people are the same wherever we go....

As an historian, I must say that I do find it a little amusing the way that there are so many things signposted both in New Zealand & in Australia as "historic".. when actually what they mean is that the item in question might be about 100 years old. I shouldn't be so snobby about these things, of course... not everyone is lucky enough to have so many ancient monuments and so much monumental architecture on their doorsteps as us Europeans, but it's hard not to see it (more than a touch patronisingly) as a little sweet - bless these colonials with their "history" and their search for a place in the world.

But of course, the human history of both of these countries goes back beyond the arrival of the Europeans a couple of centuries ago. What's really interesting around this part of the world is the way that the Maori culture seems to be part and parcel of NZ life in a way that aboriginal Australian culture is not. I'm ill qualified to comment on this with any authority, of course, and these are only my observations....

In New Zealand, their Maori heritage seems to be something that is honoured and preserved. The Maori language is prominent: this may be the result of a recent campaign to prevent it disappearing altogether by making a concerted effort to get kids to learn it and to speak it, but the result is that lots of things are presented with their Maori names displayed first: Mount Cook is called Aoraki / Mount Cook these days, and I can ultimately see the Cook bit being dropped entirely over time and in the national museum, Te Papa, all plaques are in two languages, with the Maori displayed before the English. Every museum we visited also had extensive displays of the polynesian history of the island, and in places like Rotorua, cultural displays are as big an attraction to tourists as the skydiving and bungee jumping. A huge proportion of tourists will leave New Zealand wearing a bone carving or a piece of greenstone as a souvenir of their stay, both the products of Maori culture. Most obviously of all, of course, is the haka performed by the All Blacks before every rugby test. Can there be a more prominent display of New Zealand's cultural heritage and how big a part it is of the nation's pysche?

I'd assumed that the Maori had been in New Zealand for years, but actually they only arrived something like 400 years before the Europeans. Of course, the European arrival changed things dramatically, but the massive environmental changes usually associated with the European arrival actually started with the Maoris and are really not all our fault. Sure, the pace of change accelerated massively after Captain Cook's arrival, but the Maori had already begun to radically change the environment before the tall ships sailed into view: the massive wingless Moa were hunted to extinction before we turned up, for example and the rat was introduced to the islands by the polynesians as a meat source....

By way of contrast to this relatively recent history of human intervention on the environment in New Zealand, the Autralian Aboriginal culture dates back omething like 40,000 years....it's the earliest human culture. And yet, as we travelled around, we barely saw a single aboriginal face in Southern Australia and they were most easily found in North Queensland in the local branch of MacDonalds every evening or drinking from brown paper bags on a park bench. With something like 400 distinct languages rather than just the one, I suppose it's much harder to include the indigenous language on bilingual signposts, but the difference with New Zealand is really marked, with the Australian Aborigines seemingly much less involved in the "Modern" society than the Maori in New Zealand. A couple we met in Tasmania told us how they had worked as volunteers with the aboriginal people of Queensland, but that no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn't help people who didn't want to be helped. They told us about how they found a group in the house they had been given trying to cool themselves down with sprinklers inside their living room, in spite of the fact they were surrounded by TVs and air conditioning units. Another story we heard was of the aborigine who won a pile of money on the lottery and spent it all on a top of the range Toyota Land Cruiser that was up in bricks and rotting within a month. The problems clearly run deep with two cultures that just don't seem to be capable of integration.

A Kiwi kayaker we met in the Whitsundays told us that the difference in New Zealand was because -- unlike the Australian aborigines -- the Maori were never actually subdued by the Europeans and Maori rights were ultimately enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, recognising claims to the land and their rights as British citizens in their own right. It's a treaty that is still referred to today. There is no Australian equivalent....

Of course, this is a complicated issue, and I certainly won't pretend that I have all the answers. I know that everything isn't rosy in New Zealand, and neither is everything all doom and gloom in Australia. To say otherwise would be a gross over-simplification.... but it has certainly been interesting to observe the differences between these two beautiful countries as we've travelled around them both over the last couple of months.

ticket to the tropics....

With the diving on the reef out of the way, we now had the small matter of nine days and 1700km between us and our flight out of Brisbane to Christchurch in New Zealand. The whole aim of our trip to Tropical North Queensland had been to learn how to dive, and we were always going to play the rest of it by ear... but here it was and now we really had to work out what the hell we were going to do with our time.

One decision was easy: we’d enjoyed our campervan on the Great Ocean Road so much that it was a no-brainer to rent another one to take us down the Queensland coast. Although we'd paid for the same type of van that we had in southern Australia, this time around we were given a somewhat more muscular 4x4 version at no extra cost.  I almost felt manly up there behind the wheel of that monster.... almost..... Of course, there’s a reason that this is called Tropical North Queensland, as we were to discover on our first night out of Cairns in a campsite in Townsville, some 370km down the coast.... it’s extremely hot and humid around here, especially at this time of year. You tend not to notice this sort of thing when you’re in an air-conditioned hotel room or on a boat out on the ocean, but in an unpowered campervan..... In southern Australia, we’d got used to the camper turning from an oven to a fridge in the course of about an hour as the temperature dropped at night, and we’d been grateful for our blankets. In Queensland, we had quite a different problem: shutting the doors and windows on the van was clearly not an option, but the heat and humidity brings with it a vast array of biting insects. This is where I get lucky. Although I get plenty of bites, I would estimate for every one that I get, C. gets about 20. Over the course of the last week or so, the poor girl has been eaten alive. Even after we managed to get hold of a mosquito net, we were never able to keep the sandflies and midges at bay. It’s been carnage.

Biting insects aside, it’s been another wonderful few days. Our first stop along the way was easy, We flogged it for four hours past the banana plantations alongside the Bruce Highway out of Cairns to get down to Townsville for one simple reason: the Yongala. As soon as they learned that we were driving south, all of the Pro-Dive guys on our boat told us that we simply had to stop to dive the Yongala. The SS Yongala sank in 1911 with the loss of all 122 hands. The wreck wasn’t discovered until 1947, and wasn’t dived until 1958, by which point it had become something of an oasis for marine life in the desert of the surrounding sandy ocean floor. The wreck is almost completely intact and sits at a depth of between 16m and 30m in the ocean, making it eminently diveable. As it’s protected by Australian law as a historic site and is effectively a gravesite, you’re not allowed to penetrate the remains of the ship themselves, but you are able to get down and have a look at the ship and the incredibly diverse marine life that now surrounds it.

Our diving instructors made great play on the fact that the wreck is home to several Bull sharks, a species known to be big, curious, fearless and unpredictable, but they also told us that we should definitely go and have a look. As we now categorically had the diving bug, what else were we going to do? In the end, our trip out to the wreck taught me two things:

1) How lucky we were with conditions out on the Great Barrier Reef. There we had visibility of 20m and almost no currents. On the Yongala, we were forced to make do with visibility of 5m and some really strong currents. Having never dived in a current before, this took quite some getting used to, and meant that we spent a great deal of energy and air just trying to stay alongside the wreck. The poor visibility meant that, although we saw plenty of the ship, we didn’t see as much as we might have done. Once back on the boat after the second of our two dives, the crew told us that the currents probably meant that the Bull sharks were sheltering in lee of the boat, but just out of sight. I found that thought strangely unsettling

2) Although the company that took us out to the wreck was perfectly acceptable, it drove home how lucky we had been with Pro-Dive in Cairns, where everything was just that little bit better, from the equipment down to the guys supervising the dive.

In all, I thought it was a great day. If we go back when we’re a little more experienced and when conditions are a little easier, I’m sure we’d get more out of it.... but as things stood, it was still pretty amazing to swim around a shipwreck like that.

After Townsville, we drove on down through Queensland, pausing at Bowen before heading on down to Airlie Beach. Bowen was funny: it’s essentially a small provincial town, but ever since the film “Australia” was partially filmed there, they seem to have become starstruck. There’s a huge watercooler on the edge of town painted with the slogan “Bowenwood”, and every shop seems to have a story to tell about “Hugh and Nic” stopping to buy their sausage rolls, or somesuch. Still, I did have a nice sandwich there (chicken and avocado), so....

Airlie Beach is a different kettle of fish altogether. It’s the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, and as such is very firmly a stop on the backpacker circuit. Most people stop here for a cruise around the 74 Islands, but as we were already chasing the clock, we only stopped to spend half a day Sea Kayaking. It’s not much time, but it was long enough to get a real feel for quite how beautiful a part of the world this is, and we got to paddle with turtles and stingrays, looking up at the sea eagles as they soared above the crystal clear waters. Our guide’s last job was in the New Zealand tourist office, so we were able to pick up lots of useful hints about the next stop in our trip. Not for the first time, we realised that we are going to have to come back to Queensland in the winter, when apparently the weather is wonderful and we’ll be able to see the wildlife at its best, including whales. One day, perhaps.

The next couple of days were a blur of driving down the Bruce Highway, watching the scenery slowly change as we moved on south. We stopped overnight at Marlborough, but were working our way towards Gympie where we had arranged to meet up with some friends. I say “friends”, but actually I’d only ever really encountered Deb via the Bookcrossing website back in about 2004. We’d exchanged a few books and seemed to get on well, and that seemed like enough of an excuse to get out of the camper for the night and to spend some time in a real bed with some real people. In the end, I was absolutely delighted that we stopped at Margaritaville to meet Deb, Jaimie, their two dogs, their chooks, their guinea fowl and their peacock. It poured with rain the whole time we were there, but the welcome was warm and it was a real treat to be able to share Deb’s birthday meal on the Saturday night and to then be treated to barbecued bacon and eggs for my birthday on the Sunday morning. It was a lovely 24 hours, and I really can’t begin to thank them enough for their hospitality. We’ll definitely be coming back here next time we’re in Queensland (that kayaking trip sounded good), but in the meantime, if you ever find yourselves in Nottingham....

Next up was Rainbow Beach and on to Fraser Island. Luckily for us, by the time we started travelling on Sunday afternoon, the weather was easing up and the roads that had been closed were now all open. By the time we reached the coast, you wouldn’t know it had been raining at all.... apart from the cloud of biting insects, that is.

Time meant that we didn’t really have all that long to explore the island, so we booked onto a two day, one night tour. The island is a UNESCO world heritage site, but as a sand island, the only way around is by 4X4 vehicles. Lots of people rent their own trucks to carry them around the island, but as I’ve never driven on sand before, I didn’t fancy that and decided to let someone else – a professional, no less - do the hard work. I can’t say that I’m sorry we did, either. It’s tough driving over there, either on the roads up into the rainforests or on 75 mile beach as you race against the tide to make your ferry. Anyway, it’s a lovely spot. We saw plenty of dingos, we swam in beautiful Lake Mackenzie, a freshwater lake perched some 80m above sealevel with the softest, clearest water and the most perfect white beaches, we climbed Indian Head to peer into the ocean to see if we could see any of the breeding colony of Tiger sharks, we cooled off in a freshwater creek (the sharks and currents make swimming in the ocean impossible), we walked in the rainforest, we drove along 75 mile beach and admired the wreck of the SS Maheno on the sands.......

I’m pretty sure that the best way to see the island is to spend a week there, camping and walking across it. We only had time for a whistlestop tour, and we spent much of that time sharing the places we stopped at with school parties and backpackers. Even so, it was a pretty cool place. Another world heritage site ticked off the list, and another reason to return to Queensland. We were very lucky with the weather too.... given the rains of 24 hours previously, we had nothing but sunshine all the time we were there. It’s a beautiful spot, and it’s actually hard to believe that the Australian government is so relaxed about letting people hire 4x4s and drive themselves around this island. That can’t be doing the environment on a sand island much good, eh? Still, it’s a lovely spot.

All that remained to us after that (and a haircut) was to flog the remaining 250km or so down to Brisbane. In all we did something like 2000km down the Queensland coast, and the time just flew by. Brisbane seems like a nice spot, a city with a proper metropolitan feel to it like Melbourne, but to be honest all I’ve really got the energy for is to have a quiet drink and to get ready for our flight out to New Zealand. The last month in Australia has been absolutely fantastic, and we seem to have managed to cram so much in that it feels like we’ve been here for a lot longer. Now though, it’s time to get ready for a somewhat colder climate and an almost complete change of scenery. South Island New Zealand, here we come.......

not much has changed but they live underwater....

Perhaps it’s a boy thing, but did you ever read the “Adventure” series of books by Willard Price? They’re a collection of children’s adventure novels, featuring a couple of teenaged naturalists called Hal and Roger Hunt, who encounter various pirates and poachers as they travel the world collecting specimens for their father’s wildlife collection. Anyway. I ripped through these books before I was a teenager, and they made a big impression on me. As well as giving me a desire to go on a proper safari in Africa, they also made me desperately want to strap an aqualung on my back and go and explore the world underneath the sea. Hal and Roger always seemed to be running into sharks and deadly rays every time they slipped beneath the waves, but even that wasn’t enough to put me off the idea.

Quite why I’ve waited until now to give diving a go, I’ll never know. I was actually given some “try scuba” type sessions as a birthday present a few years ago, but I never quite got around to it. If you’re going to learn how to dive though, where better than the Great Barrier Reef? Two of my friends have qualified as divers in the last few years, one in the Red Sea and one in a flooded quarry in England, both I’m sure were good in their own ways, but surely learning on one of the natural wonders of the world has got to be a great way to spend your time, no?

My first concern, naturally, was my health. Australia has some of the strictest medical regulations around diving in the world: if you want to dive in Australia, you must first pass an Australian dive medical. Although I was keen to spend some of our time down under learning, I didn’t want to get my hopes up until I thought I had a decent chance of actually passing the medical. I emailed a couple of diving schools in Cairns, and although both were exceptionally helpful, essentially all they were able to tell me was that I would have to see a doctor to be sure. There are two key problems with multiple sclerosis that make a dive medical problematic: the first is simply that the spread of symptoms can be so wide that it is impossible to judge how able or otherwise an individual is to dive until you have seen them with your own eyes.... you may be virtually entirely physically unaffected, or you may be unable to walk unassisted. No self-respecting doctor is going to sign anyone with MS off until they’ve had a good look at them. The second, and perhaps more thorny problem, is that some of the most common symptoms of MS are the same as some of the symptoms of decompression sickness – the Bends. DCS is what can happen when you ascend too quickly and the nitrogen in your body tries to revert to gaseous form. It can ultimately kill you, but some of the tell-tale signs that you have been affected are things like numbness, pins and needles, muscle weakness... all common MS symptoms, and all things that affect me.

On the advice of one of the dive schools, before I left the UK, I asked my MS Nurse to give me a letter confirming that I was fit and physically able. Maxine, bless her, went well above the call of duty, and wrote me a letter saying that I had run the Nottingham marathon this year and had a daily routine that consisted on 5 mile runs. None of it entirely true, but it made all the difference, as it confirmed to the doctor in Cairns that I was physically active and he didn’t just have to take my word for it. I was signed off and ready to go. Actually, as it turned out, C had much greater difficulty than me with her medical, and her occasional asthma was very nearly a show-stopper. Luckily (and I think it was down to luck) the doctor asked her to sign a disclaimer saying that she was aware of the risks, and then he signed her off... and we were ready to start our training.

At this juncture, serendipity took hold of our destiny. We were all set to go with one company (one of the ones that had been so helpful over email), when we dropped into an independent travel agency next to their office to enquire about another Wicked Camper to take us down the Queensland Coast. Andy at Experience Cairns was, as it turns out, something of an expert on diving in the area, and he listened to what we wanted to do, warned us against the company we were going to go with, and suggested we try Pro-Dive in Cairns. With nothing much to lose and no particular preference, we took his advice, and were picked up early the next morning to commence our pool training and our theory lessons.

What can I say: Pro-Dive were superb. Our class consisted of a bunch of Swedes, a couple of dutch guys, a Czech and another English girl, and our instructor – Janine – was originally from Leeds but had been in Oz for something like 9 years. It was brilliant. For the first couple of days, we alternated the theory in the classroom with skills sessions in the pool. Before that first day, I had never once in my life been underwater with a tank of air on my back, but before the end of the second day, I actually thought I knew what I was doing. On the end of the second day, we all sat the PADI Open Water exam. You needed 75% to pass, and I got 49/50 and C got 50/50 (although to this day I will dispute that the answer I gave to question#39 was just as valid....and besides, she revised and everything). In fact, the whole class passed, and so we all boarded the boat the next morning to spend the next three days on the Great Barrier Reef.

The transfer from Cairns to the reef is something like 3 hours, and for the first day and a half out there, we completed our Open Water certification by demonstrating our skills in the water – skills like clearing your mask underwater, showing you have control of your buoyancy, showing you have some basic navigation skills.... nothing too complicated, but all the fundamental basics that any diver should understand. Once certified, we were able to dive without an instructor, but were also given the option of completing our PADI Adventure Diver certification whilst on the reef: basically this entailed another couple of supervised dives, including a deep dive to 30m (the Open Water qualification enables you to dive to 18m, and that extra 12m can make a big difference if you want to dive wrecks and things like that.)

 Our instructor, Janine, shows off her muscles by throttling me...

It’s hard to explain how brilliant these few days were. The weather was perfect: the water was calm, visibility was a constant 20m and a steady 29 degrees; the company was good too... but above all, I was learning a new skill and was immediately able to apply it in an incredibly beautiful environment. We were warned, before reaching the reef, that often people are disappointed when it doesn’t live up to some of those amazing photos and film footage that we’ve all seen of all those colourful fish. The truth is that it probably doesn’t, but it is still AWESOME. Nothing can really prepare you for getting up close and personal with such an incredible diversity of marine life: parrotfish, huge bass, a 150 year old turtle the size of a dinner table, squid, clown anemone fish (Nemo!), many and varied types of coral, batfish, eagle rays, maori wrasse the size of dogs..... and sharks. Ah, sharks. We’ve all seen Jaws, and the shark is the one fish that still summons up a kind of primal fear. We are, after all, lower on the foodchain than some of these guys. The truth, of course, is that you are extremely unlikely to be attacked by any shark, and even less likely to be attacked by the ones we were going to see on the reef. Even so, there was something incredibly thrilling when we saw our first White Tipped Reef sharks on our first dive after qualifying. They weren’t especially big, but I saw the pair of them basking on the sand during the heat of the day, and all I wanted to do was to get closer. One swam away, but we got to within about 2m of the other before he got tired of us and moved away a little to try and sleep.

careful, the wind might change....

Later on that same day, we went on a night dive. Sharks during the day are one thing, but they are essentially nocturnal hunters, and seeing them after dark was going to be a completely different kettle of fish. Our pre-dive briefing warned us that there was a chance that we could encounter bigger, more dangerous sharks like Bull sharks or Tiger sharks.  Both are fearless, aggressive and curious, and if we did meet them, there was a chance they could come and have a closer look at us.  In those circumstances, we were taught to form the "ring of steel", in a circle with our backs to the shark and to descend.  The idea is that sharks attack from below, so going deeper makes that harder for them, and if they come to have a closer look (i.e. quick taste) of you, then you are presenting your back to them and they'll get a mouthful of your tank.... we were told partially in jest, of course, but it was enough to give us pause for thought before getting into the water, that's for damn sure.  As it turned out, I actually jumped into the water when I could already see sharks circling, and I was happy to..... my fear was overwhelmed by my excitement at seeing these magnificent animals at close quarters. Night diving is strange and creepy simply because you can only see what your torch is illuminating, and if you’re at the back of the line, you have very little idea of what’s behind you. It’s also the time of day when much of the reef flora and fauna comes out to play and can be seen at its best. Most, I’m afraid, was lost on me, as I was far too wrapped up in the sensation of diving in the dark to pick up the finer detail. On the way back to the boat, we saw a few Grey Reef Whaler sharks on the prowl. One was at least 2m long – bigger than me – and whilst it was exciting to see a shark up close that afternoon, to see one cruising around looking for something to eat was even more thrilling

Sexy stinger suit

It was an awesome, awesome few days. Our instructor was brilliant, the boat was good and the guys I was diving with were fun. All in all, one of the best weeks of my life, I reckon. Turns out that I quite like diving too. Yeah, I’ve got lots to learn and my big lungs guzzle up my air far too quickly, but I think that I’ve picked up a new hobby.

Just brilliant. If I do nothing else whilst I'm away, then this alone makes the whole trip worthwhile. Plus I now have the wherewithal to dive with dolphins and seals in New Zealand, Orca in Canada... the underwater world is suddenly my oyster.

by the ocean road to linger there....

We only had one night in Melbourne, but it was long enough to reaffirm the impression I first got back in 2004 that this was the liveliest city in Australia. Alright, so perhaps it's not fair to compare a modern metropolis like this with a backwater like Launceston, but even in Sydney I found bars shutting early on a weeknight.... and here the whole place seems to be pumping.

The last time we were here, we stayed with some distant relatives of C's - they're my wife's mother's godmother's niece and family, that makes them pretty distant, right? Anyway, they're a lovely bunch, and they meet us at the airport and take us out for a splendid Italian meal. It's supposed to be our treat, but good people that they are, because we're staying in a hostel for the night instead of with them, they feel that they must pay... we protest, but they sneak off and pay anyway when we're not looking. Lovely people, and it's almost a shame that we're only in town for just the one night.

We have to leave though, as the Great Ocean Road is calling to us. Renting a car was pretty good in Tassie, but this time we wanted to go for the whole experience and have rented a campervan. Not just any campervan, mind, but a Wicked Camper. In theory, these are budget vans, but in practice, they're the only vans you would want to be seen in.

Well, I say that, but if we had been given the van next to ours in the Melbourne depot, then I'm not so sure I would have wanted to be seen in it, and would have driven to Adelaide under cover of darkness. Our Samurai pattern is pretty discreet - certainly when compared to one covered in graffiti about the size of the driver's penis.....

The Great Ocean Road starts around Geelong, a little way out of Melbourne, and curves along the coastline for something just under 300km. It was built in the years immediately following the First World War as a project to help give the returning soldiers a sense of purpose and something constructive to do during the Great Depression. It's justifiably famous, and it seems that almost every corner you turn opens up another breathtaking vista across the magnificent coastline. We've got the van for six days, so we take our time, but even then we only spend two nights on the road itself. We spend the first night in a lovely campsite in Apollo Bay, in a gorgeous spot next to a small creek and with the sound of the waves of the Southern Ocean crashing into the shore a couple of hundred meters away. The second night is spent at Peterborough, a far cry from its English namesake and with a splendid swimming beach. After that, we head up to the Grampians.

The Great Ocean Road is lovely, but I think that the more famous parts of it - on the Adelaide side - are by far the least impressive parts of it. It's not that the Twelve Apostles or London Bridge aren't spectacular to look at, it's just that they're not really massively more spectacular than other parts of the coastline we've already seen, and they're now so geared up for mass tourism that it rather takes the shine off what you're looking at. There's a massive visitor's centre and walkways at the Twelve Apostles, with a little airfield just behind so that a seemingly endless number of little helicopters can take off to give people a 15 minute scenic flight. This is the place where the big coaches stop: if you're going to visit the Ocean Road and you've only got one day to do it, then this is the place where you're going to come. The visitor's centre is only there because of this demand, and as a tourist myself, it's hard to get too snooty about the hordes of Chinese and Japanese tourists..... but having spent the morning at Cape Otway, cooing at the koalas in the trees, swimming on a pristine beach and walking along a secluded rainforest trail with almost nobody else in sight, it's hard not to feel oppressed by the hordes of people.

To get to the Grampians, we leave the Southern Ocean and hook up through rural Victoria. The landscape changes dramatically: we leave the coastline vistas behind us and enter a seemingly endless stretch of long, straight road with bushland farms on either side. It's a whole lot of nothing, and we drive through the kind of towns where not only are petrol stations not open at the weekend, but where some shops are only open one day a week.

The scenery starts to change as we get nearer to the Grampians National Park, and the volcanic escarpments start to dominate the landscape. We pass through the holiday town of Hall's Gap and head on to a quiet little campsite in the national park called Smith's Mill. This really is in the middle of nowhere, and for the princely sum of $13, we get a bush shower (a bucket with a shower nozzle), a bush toilet (don't ask) and a fire pit in the middle of the forest. It's a lovely spot, and we cook over an open fire and watch kangaroos wandering around. We are invited to a sunday roast by our next door neighbours, but we have to push on. We check out a couple of viewpoints and then head on towards Adelaide.

We stop for the night in a town called Naracoorte, and as well as marvelling at the town's manmade lagoon (seven times the size of an Olympic swimming pool and quite a nice place for a dip), we also check off another UNESCO world heritage site.... there are some caves here with fossils showing some of the earliest marsupials: a giant wombat, a massive kangaroo, marsupial lions, that kind of thing. It's also home to the southern bentwing bats, who are critically endangered, and we spend some time admiring them on infrared cameras and learning abo\ut them. It's a nice enough town, albeit another one that seems to shut up by 9pm, but again we're just passing through.

After lots of sweltering South Australian bush, we stop briefly at a nice little town called Keith, primarliy to get a postcard to send to my friend Keith (although how many towns have you been to that have a landrover on a pole?), but we're now on the highway to Adelaide.  After a recommendation from a couple we met in the Grampians, we stop at a place called Old Tailem Town to look at a reconstruction of how life used to be in a bush town.  Oh. My. God.  It's essentially a collection of mouldering junk housed in "period" reconstruction buildings.  Alarmingly it also has a number of shop dummies posed at alarming angles.

It's alarmingly like something from the League of Gentlemen, and we start to imagine that hapless visitors like ourselves are trapped inside the dummies and begin to feat that we may never be allowed to leave.  We practically run out of the door....

Our next stop is Mount Barker, about 40km outside the city. To my great delight we're now in Coopers country. Coopers is brewed in Adelaide, and we're now only about Coopers Pale Ale is, in my opinion, the nicest beer that I have tasted in Australia, and to be able to get it on tap is a real treat, even if I can't quite get my head around the fact that an Adelaide pint is 425ml, some 150ml short of an Imperial pint. It's a nice enough size for a beer, but it's not a pint....

The next morning we drop off the camper in Adelaide. I wasn't initially sure about it, but I've grown to love the flexibility it provides. Alright, so it's not the most comfortable sleep in the world, and it seems to move from oven to fridge in the space of about 20 minutes, but it's been brilliant to be able to cook what we want and to sleep where we want. The car in Tassie was fine, but it's nowhere near as cheap and flexible as a camper. I love being able to park up, crack open a beer (taken from the Eski with a slab of ice from a petrol station inside....) and to then gaze up at the awesome night skies. Quite why Orion is upside-down is a mystery to me, but I could gaze at the Southern Cross and the Milky Way for hours.... Which given that there's not much else to do when it gets dark, is probably a good thing. We decide there and then that we're going to fill that blank in our schedule between Cairns and Brisbane by hiring another camper. We also decide that this is how we want to travel around New Zealand.

Although we spend something less than 24 hours in Adelaide, it's long enough to get a feel for the place. The Adelaide Oval is reputed to be one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in the world, but as it's currently undergoing renovation, that's kind of hard for me to judge. Instead of a tour, I have to content myself with a look around the Donald Bradman museum, marvelling at the assorted bits and pieces collected about that most humourless of accumulators..... (famously from Bowral, NSW incidentally, not South Australia).

The Adelaide fringe is on, so Rundle Street is filled with performers (I help out a scottish guy who does a neat act with a bed of nails), and down in the park at the bottom, there's a whole "Garden of Unearthly Delights" which has a whole assortment of acts on show along with a very distinct Glastonbury Lost Vagueness type vibe. We play twister in a caravan with a human tamogotchi and we visit a freak show displaying the remains of horned rabbits, two-headed cows, one-eyed chickens and the like. It's really quite cool. I liked Adelaide...and only partially because of the quality of the Coopers beer.

The weather here is perfect: endless skies and sunshine. It's almost a shame to leave so soon for Tropical north Queensland, but I'm anxious to discover if I will pass the stringent Australian medical and be able to spend the next week learning how to dive on the Great Barrier Reef.....

[You'll probably have realised I'm a little behind with this... what can I say? Australian wifi is proving s-l-o-w...... I'll get there.  I bet you can't wait....]

for to face Van Diemen's land....

We don’t actually see Tasmania until we are about 10m above the runway. Tassie has a reputation for being very British, and it appears that this extends to the weather, which – compared to Sydney if not to Nottingham – is distinctly cool, cloudy and drizzly. As is often the case in Australia, we are greeted at the airport by the cutest beagle. Quarantine laws are strict, and although Hobart does not receive any international flights, there are still restrictions on taking fruit and vegetables between states. The beagle dutifully sniffs everyone as they walk past him, and then walks along the luggage belt, snuffling each bag as it comes past him. I don’t know how effective he is, but he’s certainly a nice welcome to the state.

Hobart is only a short drive away from the airport, but even without the weather, there is definitely something British about the place. The landscape doesn’t look exactly English, but – if you ignore all of those alien gum trees – there’s something about the brown-tinged low mountains that reminds me of Wales or Scotland. Hobart itself doesn’t seem all that impressive: it’s not on the Southern Ocean itself, but is rather nestled into the Estuary of the Derwent River. For all that it’s a town that is all about its maritime history, the port itself doesn’t seem all that impressive, consisting as it does of what look a lot like a load of rundown warehouses. There’s a thriving little strip around Salamanca that has a number of bars and restaurants, and there are one or two old buildings about the place, but otherwise it’s not really anything much to write home about.... even if it is nice enough.

We spend a couple of nights in Hobart, and frankly that’s enough to get a feel for the place: we pick up the hire car, we have a look at the maritime museum, we eat some delicious flathead, calamari and chips at a place called “Fish Frenzy”, and we check out the Tasmanian Museum. Apart from having an obsession with stuffed animals, this last has a really interesting exhibition on Tasmania’s aboriginal history. Although Australia as a whole doesn’t have a great track record with the natives, Tasmania’s record is especially poor – essentially the aborigines here were systematically exterminated when they proved unable (or unwilling) to assimilate with the white settlers. The exhibition tried to show the aboriginal way of life and also to apologise for their treatment by the European settlers (Tasmania was the first Australian state to formally apologise for this, although Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised on behalf of the nation upon his election a couple of years ago.) I read a fantastic book called “The English Passenger” that dealt with the issue of the aborigines in Tasmania, and I was quite moved by the exhibition. The next room along features various stuffed examples of the indigenous wildlife – first and most obviously featuring the Tasmanian Tiger, hunted to extinction by the early 1930s. It’s a sad story, for sure, and it is upsetting watching the old video footage of a captive tiger pacing up and down its cage, knowing that none are left.... but when two ladies walked past us, and one said to the other, standing right next to the aboriginal exhibition, “oh, the extinction of the tiger is the greatest tragedy to ever happen to this island”... it was hard not to be astonished at the crassness of the statement. The extinction of the Tasmanian Tiger *is* sad, but the extermination of the aboriginal inhabitants of the islands is surely worth a mention, no?

 We left Hobart early on the Saturday morning to head down to Port Arthur, a hundred or so kilometres down the Tasman peninsular. Port Arthur is where those convicts who reoffended after transportation were sent, and it had a fearsome reputation and is supposed to be an incredibly atmospheric site. To be honest, although I found the setting stunningly beautiful and the site well presented, it wasn’t until we got to the “other” prison that I found it especially atmospheric. The main prison had a well-earned reputation for brutality, and prisoners who were sent here knew they were in for a hard time: leg irons, hard labour... the works. It’s interesting to read about the people sent here, and how some of them went on to lead productive lives elsewhere in Australia; how some escaped and were quickly recaught as the hostile environment took its toll.... many prisoners died here, some as young as nine years old... and it’s hard not to feel something when cruising around the Isle of the Dead where they were all buried. The general impression, though, is of a relatively enlightened environment where successive prison governors worked hard to make sure that the prisoners were treated as fairly as possible and given every chance to return to society. It was no picnic, for sure, but neither was it entirely without merit. The “other” prison is something else entirely though. As the nineteenth century wore on, prison reformers campaigned hard against the brutality of the traditional prison system. It was far better, they said, to work on the mind of the prisoner rather than to inflict punishment on his body. The chilling result is a prison where people were kept entirely in solitary confinement; where they had to wear a mask whenever they stepped outside their cell; where they had a completely isolated exercise yard where they would get to smell the fresh air for an hour a day, but would but unable to see another living soul; where the prison guards would wear slippers so that they would not make a sound as they walked up and down the prison block.... now that’s chilling, and it’s an atmosphere you can still feel as you look at the cells, as you walk in the exercise yards and as you look at the chapel (where prisoners would be forced to listen to the parson whilst enclosed in individual booths were they could only see the pulpit and nothing else.  Poor souls). The intentions of the reformers were good, I think, but the result was far more punishing to a prisoner’s wellbeing than all the beatings and leg irons of the older prison. Port Arthur is a fascinating place. Not the finest hour of the British colony in Australia, that’s for sure.

 On the way out of the Tasman Peninsular, we stopped off at a Tasmanian Devil sanctuary. Although once widespread, the Tasmanian Devil is now unique to Tasmania and is under serious threat of extinction from a contagious facial tumour that has ravaged the population over the last decade. At current rates of decline, they could be entirely extinct in between 10-15 years time. It’s a sobering thought, and one that makes the sight of one of these magnificent marsupials all the more poignant. You’re probably familiar with the Warner Brothers cartoon character, but he does the real thing no justice at all: they’re a touch smelly, but they’re also incredibly cute, even as they crunch on the bones of a raw chicken... Also in the sanctuary, I get a good look at another animal that is under threat and is now only really found in Tasmania: the Eastern Quoll. They’re sometimes called the Native Cat, but really they look like a kind of stoat or weasel, with reddish brown fur speckled with white spots. As with the Devil, they may crunch on the bones of other animals, but they’re also incredibly cute as they wash the gore off their snouts by licking their paws and rubbing them across their faces and ears. I’m a sucker, but I definitely like Quolls. I miss my cat!

Heading up the East Coast, after a short detour on one of the island’s many unsealed roads, we spend the night in a distinctly chintzy bed & breakfast in Orford.... like many places in Australia, when it claims to be historic, it means it might be about 100 years old. It’s nice enough, but the teddy bear on the bed should tell you all you really need to know about the place. It’s raining when we get up, but we head on up the East Coast towards the Freycinet National Park and Wineglass Bay. This is one of the “must see” stops in Tasmania, and it’s certainly well worth the fairly strenuous hike through the rain to get to the viewing point and then down to the beach itself. You might think that this was named because of the shape of the beach, but apparently the place (may have) got its name from a time when whales were so plentiful that you could hunt them from bases on the island rather than having to chase them out into the Southern Ocean. This bay was a processing centre for the Southern Right Whales that were caught (so called because they were the “right” whale to kill...not from the whale's perspective, eh?.). So many were dragged here to be processed that the water in the bay was the colour of burgundy wine from all the blood.... nice story, huh? Nice viewpoint,anyway.

After serendipitous stops in the pleasant seaside town of Bicheno (penguins! blowhole!) and the lovely historic old town of Ross, we head on to the Cradle Mountain national park. This is Tasmania’s big draw, and the one place that everybody visiting the place is likely to visit. As school holidays here are now over, we seem to have chosen a good time to arrive, and although many of the hotels are busy, we often have many of the trails to ourselves. We spend a couple of days here, and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

As well as the plentiful wildlife we see during our walks, we also choose to go on a night time wildlife drive, and in all we see wallabies, pademellons (a small Tasmanian wallaby), echidnas, wombats, bush-tailed possums... and even a Tasmanian Devil. It’s a lovely spot.

From Cradle Mountain, we head up towards Launceston (rather upsettingly pronounced by the locals of Lon-cess-ton). It’s the second largest “city” in Tasmania, but we found that even here, the biggest pubs on the busiest street were starting to shut up shop at about 9pm on a weeknight..... we were staying at a backpacker’s hostel, but elected to eat out at the city’s finest restaurant – Stillwater – more fool us. On seeing a menu full of jus and foams, we should have trusted our instincts and left, but instead we stayed to enjoy an overpriced menu of appallingly low quality food. We made our feelings known and had the price of our bottle of mineral water knocked off the bill and were shown the door....honestly, it was terrible. Lonely Planet should be as ashamed of themselves for recommending the place as the restaurant should be for serving that muck at those prices. Needless to say, it was full of people determined to convince themselves that this was indeed the meal of a lifetime. Pah. You live and learn, right?

For a town full of kids in muscle cars, crappy restaurants and pubs that shut ludicrously early, I have to say that Launceston actually grew on me... particularly when we headed up to the park at Cataract Gorge at the top of town. This is an especially Victorian affair, where the bush has been tamed by the addition of a swimming lake, some walking paths and a scenic chairlift, but actually it was lovely, and clearly an excellent spot to bunk off work on a sunny afternoon and have a swim. From there, it was on to the airport and out to Melbourne.

On the whole, I found Tasmania to be an absolutely lovely spot: it’s clearly Australian, but it’s got a slightly more temperate climate and is on a much more manageable scale. It *does* look quite English in places, especially in flatter land of the midlands (where each town has a thing - Sheffield's was murals, and every house seemed to have a different mural, including one very brightly coloured homage to the Wizard of Oz.  I have a feeling that the small town owners might be horrified to learn that their innocent mural had *other* connotations....). Here the cultivated pastures filled with sheep and cattle, but for the wall-to-wall sky, could easily be somewhere in the UK. It’s a landscape that is at once familiar and alien. That said, we were only there for something like six days and only covered 850km and a relatively small portion of the island. Even here, I was conscious that there was so much more to see... we actually bumped into a retired couple in Orford who had so far spent three-and-a-half years travelling around Australia and were planning to spend the next twelve months in Tasmania alone. With that in mind, how much can you really see in six days? Still, I really liked what I did see.... how often can you say that you’ve seen Penguins in the wild, nevermind a Tasmanian Devil.... and I think I need to come back here again and have a proper look around.

For the record though, I much prefer Hobart’s Cascade beer over Launceston’s Boags. Just personal preference, I suppose, but I sampled both extensively and this was more informed conclusion... neither, it must be said, as good as a Cooper’s Pale Ale, but that’s a story for the South Australian section of the trip.....

Bit of a long post... sorry about that.  Loads of stuff to write about, and only annoyingly flakey wireless connections to load it up on....... I've still left loads of stuff out too, but I'm one day into my PADI course in Cairns, and I'm about to spend three days diving from a boat on the Great Barrier Reef, so the rest will have to wait until another day, eh?

gentlemen and players play....

As an English sports fan, I have become sadly accustomed to defeat at the hands of the Australians. Cricket, rugby, football, athletics, hockey, swimming.... well, you name a sport and they've pretty much beaten us at it. Yeah, sure, we have the odd victory -- the 2005 and 2009 Ashes, the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and 2007, the rowing -- but basically the pattern is that we get resoundingly beaten by a nation who just seem to be better than us at every sport ever devised. They are meaner, leaner, faster and more driven to win than we British will ever be.... we're far too diffident to ever match that kind of self-confidence.

Or so I thought.

In Hobart, whilst waiting for my flateye & chips (delicious, by the way), I idly flicked through an Australian sports magazine. It contained an article on the British push for medals at the 2012 games. The first few paragraphs were the predictable laugh at British sport. The author didn't bother to go into detail our long-term failings in rugby, cricket and football, but did say that our pre-Beijing Olympic highlights reel could be set to the theme tune to Benny Hill. List Great British Olympic heros, and after you've named Steve Redgrave and Seb Coe, how long is it before you are forced to mention Eddie the Eagle. Ha bloody ha. Then the tone abruptly changes: after the watershed of the Atlanta Games in 1996, when Britain won a solitary gold medal, we began to take the sport more seriously and, with the help of National Lottery funding, we began to invest in success.... an investment that culminated in Great Britain finishing above Australia in the Beijing Games in 2008, with the equivalent of one billion Australian dollars earmarked for the medal campaign for London 2012.

Not fair, apparently. Although people like Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton are clearly outstanding athletes, so the article informed us, didn't people like Tim Brabants only win their events because they could afford the best equipment? Now, obviously this is an unfair criticism, not least because all of these athletes, although they may be well funded, still make enormous sacrifices for their success. Brabants is a good example: as well as training for his gruelling event, he holds down a job in the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham as a duty doctor.... putting in 100s of hours a week on top of his training. Is his kayak really the only reason for his two medals? No, it's not, and it's unfair to say that it is. Were the Australians in Brabants' race really handicapped by significantly inferior kit? I doubt it.

The article gets worse. Not only is British success being bought, but surely they have also lost something far more important. There is an inscription at Centre Court Wimbledon that quotes Rudyard Kipling's "If", exhorting competitors to treat triumph and disaster the same. In the ruthless pursuit of success at all costs, Britain have forgotten what it means to simply take part and are all the poorer as a result.

Oh spare me. You can laugh at us for being hopelessly disorganised and amateurish at sport, or you can scorn us for our investment in success... but you surely can't do both.

This article is only one journalist's opinion of course, but I really had no idea that the Australians -- a nation that have always struck me as being supremely self-confident, certainly when it comes to sport -- are still quite so insecure in their relationship with Britain.

See you in 2012.

(* please note that I'm not going to brag about the 2009 Ashes series. We're due in Australia later this year, and we all know what happened after the 2005 successes, right?)

Incidentally, I've been happily wearing the t-shirt above around Tasmania.... even though that missing apostrophe kills me every time....

under the bridge....

When I first visited Sydney, in 2004, I was initially distinctly underwhelmed. Upon arrival, we dropped our bags at the hotel and headed straight down to Circular Key. We'd just spent some seven days in the Red Centre, so we were quite keen to get to the heart of the metropolis as quickly as possible. I can quite clearly remember standing in front of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, one of the most famous viewpoints in the world, and thinking "Is this it?". It's a scene that pretty much everyone must have seen hundreds of times; it's a scene that we're supposed to gasp at and immediately recognise as one of the most beautiful city views in the world. The bridge is nice enough, I suppose... although even a nice bridge is still just a bridge right? But to my eyes, the Opera House looked a little grubby and the tiles were far more textured than the pristine white sheen of my imagination.

It took a couple of days before the city began to get under my skin. I went running early one morning down through Hyde Park and into the Botanical Gardens. The flying foxes were chattering noisily in the trees as they returned to roost and the spider webs were glistening with dew, highlighting them nicely so I didn't run into any of the massive - and no doubt deadly poisonous - spiders perched on them. I ran down as far as Mrs Macquarie's Chair, and as I looked back out across the harbour in the glorious early morning sunshine, I realised that Sydney wasn't so bad after all. Later on, walking down to Darling Harbour, I watched the office workers spilling off the ferries on their way to the office. They were mostly wearing short-sleeved shirts and sunglasses, and they were clutching cups of coffee and fresh squeezed juices. Just behind me in the harbour I couldn't help but notice a large IBM building. It all seemed like a far cry from the lifestyle we have in Britain and I found myself thinking that I could quite happily work in Australia for a while. I could work in that IBM building.

Fast forward six years and a couple of years working for IBM - albeit sadly in Nottingham rather than in Sydney - and I find myself back in Circular Key. Yup, it still looks pretty good to me. Hong Kong was nice, but the moment we step off the plane and into the warm fug of an Australian summer evening, it's fantastic to be here again. There's something about the wall-to-wall skies and the wide-open spaces that makes this such a nice place to be.

We don't really do all that much, to be honest: we wander around the harbour and the Rocks; we go running through the parks again; we drink long black coffees and freshly squeezed juices; we wander around Kings Cross and Paddington; we coo at the possums in Hyde Park; we go swimming in the salt-water outdoor Andrew "Boy" Charlton pool on the waterfront; we walk the 10km bush trail in Manley before having huge steaks in Ribs and Rumps overlooking the beach.... we don't do anything much, but it's a brilliant three days.

Nice town. It's no West Bridgford, but you can't have everything.