thinking trained fish, swims quietly, and calmly with the old lady! Old man takes pictures. End of adventure. Well we did it, we saw it, Karen once, Mike twice, and Mike was able to capture it amazingly on the little underwater camera. After about a couple of hours of moving the boat spotting the fish, snorkelers chasing the fish, the Whale Shark took a dive and left the area, phew enough fun for one day. We then were served a nice lunch and sailed back in closer to land. We did snorkel again in the afternoon, the seas had calmed a lot and it was nice, not as much to see as the day before, but we swam over some beautiful coral and enjoyed a more relaxing swim. We had a memorable day and can say we have had the chance to: Swim with the biggest fish in the ocean. Oh ours wasn’t the biggest only about 12-15 feet long, but it was amazing none the less. Tomorrow we continue north planning an overnight stop at 80 Mile Beach. Enjoy, we may not find wifi again for a few days