Destination New Zealand!

Wow, it's September! It's kind of crazy that we've already been back in Australia for six months now - and sadly, have not yet even left Queensland. So we're truthfully a bit giddy for October to roll around - because in just four weeks' time, we'll be headed off to explore some totally new territory: the south island of New Zealand!

We're taking the easy way out with this trip, actually. It was actually pretty much all already planned when our friends Stephane and Jenny (who are living over in NZ and about to wrap up their year there) invited us along on their weeklong trip in October, where they'll drive from Christchurch to Queenstown in a leisurely, on-a-budget-but-with-lots-of-hiking-and-photo-snapping sort of manner... just the way we like it! It's a real double whammy -  not only will we get to reunite with some great friends (with whom we spent a lot of time with during our first stint in Oz - in Echuca, Port Douglas, and Melbourne), but we'll also get to finally visit a country we've been meaning to for ages.

Kiwi dollar... how cute.

On October 4, we'll fly into Christchurch airport and meet up with Stephane and Jenny. We probably won't see much - if any - of Christchurch, which we hear is still in quite a bit of rubble after the earthquake early this year. From there we'll wind our way south/west to the mountain/adventure town of Queenstown, via Mt Cook, Dunedin, Fjordland National Park (at the southernmost tip of New Zealand, and possibly the world!) and a few other stops. We've got about a week and a half to soak up the scenery and the Kiwi hospitality, both of which we've heard great things about. We're also stoked that the Aussie dollar is doing so well against the New Zealand dollar, making it a cheaper trip than we thought, and also for the chance to brush up on our conversational French with Stephane and Jenny.

Queenstown: looks awesome!

We're slightly worried it's going to be freezing cold in October, which is still springtime, and the fact that we'll be hanging out in high altitudes pretty close to Antarctica doesn't help. (Note to self: add wool socks to the packing list!) So unfortunately, it's not a camping trip, but we're hoping we'll be so distracted by the stunning scenery that we'll forget how cold it is. And maybe we'll see a hobbit or two - it is, after all, the gorgeous setting where Lord of the Rings was filmed. It should be a good adventure anyway. The countdown's begun!

A Few Resolutions...

Happy New Year! We finished off 2009 with a New Year's Eve full of great fun and reuniting with friends we haven't seen in a while! We hope everyone had a happy end to 2009 too. It's snowy as ever here in Toronto and it's still kind of a novelty. We've even volunteered to shovel snow once or twice...

But alas, to be really cliche and do that thing we're supposed to do every January 1st, it's time for a few resolutions!

1. Write more blogs! (No kidding!)
2. Get back in touch with old friends.
3. Spend more time enjoying the outdoors.
4. Get creative-- time to get out the paintbrushes, crochet hooks, sewing machines, all of that good stuff while we're holed up inside avoiding the cold.
5. Get cultured. Go to more museums, art galleries, and cultural events (we had a great time hanging out at the Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, festival held at Harbourfront Centre this past November. Not exactly like being back in Mexico, but pretty swell anyway). Toronto's got plenty to offer and we're going to get into it!
6. Eat more rice. Not that we're sad to have returned to the land of cheese (yay!), but we sure felt healthier while in Asia, living off rice for at least two of our daily meals.
7. Exercise more-- yup, gotta throw that one on there.
8. Try new things. Bollywood dance, anyone?
9. Fill 2010 with adventure-- wherever and whatever that may be.

And speaking of being creative, here's a little fun we stumbled upon online tonight: Cubeecraft.com is a nifty little site where you can download 'cubist' versions of your favourite characters-- from Domo-kun to Barack Obama, seriously-- to print and fold out of paper. Random fun!

Un Poule Sans Head

Like the title implies; we're both running around like chickens with our heads cut off.
Currently we're in the throes of figuring out how/when to transfer money and the shutting down of accounts, fighting last-minute government bureaucracy struggles, shipping everything we own over the Pacific, and attempting to meet with everyone we've known in Melbourne. It's been just a little chaotic!

Later today (1:30pm) we'll take off from Oz for the last time and will land in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. It's so exciting, as we booked the flights way back in July-- it felt like an eternity away at that point! And we still haven't had time to read much about the place, heh heh. We'll spend a month (maybe more?) in 'Nam, and maybe try to get English-teaching work. Later on, the plan is to travel through Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia... with the possibility of visiting India and maybe even some friends in Europe before heading back to Canada in early September. We'll see how it goes-- there is only so much one can plan with this sort of trip!

We'll do our best to keep you all updated-- hopefully with the help of Dayle's new "baby laptop", a blue Acer Aspire One (only 895 g in weight!!) we'll be online more than we have been lately. Asia's probably got much better internet options than Western Australia, we imagine. The last few weeks have been pretty insane-- first selling Daisy about 2 weeks ago (boo hoo!); then continuing south of Perth in a teeny rental car and camping in a tent -- we remember what roughing it was like!--for some wine, cheese, chocolate, and beach; we flew back to Melbourne on February 11 & have been staying with our lovely friends the Geeveses since then. It's hard to believe our two years are almost finito... but we hope we'll be back in Oz sooner rather than later! xoxoxox A&D

PS. We have finally updated our photos from our entire West Coast road trip online on Flickr so have a look and enjoy! We heart your comments too :)

Downsizing... a very time-consuming exercise

Yup, that's our clothing being turned into clothing jerky. Hooray for vaccuum-seal bags!

So... yeah, we're horrible travelers. Somehow we're 2 days behind and still at our place in Melbourne -- BUT we have resigned to leave today at 7am!

We!just can't get enough of this apartment! We've cut through all our clutter and donated heaps. Now its a matter of stuffing it all into the van and going... which we're working on.
Stay tuned.

Aussie road trip map route

Aussie road trip map route
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Ahoy, hoy! Well this is it our route for the next little while - it makes a nice "figure 8", or as Adrian says; "It looks like the mask of an angry superhero looking down and to the right."
Everyone's a critic I suppose.
From Melbourne we head East up the coast to Canberra, Sydney, & Brisbane. Then cut West to Adelaide (that's where the middle of the "figure 8" meets). From there we blast north up to Darwin and follow the West coast down to Perth. Finally we head back to Melbourne along the South coast (once again through Adelaide), and back to our quasi-home of Melbourne.
There is lots of adventure afoot, so please keep tuning in!

Off we go! (Well, sort of...)

The long-awaited day has arrived-- it's time to hit the road!

After 11 months in Melbourne (we arrived on December 23, 2007), it's finally time to ship out and see the rest of Australia. Time to venture to the Outback, visit Uluru, take a cruise around Sydney harbour, and explore the little-discovered west coast. We're super excited and have been preparing for ages...

But as we keep learning, there's never enough hours in a day! Yesterday was spent feverishly cleaning (the apartment and Daisy), packing, and tying up loose ends, in anticipation of an early-morning departure today. We thought we could get our mile-long to-do lists done--no worries!--but it was around 9pm or so last night, when we were eating one last pizza delivered from our favourite pizza joint, Crust, and watching CSI Miami (hey, no more TV for ages!) in a VERY messy and chaotic living room, thinking about the late night ahead... when we thought, hey, would it really hurt our schedule THAT much if we just left on Tuesday?

The thought of enjoying our solid walls and our fiery gas heater (yes, it's gotten cold here again!), a TV, internet, our own bathroom an kitchen, and perhaps one more beer on the balcony while watching the sunset over the city was pretty enticing. Not to mention the chance to sleep in! It wasn't a very tough decision at all...

It's true, we originally planned a Sunday departure (the 22nd), but as Adrian just finished work on Friday, we thought it would be too chaotic. Monday seemed like a good idea. But now, Tuesday seems like an even better one!

So here's the plan: Tuesday morning we'll head off early, drive about 6 1/2 hours northeast to Canberra. We'll check out the leafy city of civil servants (which apparently has the biggest concentration of porn and drugs in the country, is what we keep hearing... too funny!) and see the sights before heading off to Sydney on Thursday morning (about 4 hours east). We've booked a budget (ghetto?) hotel room cuz we're sick of hostels... and we'll stay there, enjoying that good city life til Sunday morning, when we head off to the nearby Blue Mountains. We'll post our whole (rough) itinerary on the blog here so everyone can follow along, but as we know, plans change, and if we've learned nothing else on our travels, it's to be flexible!

So stay tuned, and we promise to bring you lots of stories, photos, videos, and more of our trek around the great wild world Down Under. But for now, we'll just be enjoying one more chai latte from that trendy teak-couched & silk-cushioned cafe down the street! We'll miss this city...

The monthly update

Oops-- we didn't mean to abandon the blog again! It's just we've been trying to take a decent photo to post with our updates and... well... this was the best we could do. As you all know, we're quite photogenic (!).

So what's new? Lots. And since another evening has been half-consumed by TV cop dramas again, we'll have to update you all in point form (damn you, television!).

** The big road trip: We've been scheming and mulling over our maps and calendars and we've cooked up a loose plan for our jaunt around Oz. We've spread the driving over 9 weeks or so and plan to leave Melbourne somewhere around November 23; we'll make it back here to part with Daisy (boo hoo!) at the beginning of February and to fly out to Vietnam on February 19th. And it looks like it'll be Christmas in Alice Springs and New Year's in Darwin. We plan to kit Daisy up with our twinkle lights to try and feel a little festive in the 40-degree Outback heat!

** Work: The countdown's on! It turned out our employment agency remembered we could only work 6 months for the same company (yarrr) on our visas, so Adrian finished up at ANZ at the end of September and Dayle will finish on the last day of October. Luckily, Adrian had no problems scoring himself a new job, which conveniently kicked off exactly the day after he finished at the bank. He's now working in the payroll department of Myer, a huge and historic department store chain in Oz, kind of like The Bay is to Canadians (minus the fur trading legacy). He greatly misses goofing off with his pals at the bank (who would have thought bank work could be fun?), but as we're learning more all the time, a job's a job, though we'll both really miss the friends we've made at work. Adrian will work at Myer until close to our departure day (22 days left!) and Dayle will finish at ANZ next Friday (7 days!) and be in charge of packing and sorting the many loose ends which need to be wrapped up before we head off. And then-we hope!- it'll be no more work for the next 6-8 months or so...

** The apartment: The balcony garden was finished a few weeks ago-- it's awesome-- and a few plants, like these cute daisies, have already been devoured by bugs. Nonetheless, we've been enjoying many a Corona on the balcony on summery days (we've learned a Melbourne spring day can be anything from 11 to 27 degrees...sometimes on the same day). We're dreading the packing of our stuff, which has surely expanded quite a bit over the past 11 months in the city! And no sign of the Huntsman family... at least for now. Phew!

And the little victories:
- Finally reaching someone at the Vietnamese embassy to get a price for our visas, which we're required to pre-arrange (what a headache!)
- Buying tickets to Melbourne Cup-- the horse-racing/drinking/fashion extravaganza which shuts the city/country down the first Tuesday of November. Now we have 2 weeks to find ourselves something to wear!
- Seeing a big Aussie band on their home turf... proving there are definitely way more Living End fans in Melbourne than anywhere else.
- Visiting the Royal Botanic Gardens finally- a really awesome park with plenty of plants and funny ducks.
- Locating, after 8 months, our favourite wine in a store. We first had One Goat Shiraz at an Italian restaurant in February, and loved it. We've been asking around for it at bottle shops ever since and no one's heard of it (didn't help that we only vaguely remembered the name!). Recently we had another dinner at the same restaurant and copied down the label details this time (and yes, it was just as fantastic as that first bottle we had). We learned the vineyard's actually just 2 1/2 hours from the city but luckily they could name a few obscure bottle shops around in which to purchase their wines, and last weekend we bought every bottle we could find at Duncan's on La Trobe Street... which was two bottles. Hooray, we win!

Victorian times...

Today there were a few tears, a little bit of shock.... it was only today, while unscrewing license plates in the parking lot of the VicRoads office where we finally had to say to our trusty travelling companion-- "Daisy, I've got a feeling we're not in Queensland anymore."

I suppose it's hard to deny that we're no longer Queenslanders... we once again wear socks AND shoes when we go to the supermarket, possums outnumber cane toads here immeasurably, and while we can be happy there will never be any cyclone threats in our present home, we continue to freeze our butts off in the Melbourne winter. Daisy's been living in our covered garage for a while now, her "Sunshine State" plates just a tad ironic (though there was a fabulous late-afternoon rainbow visible in Richmond today). So it was only a matter of time before we had to switch our van's Queensland registration (that's "Rego" in Aussie) to the state of Victoria. Daisy's taking it well-- true, "The Place to Be" is a bit of a lame slogan to bear, but we weren't shelling out the extra cash for the "European"-style plates. We don't know too much of her history, we do know she came from Melbourne before her move to Port Douglas, and her window-stickers like "I played Apollo Bay Music Festival 2000" (a big annual concert held on the nearby Great Ocean Road) give us some clues to her past. So maybe she's happy to be home! Not to mention this whole rego thing saves us a car wash if we can just trade in our bug-encrusted and bird-poop-splattered old plates for sparkly new ones.

We haven't told her too much about our future plans, but we're planning a great deal of quality time together in the coming months. Time on our visas is running out but there's a lot of road to cover and sights to see before we take off in February. We've found a fantastic website, Roadmap Australia, which has eliminated our need for a ruler & map to guesstimate the mileage we hope to cover (about 15,000 km!). Since we rushed down a good chunk of the east coast to Melbourne and missed a lot of the classic sights in New South Wales-- the Blue Mountains, outside of Sydney; Nimbin, the hippie mountain village; legendary surf spot Byron Bay; and Bondi Beach, to name a few spots-- we've got some backtracking to do. Then there's the highway up the centre of the country which will take us to that giant red rock, Uluru, underground opal-mining town of Coober Pedy, and Kakadu National Park in the Top End. And last but not least is the gorgeous west coast- endless beaches meeting outback, Ningaloo Reef (from what we've heard, better than the Great Barrier Reef and way closer to shore); swimming with dolphins, and camels and wildflowers everywhere... well maybe not everywhere, but close to it. We figure we'll start the big trek in December, since we have the apartment til then. We'll just have to tough out a bit of the wet season up north-- maybe learn finally what "Going Tropo" really means-- and might have to share the beach with a few screaming brats (school holidays, ugh), but the thoughts of being on the road again are exciting!

In the meantime, we've got a mini-trip booked to visit Tasmania finally in August. It's possible it'll be really cold and rainy, but then again, the environment's so unpredictable everywhere that who really knows?! Flights cost next to nothing from Melbourne ($49 there and $29 back) and if it's rainy, we'll just spend more time in the museums, on brewery tours, and perhaps wandering the Cadbury chocolate factory. It's supposed to be gorgeous, and full of old buildings and colourful history. We take off on August 15 and return on the 19th... as there's no way Dayle's going to work on her birthday. Fingers crossed we'll see a Tasmanian Devil!

Our Year in the Merde

We can hardly believe it-- today marks our one-year anniversary of travel!

Saturday, January 20, 2007 was the day we finally packed up our gear (and left a lot of it behind as well), dragged our families and friends to the airport for sad goodbyes, and hopped on our Cathay Pacific flight to Bangkok. It didn't feel real until well into the 22 hour flight, and somewhere along the way we even lost a day (so tomorrow will be our first Jan 21 in ages!). We arrived sleepy, confused, and overwhelmed in Bangkok... and you all know the story from there.

It's been a fabulous year! We've learned more than ever this year that plans will always change, and to "carpe diem" every day of our lives. If you want to go somewhere, go! And if you see something cool in a shop, buy it (unless it's zillions of dollars, or something)! There is something to be said for hard work, but what's the point if you don't enjoy it afterward? These have probably been our most important lessons this year. And saying that, we've STILL left places and things to do till "later"...

And as for keeping flexible-- well, we certainly never envisioned ourselves as cherry pickers, construction workers, living four months in the tropic jungle, flitting off to Hong Kong for 10 days, camping for almost three months, moving into a cottage in the country (with the biggest spiders we'd ever seen!) and then, never really getting out of Queensland. But it's been awesome anyway.

For those of you who keep asking the BIGGEST question of all : "When are you coming home?" We really don't know. Now that we've slaved away on the harvest trail for our three months, we'll be applying for our second year visas soon, and we'll probably stay as long as we can in Oz. We also didn't realize before we left Canada that this country is massive, and that there are fabulous things to see at every end of this land. Daisy's just resting up now for the road trip of a lifetime-- we still plan to travel around the centre (Uluru!), Northern Territory (Crocodile Dundee land), and Western Australia (an untouched beauty and THE place to explore here nowadays). And then who knows? Tassie's still on the list, New Zealand's just a short plane trip away, and then there's all the wonderful countries between here and Canada.

Only now we're starting to run into all the lovely hassles of long-term travel: expiring health insurance, OHIP paperwork, invalid return flight tickets, expiring credit cards and drivers licenses (Adrian's a Queenslander now), and digital cameras going wonky (and there's a wee bit of occasional homesickness too). But we'll tell anyone who's thinking about doing what we're doing: IT'S ALL WORTH IT. Because you just never know when Australia will be too dried-up, Hong Kong will be too polluted, or the political climate of some other country will be too dangerous to go. And with technology today, mail travels halfway across the globe in two weeks, email keeps us instantly close, and cheap long-distance calling can keep us chatting easily for hours.

If anyone needs any travel ideas, there's heaps of exotic destinations you'd never think of and gorgeous photos in Lonely Planet's The Blue List. Adrian quite enjoyed reading about tourism, Kim Jong-il-style, in Tony Wheeler's Bad Lands, and Dayle's just starting to read Long Way Round, Ewan McGregor's travel memoir chronicling Ewan and his best mate's motorcycle ride around the world. Three cheers for travel!