Hotter than a certain fiery place!

Spending just a half hour on the payphone, chatting with the family out on the sweltering street in mid-afternoon nearly killed me today.

'How hot could it really be?' I thought. 'I must just be a big wimp!' I was inspired to check the weather, and found out it was actually 38 degrees (but with 19% humidity, it felt like 40). It's weird we get the hottest temperatures yet when we're so close to Antarctica-- but hey, the unofficial Melbourne slogan is "Four seasons in one day". And since us Canucks like to talk about the weather so much, we've linked to our weather [see "Our Favourite Links" on the left panel] so all of our readers can (A) get jealous (B) sympathize, or (C) laugh at us poor souls. Enjoy! -D.

It's been nearly a year blogging... and it's been so much fun! Thanks for following our travels, and we hope you'll keep up with us in 2008. We'll be updating our links and posting more frequent blogs in the coming months. We'd love to hear any suggestions, and thanks heaps to everyone who's sent us comments. Happy New Year! xoxoxo from BigQuestionmarks

Home sweet home (again)

It was much easier than we thought possible-- we now have a Melbourne home! After checking out that first doorless dump, the place we moved into was that much more fantastic. We signed the lease right away, and moved in a day later. It's actually a renovated former refrigeration warehouse that's down a little lane off a main street, but it's quite nice inside- ceramic tiles, big kitchen, large furnished bedrooms with exposed brick (reminds Dayle of her bathroom in Cabbagetown!). It's a little pricey-- Toronto rents have NOTHING on Melbourne-- but it's in the heart of Carlton, which is the university/Italian neighbourhood, and just a five-minute walk north of the CBD = millions of cafes, shops, restaurants, gelato shops, and bars to hit. And the perks: free wireless internet, laundry, all bills paid, nice landlords who pop by with coupons for attractions and 2-for-1 ice cream... hell, we can't go wrong. We're committed for two months, and will probably stay more, so feel free to send us mail-- there's nothing better than snail mail in this electronic age. :)

OUR ADDRESS:
18 Powell Lane
Carlton, VIC 3053
Australia
(SEE OUR HOUSE ON A GOOGLE MAP)

We also have some cute kitties who roam around at night, waiting for belly-scratching, which is cool. Last night we went for a stroll and stumbled upon a park full of small, tamed possums that stumble around like they're wasted (we promise you a video soon). Our biggest problem is parking-- and we love Daisy way too much to give her up! We were almost able to get a street-parking permit from City Hall, but then we read the fine print and our car has to be registered in Victoria (and Daisy's a true-blue Queenslander). Since we live down a "lane"- kind of a cobblestoned alleyway- we can't park in there, it's illegal. And while the city street-parking permit is only $20 for the whole year, the cost of changing Daisy over to a Victoria van- safety check, roadworthy certificates, rego fees, changing insurance- just isn't worth it. I think we're going to have to rent a spot for her in a parking garage, and hope she doesn't hate us for neglecting her. On the bright side, we did buy a detailed manual on our trusty Toyota Hi-Ace, and now we actually know which spot to pour the radiator coolant into... tee hee!

Happy New Year all- hope you have an enjoyable one! They're calling for 44 degrees here, so we're going to have some drinks and watch fireworks from the St. Kilda beaches, and go for a midnight swim (or maybe a toe-dip, for those afraid of sharks). For a few hours there, we'll be in 2008 and Canada will be still in 2007- how strange! We'll let you know how the future looks...

...well actually, it kind of looks like this:

Behold the Future from BigQuestionMarks on Vimeo.

Merry Xmas from us!

Melbourne Xmas (11)
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Merry Christmas and happy new year everyone! We've been soaking up the atmosphere of Melbourne for the past few days and loving it. Our first few days were a bit chilly, but it's definitely getting hotter (33 today, hotter than Cairns). We've even been taken by surprise by city sunburns, and we're now slathering on the sunscreen!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas-- we did, weird as it was to have no snow, no Xmas cookies, and no family nearby. (Miss ya all!) We spent Xmas Eve with our surrogate French family-- us and five Frenchies parked ourselves al fresco at a long table at an Italian restaurant hidden down a small cobblestoned side street in Melbourne's CBD (in Australia they call downtown "the CBD", aka Central Business District). We sat around eating yummy Italian food and drinking wine for more than five hours (those French like their long dinners-- apparently so do we!). Christmas Day was extra lazy... lazing in a giant hotel bed, watching movies on TV like The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the live, Jim Carrey version, was actually pretty good!) and Babe ("That'll do, pig"). Then it was off to meet another international bunch for our good friend--and fellow pear-picker-- Andreas' last night in Melbourne. Andy's from East Germany (you may remember him from past blogs) and heaps of fun, and though we're super sad he's left us to explore South America, we're happy we managed to see him before he took off. With Andy, there were some lovely Italian ladies cooking the feast-- Anna and Marina-- and one Indian and one Malaysian girl to mix it up with a couple of Canucks. Good fun! Melbourne definitely has that international feel, much like Toronto did for us, so it's not hard to feel at home here. On Boxing Day, we dropped Andy off at the airport and then it was time to get onto apartment-hunting...our next true adventure, as it seems.

For those of you who have been to Melbourne before, you'll understand why we LOVE Fitzroy and hope to live there. It's artsy, bohemian, full of cool shops and bars, and just north of the CBD. But it's been a bit of a pain to be in the city with our van-- Adrian's become a brilliant parallel-parker and Dayle's been a super-awesome navigator--so we decided to move south to the beachy suburb of St. Kilda (where there's lots of parking) for a bit while we look for a more permanent place to live. We're in a hostel now-- hard to adjust the first night (how we LOVED our xmas hotel- Miami Hotel) but it's not a terrible place to sleep. Yesterday we went to the beach (not the greatest swimming beach, but hey, it's got sand) and had a nice breakfast out, and pretended we were tourists. Plenty of shopping and drinking temptations in St. Kilda-- it's a really cool neighbourhood, though we wish it was walking distance to downtown-- and we were highly entertained to encounter our first stray cats/prostitutes/drug dealers in ages. Good fun.

Last night we checked out our first apartment... errr, flat, I mean. Lovely sounding in the advertisement (as they always are): courtyard, washing machine, TV, fully furnished, short or long term stays OK. We got there and they forgot to mention: the kitchen stank and lacked a tap for hot water, the bedroom was sans curtains and had the air of a junkie palace, the bathroom was grunge central, there was a packet of rat poison sitting outside one bedroom door, and OH WAIT-- there wasn't a DOOR from the outside courtyard to the inside. It's unbelievable what people try to pass off as a "home". Daisy must have left some rubber on Fenwick Street-- we sped off as quickly as we could.

But, fingers crossed, we'll get out of bunk-bed life soon. For now, while the city is still asleep for the holidays, we'll take in as much beach and cappuccinos as we can (another great Aussie concept we've discovered: when a coffee's included in your breakfast, that means you can get an espresso, a cappuccino, whatever fancy coffee, etc). Soon enough, we'll be working and back to our normal city existences. And the jobs can't come fast enough, because Melbourne is full of exciting stuff to do and fantastic concerts to spend money on (and nooooooo Huntsman spiders, yippee)! Fingers crossed we can somehow get to Big Day Out to see Bjork and Rage Against the Machine at the end of January...

In the city that is about to sleep...

We did it, we reached Melbourne (and yarrrr, it's cold here)!
It was an ass-numbing four-and-a-bit days of driving, but Daisy wins again. From Stanthorpe, we rode the scenic New England Highway (think: mountains, rolling hills, flower-covered meadows, old country towns with gorgeous buildings) down through inland New South Wales for our first few days of driving-- and New South Wales is huge, though not as big as Queensland! We swerved around our first highway-crossing goanna (a big lizard-- he stretched across a whole lane-- and he made it across after all), and then passed another one, belly-up and not so successful a little later. We visited Tamworth, the "country music capital of Australia" so we could take photos with a giant golden guitar and buy tacky souvenirs. We've treated ourselves to some nice restaurant meals and a night at a huge old cinema in Newcastle (it's been ages for both movies and dining out). We watched "Into The Wild" finally-- two thumbs up, go see it if you haven't! (And don't worry, Moms and Dads, we're now going more "out of the wild" than into it, at least for the time being. But I guess we're rubber tramps!)

We finally dug our toes into the sands of the east coast in Newcastle, after being landlocked for a few months, yay! And we checked out Sydney in one whirlwind afternoon-- and sipped Coronas by the Opera House, which was every bit as impressive (maybe more) than we expected. The city itself is gorgeous- chock-full of old architecture and history (and living history-- we followed a guy dressed as a pirate through The Rocks district till we lost him). It's a nightmare to drive and navigate-- we circled the core and suburbs for 2 hours before we figured out where to park. Sydney's best discovered on foot, or on the super-futuristic monorails which we didn't get a chance to ride yet. As we left the city the next day, we were like "Damn, we kind of like Sydney, should we go live there instead?"

But we continued on-- this time along the long and boring 12-hour drive to Melbourne on the multi-lane Hume highway. The winds whipped up like crazy as we headed west (we don't know if it was just the mountains, or a storm) and Daisy was making almost no progress, so we finally stopped after a hellishly windy ride. We managed to stop in the sheep-shearing centre of Goulburn (a few hours west of Sydney) to climb up into the Big Merino, a funny, wrinkly-looking three-storey sheep with historical wool-industry displays inside (and his name is Rambo, said the lady in the gift shop).

From there, we crossed the border to Victoria and the road became even more boring. Luckily, it was a short three hours to Melbourne-- via Glenrowan, the little town where the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang met their final fate in a big shootout with police in 1880. And Ned's huge here, so we went to pay our tributes. We're going to check out the homemade armour (from ploughshares!) he wore in the legendary gunfight soon-- it's in a museum here in Melbourne.

Our plans to sleep at friends' houses didn't work out so well (everyone's between houses) but we scored ourselves a sweet hotel room in the Miami Hotel for $80 a night-- with free parking, a king sized bed, fridge, walk-in closet, and a swanky bathroom! It's sparkling white and pristine, and the carpet's really soft. But my eyes keep darting to the sprinkler system on the ceiling, which looks like a Huntsman spider from the corner of my vision. Slow but sure, we'll get out of bumpkin mode.

And Melbourne's wicked--this is the 3rd time here now (almost feels like home), but we'll see how it works out for jobs and apartments. Looks like the whole place might shut down till after new year's (it was a battle getting a dinner out last night!), so we might end up camping again for a while after all. but thanks to all you spider sympathizers and blog-readers, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all! (photos to come on Flickr soon, promise). xoxoxo, A&D

Southbound we go

Daisy's got a new pair of shoes (snazzy new Bridgestones, that foxy lass) and she's itching to get on the road. I guess we are a little, too-- though country life has been swell, we are excited to get to the big city, where there aren't so many creepy critters!

We finally finished up the last of our work at Cherry Park (yes, I know I said that before, but there was more) yesterday... and in just a few days of weeding and putting mulch on cute little cherry tree saplings, we've totally destroyed our work clothes and gardening gloves, acquired ourselves achy and sunburnt backs, and had our nerves shattered by creatures hiding in the pine mulch. Anyone heard of the wolf spider? It's something that only existed in wildlife books for us till last week-- it's a giant, hairy spider that, if it bites you, is thought to sometimes cause necrosis-- translation: the spider injects digestive juices into the bite and your arm (or whatever was bitten) rots off painfully over time. Without a cure, no less. Ew! Wolfie's death came promptly a la the shovel, needless to say. Adrian also encountered a killer giant blue centipede, and thanks to his gloves it didn't get him. [WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE] We also uncovered a pile of lizard eggs, and one big bird egg, which we were hoping it didn't belong to a magpie-- those things are vicious! Let's just say we're pretty stoked to be finished the orchard work.

But it's not all doom and gloom... Stanthorpe's been good to us. Our boss took us all out for a fantastic night out on the town Friday night, we've found a pretty awesome pizza place in town, and we've relaxed lately by feeding the birds-- gorgeous king parrots and crimson rosellas flock outside our house-- and the cows, who are now so loyal they sleep by our cottage. We've even spotted the big lizard that lives in our roof, and we're expert firestarters, thanks to our wood stove.

Apparently it's a 24 hour drive to Melbourne (this country is so big!) so we'll do the trip over a few days. We haven't even seen a movie in ages, so we're very excited to check out Into The Wild (anyone seen it?) and have some good restaurant grub along the way. We're also planning to spend some time cruising around Sydney Harbour on the ferry-- it's hard to believe we've been in Oz for 10 months and haven't visited Sydney yet! And then it'll be off to Melbourne, for our third time, though this time hopefully to stay, to visit friends, get proper jobs, shop, eat, drink, and go to all the live concerts we can handle! (We just hope nobody notices our farmers' tans.) We're thinking of you in Ontario, all snowed in... one more week till "Chrissy", as they call it here!

We live in a house, a very small house in the country...

Sweet mercy- we're done fruitpicking!

Cherry season ended a bit earlier than planned due to the crazy amounts of rain we've been getting here lately (a real shocker, since Stanthorpe is a drought-stricken community where the town water supply is -or was- expected to run out in February 2008!) Saturday was our last day, a real scorching-hot, sunny, humid summer day. It was getting to be a real nightmare finding any ripe cherries on the trees that hadn't split from the recent rains. After a few hours of sweating, and dodging snails, spiders, and Korean tourists picking their own baskets of fruit, we all agreed that was it. Not an hour later, we were treating ourselves to McFlurries at the local McDonald's (or, "Macca's", as they call it as they call it here) the thunder, lightning, and biggest downpour began... and the storms here aren't like any Canadian summer storm. The lightning's brighter, the thunder louder, and for such a dry place, the rain just keeps on pouring. So good bye cherries!

We still had one week remaining to "do our time" for our second visa, but we'll plant blueberry seedlings at Cherry Park for a day or two to finish it off this week till we're back on the road (and despite our blog polling results, it's looking more and more like Melbourne's in the cards). Somehow along the way we really began to enjoy cherry picking (and especially the people we work for and with) and are pondering coming back next year after some travels...plus, we'll have to see what our boss, Graham, does to his house next year for Xmas-- we visited on Friday evening and he surprised us by being the local Clark Griswold!

We're also happy to have a little time off so we can enjoy our new home-- last weekend we moved to a tiny stone-and-timber cottage just across the state border from Stanthorpe in New South Wales. (We're actually living in another time zone, though no one goes by it here! Crazy.) The cottage belongs to the neighbour of our Cherry Park co-worker, Sandy, and she rents it out to backpackers while the cottage's owner is off on the coast studying naturopathy. And it's a steal, at $60 a week (our trailer was $200!). It's a little "basic", as Sandy describes it-- you've got to fire up the wood stove to create hot water for the shower, and we've got a dunny (that's Aussie for outhouse, ew!). But we figured, it's only for two weeks and then we'll be city slickers again, so what the hell!

The cottage itself is about five times the size of the caravan we used to rent (we're moving up!), and it has a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, office, and a huge living room area complete with couch and super-old-school TV that gets no channels at all. It's nestled in a grove of red gums and spotted gums (huge eucalyptus trees), and we're right next to a paddock where seven cows greet us every morning (we've been tossing apples to the pregnant one, and we think she's warming up to us!). The house, we're told, is about 20 years old and entirely made of found pieces-- part of it is made from granite boulders, part raw-looking logs; there's fringed lamps and red velvet theatre curtains that must have been the ultimate garage sale score. And each window is totally different.... it's really cool.

But I know after our last blog, you're all wondering about the critters roaming nearby! Let's just say that I (Dayle) have TOTALLY kicked my fear of small spiders (I can stick my hand through a web without a squeal!) because the monsters who inhabited our dunny were unbelievable-- till we unleashed the power of Mortein, the aerosol spider killer, that is! Luckily, so far they've all been the non-threatening Huntsman type. (Lately we were reading in horror about the Wolf Spider- Aussie of course- that when it bites you it injects digestive juices so your arm slowly rots off over years and years. UGH!) But anyway, the Huntsman we found inside on the dunny wall the day we moved in was terrifying nonetheless, so big we stared in awe while he wiggled his mandibles and ate a piece of a grasshopper with its very large and hairy front leg. Ew! [WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE] A few days later, there were two Huntsmans in there-- one perched on the ceiling (it's a pretty low ceiling, too) that had me running out screaming, and another stretched out on the door. Adrian poked it with a broomstick to see what it would do, and after a few nudges it began running in circles at warp speed and we both dashed into the house screaming. (We were quite literally scared shitless!) The next morning, the ceiling spider was hanging in the same spot, but dangling from two legs in a strange acrobatic pose. I gave it a few sprays of spider death before realizing it was probably dead (or a really good actor) and tried to nudge it down with the broomstick. But it was still so scary, Adrian woke up to my screeches and was braver with the stick-- and when the spider dropped, the THUMP it made on the ground really resonated that these are no ordinary spiders... these are the Australian version of chipmunks!

The other creatures around here pale in comparison to the Huntsmans, but keep life interesting. Yesterday a fat little black lizard wandered in and hung out behind the open front door until I scared it off with the camera flash. We were late for work one day when we had to get a tree frog out of the van. Every day, we wake up to the cackles of kookaburras, king parrots, and crows, and sometimes come home to find a bunch of idiotic belly-up beetles who decided to die in our cups and mugs. And there are probably about 20 big charcoal-grey moths that live in the cabin, but we just leave them alone since they were here long before us (though there are times when we dislike them, like when we pull a curtain and one swoops out to freak us out).

And if the cottage is cool, our neighbours are even better. Though Sandy does enjoy 'freaking out the tourists' by lending us books like "Australia's Deadliest Creatures" and inviting us over to watch Wolf Creek (eek, have you watched that movie back home??), she and her family have treated us like family ourselves and had us over for beer and barbeque feasts, and yesterday they took us out to Undercliff Falls at a nearby national park, where we hiked down what was pretty much a sheer cliff to a gorgeous towering waterfall, where we swam around for hours and had a great time till the thunder began rumbling again. It's a pretty cool spot to be in-- though Liston (where we're staying) is a village now, apparently in the gold rush days (like 1870s) it had a population of 80,000. Sandy's partner Lionel's a big fossicking enthusiast and said it's not hard at all to find rocks full of gold and tin that the miners missed, today just laying on the ground in dried-up creek beds. And we still get excited just by seeing a kangaroo jump by!

PS. Come see the creepy critters hanging out around our country cottage, and more-- we've put up a pile of new photos on Flickr.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Based on True Events...

(Adrian) So there I was cooking up some burgers talking to a friend on the phone leaning against the doorway to the boudoir on Friday evening. "Yak, yak, this and that" and I casually glanced away from the meal when I noticed that the walls were shifting. At first I thought it was my eyes adjusting to the light, but it turns out it was a Huntsman spider about the size of a hand palm skittering about the wall.
(Dayle) I was flipping through a book on the other side of the kitchen, when Adrian told our friend on the phone abruptly "I'll call you back. Oh my God!" He told me, "DON'T come over here... DON'T!" Of course I had to find out what was on the other side of the wall... spider? rodent? snake? bunyip?
A: I got off the phone and stood stunned for a split second. "What the hell do I do? I didn't read about how to handle this situation in college!" Since Dayle would no doubt freak out i told here to move to the complete opposite of the trailer.
D: But curiosity got the better of me. I peered around the corner to see what Adrian was staring in terror at...
A: Dayle screamed like a banshee when she saw the spider, as I figured she would. My ears still hurt.
D: Shut up! You were freaking out too!
A: So anyway...
D: The spider started moving sideways along the wall, that was the scariest part. Not to mention it was huge, hairy, and kind of stepped like a Muppet character. We stuck a mirror around the corner and watched it... it was a little less scary.
A: The next problem was how to get rid of the beast. As Dayle screamed, it started inching toward the vented door that it must have come into from the pouring rain. But it wouldn't leave, no matter how much she screamed.
D: Finally, Adrian got a bucket, the fly swatter (the longest stick-like object we could find), and a newspaper. The plan was to cover the Huntsman with the bucket, cover the top with the newspaper, and release it back into the rainy outdoors. The fly swatter was in case it jumped-- as they apparently do!
A: After some mental preparation, I waited for the spider to get into the perfect trapping position. Then I slammed the bucket over it.
D: I think I was still shrieking.
A: I had to make sure it was in the bucket, so I peeked inside. The spider made a mad dash to escape... and that's when I dropped the bucket on top of it.
D: And then we had this large, icky carcass to deal with....

Epilogue: Dayle and Adrian got out of the incident without any physical injuries. The spider, however, was not so lucky. On the bright side, the old rule that if you kill a spider, it will rain did not apply. It had already been pouring rain for 24 hours by the time the soggy spider came in for shelter.

In other news... the rain detsroyed a lot of the cherries at the orchard we're working at, so we're not sure if we'll still be cherry pickers in a week. But the countdown to our second visas continues-- 3 weeks left, including this one! This weekend we got a new prime minister Down Under-- a guy named Kevin Rudd who seems a lot cooler than John Howard, who's been in power for the past 11 years or so and has annoyed his citizens by following George Bush into Iraq and not really giving a rat's ass about Kyoto, or the environment as a whole (among other things). We have hope for this country after all! And it's definitely interesting watching the whole thing as kind-of outsiders but from the inside.

What else? Oh! The spider story might not make any sense to everyone who didn't get the memo about our new "apartment". Yep, we got sick of camping/driving/eating/sleeping in the same tiny van, and splashed out to rent an on-site caravan in Stanthorpe while we're working here. Yes, we live in a trailer (we're in anticipation of all of your jokes). It's great! We have an oven-- we've been baking pies!-- we have a bedroom AND a kitchen area AND room to sit around in! We've unpacked our clothes for the first time in ages. And it's all decorated in fake wood. Classy.

After this, we're debating whether to settle in Brisbane or Melbourne for the next few months... Brizzie is close by, a nice city, plenty of work, and loads of fun stuff to do nearby, but we're not sure if it has that magical city mojo Melbourne does. And on the other hand, Melbourne's awesome, fun, gorgeous, and it's the good weather season, but really far away, and we're worried it'll be packed with travellers (hence: all good jobs gone). In the meantime, why don't you all give us a vote on where we should go next on our snazzy new blog poll. We'll close voting in a month... that should do it. Kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure. And in the meantime, check out our new favourite website, Hats of Meat. Bye!

A Tale of Two Cherry Farms

Hooray! The cherry-pickers are on a three-day weekend! But unfortunately their internal clocks can't be readjusted and they woke up at 6:30am this morning anyway. Yarrrrr.

The countdown is on, and we now have only three more weeks of harvest work in Stanthorpe until we're eligible for our second year work visas in Oz. Cherry picking hasn't been bad at all, in fact, we're pro-stars at it now and spent our week getting shuffled to wherever the work is at the time-- between our original farm (Beaver's) and our new orchard (Cherry Park), where we started two weeks ago.

The two farms are right across the highway from each other, and have their pros and cons. At first, we were overjoyed to start at Cherry Park, where we were promised 5 weeks of employment (all we need for the visa) and there are tons of cherry trees, a nice lunchroom, and a really nice family running it. There were a lot of us working there at first, but since they all sucked at cherry-picking, suddenly it's down to us and an Aussie hunting enthusiast, Dave. We get to cruise into the orchard in the farm ute (see "Autosluts" photo below) and aside from the odd spider, tree frog, and one big resident frill-necked lizard, we're left alone to do our picking (and snacking). Not bad!

But then, this week the folks at Cherry Park told us we're going to work a day and a half at Beaver's farm... OK, whatever, as long as we're getting paid. Beaver's trees are coated in pesticides and fungicides (our hands get SO dirty there, and we're afraid to eat the chemical-laden cherries), but the manager, Peter, is a cool guy who cracks us up and doesn't make us pick the cherries by colour or any of that business. AND there are no mouldy cherries or spiders waiting in the branches (the only survivor we met was a green caterpillar!). We have the run of the whole orchard as their only 2 workers-- a little spooky-- and can goof off as we please. Not to mention we get paid more there!

But Beaver/Peter's orchard only had so many trees (it's mostly apples, which get harvested in January), so it was back to Cherry Park. We felt kind of like baseball players being traded from team to team by our agents... really, we're pretty sure they're just trying to keep us busy so we don't skip town on our days off. We're bittersweet about being back at Cherry Park, as the schedule keeps changing and we honestly think the owner, Graham, has no idea what's happening out in the field (after having part-shares in the farm for years, he finally took it over this year). Part of us wants to make lots of money and part of us just wants to sit around and play lots of Tropico, while ticking off our visa weeks without working too much.

Not to mention our only co-worker, Dave, is a piece of work too-- if he's not talking about cherries (85% of the time, too much shop-talk!), it's about hunting. Don't get us wrong, he's a very nice guy, just a little hard to relate to. If he were a North American, he'd be from the heart of Texas. He drives a 4WD with his spare tire on the back decorated with a logo for "Longbow Hunters". He tells us proudly, "This is the only country in the world where you can knock on someone's door and they're totally cool with hunting on their property," (that's his weekend activity). He says he likes to shoot animals with a longbow "because it's more humane than with a gun". Hmmm. One day in the car ride to work-- yes, we carpool with him-- there was a little too much shooting talk and Dayle mentioned she was a vegetarian. Dave called her a "greenie" and tried to further justify his hunting by saying everything he shoots is "feral". (though in other parts of the world we think "feral" may refer to something else, in Australia, everything that's not a koala, crocodile, goanna, or emu-- anything native Australian-- is feral. Thus, it's OK to shoot apparently.) And Dave shoots feral pigs, deer, cats, boars, camels (well, he hopes to someday). Even kangaroos, though they're not feral, "There's just so bloody many of them," says Dave.

"Well, you know what else is feral in Oz??" Adrian thought, and quickly bit his tongue-- "White people!". Somehow we both think he'd find a way to justify that too.

When possums attack

Howdy, y'all! We're now back to livin' it up in the country (if you can call it that).
Brisbane was great and all, and we'll definitely be back, but for now it's time to hunker down and get the rest of our required six weeks of harvest work done for our second year's visa-- and hopefully we'll never have to pretend we're Paris and Nicole on The Simple Life again.

After Brisbane we decided to take Daisy for a camping night on the way to Stanthorpe. We visited an information centre and they pointed us to The Gorge campground, a strange prviately-run campground near Boonah, QLD. It was a little rugged, but recommended because it was by a creek-- and they really love to swim in anything here. One look at the black, murky water with vines overgrowing the sides and we were like "Forget it! Where's our pool?" But we parked next to it and it was a nice setting to eat cheese and crackers in.

Not long after we had started our snack, a friendly man with beer in hand came over to invite us over to the large cabin across the lane for his group's annual men-vs-women Trivial Pursuit faceoff and apple pie. How could we refuse? We were there for hours in a fierce battle with retired schoolteachers, posties, etc... until the men finally took it (though we were aces at sports, us girls just couldn't get the Arts & Literature questions!)

We get back to our van, which we had left open to get some air into (it was stiflingly hot) and immediately think "Eek, what kind of bugs are going to be sleeping with us tonight!?". Adrian gets in to investigate. Everything seems in place. I'm standing outside the van when I hear a rustling and a cat-sized figure just behind the driver's seat-- A POSSUM! Our first possum sighting (finally) though maybe not in the manner we were hoping. The damn thing wouldn't leave, and there was a baby one on the roof trying to sneak inside as well. With some help from our Trivial Pursuit mates and some fierce possum-shooing tactics, we finally got them back up the tree and surveyed the damage: they apparently had fancy tastes and only went for the French baguette we bought to accompany dinner. Yarrr! They tried to pay us back by scritch-scratching trails along the roof of the van for the rest of the night...

On Sunday we drove the rest of the way to Stanthorpe (the farm town in the mountain we ditched for HK a few weeks ago) and found a much better caravan park than our last-- at Top of the Town, we get a pool, nice patches of grass to park on, showers you DON'T have to put coins in to use (sheesh!), and microwaves and real ovens to use in the camp kitchen. AND we have phone reception (at our old "home", Blue Topaz, the phone bars dropped off randomly on the highway about a 1/2km before the park) AND it's walkable to town. We had just started our laundry and jobs came to us within about two hours after arriving-- and now we pick cherries for a farmer named Beaver. :)

We did our first day out it the orchard yesterday-- and without jinxing anything, it's probably our best harvest job yet-- we get a bit dirty and sticky by the end of the day, but there's no ladders, scratchy branches, or even a hovering supervisor to deal with. Not bad! Today we got rained out, so we even get to catch up on our errands and though it's kind of freezing, but life is pretty all right here. (Though we're thinking Brisbane hotel for Xmas!)

Oh yeah-- And if anyone wants to mail us, send away! We'll be staying at Top of the Town for a while-- here's our address:

10 High Street
Stanthorpe, QLD 4380
AUSTRALIA

Hooray for Hong Kong!

Hello everyone from sunny Brisbane, where we've returned to after our crazy 10-day whirl in Hong Kong! I guess we were a little too ambitious in planning to blog daily-- first our free "hotel" internet stopped working for days, and there was just too much to do to have time to write about it!

To our HK-born friends: we now understand why you love the place so much. And to everyone else, go visit! (We're going back the first chance we get). We saw tons in our time there: took in some legitimate culture at the massive art and history museums, oohed and ahead at the skyline from The Peak, cruised around Victoria Harbour in the Duk Ling junk boat for free (thanks to the tourist board), and got our photos taken in crazy Japanese photo booths (so much fun we did it 3x! we'll try to scan them for you at home). We ate as much authentic food as we could, but treated ourselves to frequent Starbucks frappuccinos too (hey, we had to make up for all our time in the boonies of Australia). Best coffee spot-- Pacific Coffee Company on the Avenue of the Stars, where you could sit and sip for hours and gaze at the lit-up skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island.

And then there was the shopping (Adrian rolls his eyes here, but he loved shopping as much as me)! Every day, a new neighbourhood to shop in. We cruised around Causeway Bay a bit, though it was too designer for our tastes. There seemed to be a Louis Vuitton on every corner-- all of them with had roped-off queue areas, sheesh! We stayed right by Granville Road, which was full (and I mean 6 storeys stacked) of trendy clothing shops, many with awesome sales (and one day we'll go back and get our hair cut at "Hair Potato"). My personal favourite was the market on Fa Yuen St in Mong Kok, where I got the best boots in the world.... they made me feel like a million bucks but also stopped my limping. One thing no none warns you about is the terrible foot-aches and blisters you get about two days into a HK trip. Yeowch! I broke a pair of shoes on the first day :( Oh yeah.... and there's H&M! (none yet in Oz, I don't think) We were in there about an hour when I thought, "Gee, I've sure taken quite a while in the changeroom. Oh, poor Adrian must be bored to tears".... well, guess who I found with an arm-shattering heap of clothes. It's hard to tell who's the biggest shopper out of us!

If we went back (when we go back!) we'll have to explore a bit more of the nature side of things-- we took a day trip out to Lantau Island to climb a boatload of stairs to see the big Buddha on a hill. It was gorgeous countryside, mountains and temples, and hard to believe it was still Hong Kong! It also happened to be a full-moon evening, and our bus back to the city passed a lively-looking jail, bulls locking horns and wrestling in the road, and then after all that, our bus broke down to a literal GRINDING halt on its way uphill--on a 45 degree angle--on a winding road... scariest thing ever. But, we made it out OK, quelled our worries in more shopping and ice cream, and really, it made us feel even more like yay, we're really in Asia!

On the flight back (thanks again Graeme for making sure we got out!), we stopped off in Taiwan and with our 7-hour layover, HAD to go visit the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101 (which may soon be dwarfed by the Burj Dubai. Honestly, from the ground, it didn't look THAT high, and then we got up to the observatory, and we were promptly corrected. And the elevator took just over 30 seconds to get from floors 5 to 89! (and felt nothing at all like the death-elevator we rode to our "hotel" room every day in HK)

Now that we're back in Oz, we've been sleeping a lot. The adjustment was pretty extreme-- from hellish smog and no birds to trees everywhere and big bites and camping. All we smelled was TREES (yay!) when we left the airport. But then we got depressed because Brisbane's not half as exciting as HK. Soon, it's back to work on some farm (ugh), but for now we're easing ourselves in gently with a little city livin' in Brizzie and some partying with our good Scottish buddy Stu (you may remember him from our pear-picking photos). Hey, Brisbane's not so bad, really... we've designated our new all-day breakfast hangout today, and the weather's pretty good. Maybe we'll be back here in a few weeks!
Thx for the comments and for reading. There's "heaps" of new photos online, if you're bored...
PS. Daisy was fine and happy to see us. Aside from a dent (that maybe was there in the first place) and some mouldy hummus in our fridge (oops), everything was all good and she forgave us for leaving :)

Yup we're in HONG KONG!

Yes, yes, the rumours are true, we're in Hong Kong. It's a long story so bear with us!
There we were on the pruning fields of Farmer Bob's slave emporium, working for some extra money and visa time. It wasn't the worst job in the world but for that second visa, it was kind of easy. Basically we just had to thin some fruits off the trees by picking off some of the smaller nectarines so the others can grow big and juicy.

Anywhos, here's how this crazy adventure began (so make sure your sitting down, because it's so amazing and crazy you'll fall over or cry blood):
Friday, TGIF, we finished work and we're heading back from the farm when I noticed we needed to fill up old Daisy (the van), the problem was we were kinda low on money (one of the pitfalls of traveling for 2 months straight), so we made our way to the ATM. The logic being that one of us had more, thus the gas buyer.
As I (Adrian) was waiting behind Dayle, admiring the sleepy little town of Stanthorpe, was shaken when Dayle began to screech with joy. I thought something had gone horribly wrong but was corrected by Dayle when she announced that our tax returns had gone through-- making us $4000.00 richer!

Back at the caravan park we were celebrating with a beer as the night was preparing to drop to its usual 3 degrees (at this time it was our 4th day in Stanthorpe, and our 3rd day of 'work'), when one of us came up with the brilliant idea - "Who needs this crap, what if we used our return plane ticket to go to HONG KONG!?"
Some back story: our return tickets to Canada (which had a stop over in Hong Kong) were scheduled to leave on October 20th at 11:30am, it was already Oct 19th at 6pm.
Hell why not?! Quick like a bunny we packed up all our stuff, the whole time wondering if this was the stupidest thing ever. (We didn't even have time to quit our jobs.....er, and still haven't gotten around to it) Some quick phone calls and a lot of help from the most awesome guy ever - THANKS GRAEME!!! - We had our return tickets figured out and were driving like mad in the dead of night the two and a half hours to Brisbane International Airport (and we made it with time to spare).

Now here we are, in Kowloon, Hong Kong sleeping in a closet of a room with a coffin sized bathroom attached. Our window looks out to a moldy, dank elevator shaft, but we have free internet! We love it!
It's busy, crowded, a little smelly but beautiful. Hong Kong is very cool. Not 3 days ago we were freezing our butts off in a bumpkin town in rural Australia and now we're taking on the big city.
We're doing lots, and trying to take in as much as we can. Yesterday we took the tram to the 'Peak' of HK and had a bird's eye view of the city's skyscrapers, and somehow spent the night drinking with Triad members, paralegals and cops - whom all burst into random karaoke between 'Liars dice' games and shots of whiskey! Today we're recovering by going to someplace quiet, probably at a museum or two, and maybe even Starbucks.
We've mastered the brilliant subway system, and already have a free junk boat trip scheduled for Thursday.
We'll post tomorrow or tonight of our adventures thus far, but for the meantime we're okay, we're just in Hong Kong looking for congee breakfast.

-love D&A

Adventures in Capricornia

After striking it rich on the gemfields (ha ha) we started heading east towards the coast again—excited because we had found out our tomato-packing friend from Echuca (well, she’s from Germany really) Bianca had found herself a nice job and a very nice park ranger in the tiny town of Dingo, Queensland. We hadn’t seen her since April and were planning to meet as she drove northwards and we headed south… though both of our trips took way longer than planned (such a huge country!) so hence the unexpected meeting in Dingo.

We stayed for a few days at Ranger John’s house on Taunton National Park, just north of the Capricorn Highway, feeling oh-so-lucky that we got to hang out in a park closed to the public! Taunton used to be farmland, until the farmer read a magazine article about a species of wallaby (the bridled nail-tail wallaby) that was pretty much extinct—the same kind of wallaby terrorizing his property that he was shooting for dog food. As the story goes, he called up the magazine, and Queensland Parks and Wildlife (QPWS), who didn’t believe him—apparently this type of news often results in local kooks making claims and such. It wasn’t until the farmer plopped a dead nail-tail on a QPWS desk that they believed him... and now it’s all history and Taunton now houses the biggest wild population of the adorable little nail-tail (about 90 of them, I think it was). We were taken out on a spotlighting adventure one night and got to see the little creatures in action—they have a sort of fingernail on their tail and they hop with their arms flailing around at their sides. Not sure why they’re so special, but they sure were cute.

And besides all of the wallaby-spotting, we had a great time relaxing and catching up (and doing some spotlighting of our own—with the biggest cane toads ever!). Australia’s a huge place, which makes it even cooler when you run into an old mate somewhere along the way!

We got a taste of the cowboy life over the weekend in Rockhampton (or Rocky, as the locals call it). Bianca had lived in town for a while and told us there was a weekly rodeo. Yeehaw! When we got to the Great Western Hotel, we found out there was no rodeo, just a band that night, but it sure was a hoot seeing the clientele dolled up in their best cowboy-plaid shirts and Wranglers. Country music videos played all night on the big-screen TV next to a pair of bullhorns, and we watched some hoons street-racing their utes—too cool! Not to mention Rocky calls itself the “beef capital of Australia”.

The only beef we had with Rocky was on Friday night, when we camped at a caravan park next to the wide Fitzroy River that cuts through town. Pretty and scenic, we ate dinner outside after applying plenty of bug repellant (as we do every night, being campers in a hot country). When we got back from our cowboy bar, we went to bed only to be woken up about a zillion times by sandflies (or “midgies”) eating us alive. In fact, I don’t think we got any sleep at all—we were killing them in our dreams and while awake. Maybe they were small enough to come in between the holes of our screen windows? They were inside and outside the van—and we’ve never had midgies like these ones, not even when we lived way up in the tropics. We finally got out of bed at 5am and headed to the showers… then sat around swatting bugs till 7am, when the office opened and we could argue for our money back for the following night (last time we ever pay in advance!). The guy at the desk was unsympathetic and claimed to be “open” about the presence of sandflies, and that we should just use bug spray and we’d be fine. (The amount of reapplying we had done I’m sure wasn’t healthy, anyway) We told him, “Dude, we’ve lived in the tropics, we’ve handled these before. They’ve never been THIS bad!” and the jackass said he had to keep a cancellation fee of a few dollars… insult to injury (not to mention there was a creeper in the girls’ bathroom and dive-bombing nesting birds on the pathways). We zoomed off and went to the nicer-sounding Southside Holiday Village to get some sleep! And the rest of our weekend in Rocky was much better… except for poor Adrian, who slept for day due to a cold.

Now we’re heading south—time to do some farmwork and get some cash and our weeks done for our visa extension (we had a great lead on a macadamia farm near Rocky, but troubles with “head office” has us and the farmer unsure). The only work on offer in our area was tomato-picking, and our strong aversion to anything tomato-related has us heading to the south end of Queensland in a flash, it seems. We’re going to do a little whale-watching (we’re in Hervey Bay) first before the farm fun begins, and maybe this time next week we’ll be working in a vineyard…

Go Fossick Yourself

We caught gem fever this week and headed west from Emerald to the funny little towns of Sapphire and Rubyvale for some fossicking. After hearing about this place from another backpacker, we had to visit. Visions of meeting old, white-bearded prospector types with picks slung over their shoulders at the pub, and of stumbling over a giant gemstone on a dried-up riverbed filled our imaginations. We’d heard cows ran free here, people were a little nutty, and the ground looked like a war zone. A crazy place! And it was all true (except for maybe the striking it rich part).

Our first night we stayed at a rest area on the way into Sapphire, under a giant orange full moon. A miner type (or so we guessed) burned a huge bonfire next to his shantytown trailer and tin-shed house across the street. It was all a little creepy (and we were getting eaten alive by mosquitoes) so we headed inside the van early that night. We were jarred awake by loud mooing sometime in the wee hours of the morning—Adrian looked outside and there were cows hanging out by the bathroom block (weird!). We went back to sleep and not long after, the mooing woke us up again—this time Dayle popped her head out and the cows were grazing and scratching themselves right next to Daisy! It felt like a bad tabloid story—When Cows Attack! Not a very good sleep that night.

We moved onto a fenced caravan park the next day (yay, no cows!) and ended up in the pool all afternoon—who can fossick when there’s a swimming pool! Tame rainbow lorikeets jumped around our campsite and ate bread out of our hands (so cute). We visited the Rubyvale pub in hopes of drinking with old prospectors, but the clientele weren’t as dusty and disheveled as we’d hoped. (It looked like a pretty normal country pub).

The next day we finally visited a fossicking park—where for $7 a bucket, you get a bucket of “sapphire wash”, fossicking tools, and a lesson on how to sieve and wash the dirt and find sapphires. It was so much fun we hit two different fossicking parks, never really hitting the jackpot but we now have little baggies of sparkly jewels! We learned that sapphires come in more than just blue—green, yellow, maybe more colours than that, and they’re the hardest stone next to only diamonds. The Sapphire Gemfields were never commercially mined, but we’re told they’re the world’s largest sapphire fields (created by volcanoes ages ago). People buy mining claims and live on them for a while, some serious and some dig for a hobby. We were told that there are many rich miners around who just don’t look it… and there’s still plenty to be found, especially yellow and green sapphires, which used to be tossed away and are now more valuable than ever. We took a mine tour and our guide (probably the mine owner) told us that if you find human bones under the ground, you don’t tell anyone, because the authorities will shut down your mine to investigate. He told us the Rubyvale pub had been blown up twice over disputes, and that claim-hopping is worse than stealing your neighbour’s wife. A serious business this gem-mining is!

We sifted through one more bucket after the mine tour and actually found something worth cutting—but our dilemma was what we’d do with it after it was all faceted and pretty, since the jewelry itself is kind of ugly here. We had an invitation to go “real” fossicking—with pick and shovel out in the fields—from a really sketchy-looking dude who came by with his girlfriend to say hello (and the girlfriend was bubbling with joy, convinced she had a giant green sapphire in her hand—which we took one look at and were pretty positive it was a broken chunk of a green beer bottle). We dodged the offer… figuring if we found anything cool, old “Joe” (or whatever his name was) would steal our riches and push us down the nearest mine shaft.
We tore ourselves away from the crazy world of the gemfields finally after four days (we’d planned to stay a day or two) and Adrian is still making fun of Dayle’s “gem fever” even now.

** You may have seen our gem fever photos already—they were up on Flickr long before this blog— maybe they make more sense now! And thanks for your comments everybody... we miss you :)

To anyone who’s ever dreamed of hiking 20km…

Stop! Take off your boots, and turn back right now. Give your head a shake (get those silly thoughts out) and get back on the couch. The number “20” looks deceptively small on paper, but it’s hella far once you’re out there actually doing it.

That’s how it all began for us—our Lonely Planet book was raving about this place called Carnarvon Gorge National Park (which we still can’t properly pronounce in Australian—something like “Cah-NAHH-Von”… we always end up sounding more like Bostonians when we try to say it as the locals do). The Gorge was said to be filled with ancient Aboriginal rock paintings, nooks and crevices, and beautiful scenery and wildlife. And, tired of doing nature walks in our flip-flops, we splurged and bought some hiking boots. After gearing up in Emerald, the city closest to the park (about 2 hours north), Daisy hit the road and we were zooming into the Outback.

The sun began to set when we were still a ways from the park—we saw our first emu (a baby one) walking really strangely through tall grass, and passed a roadside campfire with silhouettes of cowboys sitting around it (so cliché!). Poor Adrian had to drive a winding, pitch-black 40 km road to the park—20km of it gravel and all of it unfenced cattle road, playing “Dodge’em” with kangaroos. Yikes! But we made it by about 7:30—learning later we melted our highbeams—and got ready for our huge hike the next day.

We were told to start early, and to head straight to the end of the trail (9.7km) into Carnarvon Gorge, then check out all the side trails and sights on the way back. No worries, we thought, and set off at 10am with a few water bottles, cheese sandwiches, and full of energy. After a goanna (a huge lizard) scared the crap out of us right at the trailhead, we were off.

The trail followed Carnarvon Creek, crisscrossing it 22 times. We hopped from rock to rock, snapping photos of cliffs and kangaroos grazing in the bushes, feeling very much like something out of a tourist brochure. Around 8km or so, we started to get tired, and trudged to the end quite ready and excited for a picnic. The gorge had become progressively narrower along the way and we ate lunch by a rock pool under a sandstone outcrop, with a sneaky crow-type bird that kept skittering over whenever we let go of our sandwiches.

And then it was time to head back. Our feet screamed in protest as we made them follow familiar scenery in the other direction. But there’s still so much to see, we told them, and drowned their shrieks out with our chatter (about anything other than the long walk ahead). We saw some amazing things along the way, which just extended our distance another 5km or so—Boowinda Gorge, a side gorge that blew ice-cold air and was narrow enough to almost touch both walls simultaneously; Cathedral Cave, a huge white sandstone cave with walls covered in ancient paintings of hands, weapons and tools; Ward’s Canyon, a steep walk up to a palm-fringed waterfall and red-bottomed creek; the Art Gallery, another rock wall covered in carvings and paintings. With each trip off the main path, we hobbled a little more, picking up the pace as families with skipping six-year-olds hiked past us (how were those rugrats hiking this far??). With water bottles getting empty we were soon almost the only people left on the path—and it was another race with the sunset as it approached 6pm. We counted down the numbered creek crossings and even stopped caring about cute kangaroo photo ops along the way. The flies were circling us like they knew we were about to keel over, and the vultures were probably nearby as well. We were pretty close to collapsing on the pathway when we spotted—eureka!—the ranger station at the base of the trail. We’ve never been so happy to see Daisy in our lives…

It took us a few hours of laying around like vegetables, it took the rest of our energy just to stand to hit the showers. Our feet ached for about two or three days afterwards, and our toenails felt as though they would snap off at any moment. We’re recovered now (a week later) but remind us to retire our boots the next time we start talking crazy about 20km hikes again!

Fighting Ageism Across The Outback... and other adventures

Hello all! We're in the pleasantly-named town of Emerald, writing to you from the Tropic of Capricorn. We thought we were in the Outback again but it might still be too "urban" here. Later today we're off to Carnarvon Gorge National Park, to go try out our new hiking boots and see some cool Aboriginal rock art. Hopefully there will be lots of lizards and no dingoes (we've managed to hit school holidays by accident, so we also hope it won't be overrun by rugrats).

It's been a while... since we last wrote we've made some progress south. The scenery has gotten much drier and hotter, but we're still enjoying the camping life. The accomodation has been okay (anything from beachside caravan parks to roadside rest stops) Lately we've come across a few cranky caravanning seniors, who come storming out of their trailers if we've parked "too close" to their shade tree. There was one especially awesome dude in a place called Carmila Beach who came out at this FREE rest stop by a beach, hands on hips, and was like "are you going to pitch a tent there?" and we're like "no, we have a van" (duh). and he's like "well, what time are you leaving in the morning? because I need to get my caravan out that side right threr" (points to the big open free sand patch we have parked in, that somehow he has laid claim to). we kindly move back a bit while the old cranky dude watches us the whole time, since we're sleeping definitely in the next day and are not moving for his big gas guzzler. Without a thanks or anything, him and his wife drive off to town later that night, and he says "Well, I suppose that will work." and from then on he became the "mayor of Carmila Beach" (and we've encountered a few more mayors of free rest stops since then too). We've found that going off the main backpacker trail on the coast means fighting with these caravan lifers sometimes... but it's also good for laughs when they eat our dust and we blare whatever hiphop we can find to play on our crappy stereo! (gotta keep up stereotypes, yo!) The funny part is, we met a great couple in Ravenshoe, wheat farmers from Western Australia who were in their 50s, tops, and they even said they've gotten attitude from the really old folks-- like 'you aren't old enough to be living this kind of life' attitude. Strange!

Things we've noticed/love lately:
-Big things- We're starting to see some goodies... the big cassowary, the big cane toad (ugly!), the big mango (so big, Dayle tripped down some stairs looking at it. Her knee is still healing)
-We love Utes! They're like cars mixed with pick-up trucks, and "Ute" is short for "utility vehicle" or something. There are old clunky ones everywhere, and then some people have sparkly shiny bright coloured ones, like sportscars. We're currently compiling a ute photo album, for all the hoons to check out (see next)
-Our current favourite Aussie term is "hoon"... which we've read means delinquent, but it also has to do with street racing (ie. "hooning around"). Maybe Daisy can be our hoonmobile...
-People (maybe hoons!) like to hang big gutted fish from the roadsigns marking creeks and rivers. ew!
-Sugar cane is king (never thought of Oz as a cane farming country but it's everywhere!)
-Either the wood here is really hard to burn or we're really out of practice with our campfires. We sit shivering and jealous of all of our neighbours whenever there's a firepit.
-Kookaburras are really cute... until they swoop onto your table and steal a chunk of pancake (they did this to Adrian not long ago!) Yarrrrr!
-The Chaser-- A guy on ABC TV (like CBC back home) made big news here when him and his TV show team crashed the APEC meetings in Sydney saying they were the Canadian motorcade (who weren't even in the country yet)... and they got through tons of security as a prank and basically just stirred things up. Check out his show if you can... he rocks!
-Our favourite thing of all is our little tiny radio that we bought for $20. We're in touch with the world again-- country stations, top 40, and really bad comedy shows. Yippee!
Catch you soon... xoxxo, D&A
PS. We just put up lots of new pictures on Flickr (ok, the scuba ones are old now but we found them in the van finally!)

Snail's Pace Travel 101

We made it to Townsville! This is where we're writing from right now... a town with a real military presence and some pretty cool historic buildings in its core. After a good couple of weeks of nature-camping and rainforest walks, it's definitely refreshing to come to a city for a change, parade around in an air conditioned shopping mall, have a restaurant meal, and see a movie (we're hitting the 3rd Bourne one tonight-- any reviews on that?). But the best part about making it to Townsville is it means we finally made a bit of progress!

We are now about 3 or four hours down the coast from Port Douglas, which might seem absurd that we only made it this far in more than three weeks. We did a lot of zigzagging inland, had a couple dates to make (a concert festival in Cairns), and chilled out in a camp spot right by the gorgeous beach at Mission Beach last week and watched about four or five days go by as we lazily drank "goon" (for those unfamiliar, it's the extra- classy wine that is $10 for a 4L box! It's really not that bad, and definitely the backpacker special over here.) We also checked out a Spanish castle in sugarcane country (yep, not kidding) called Paronella Park, built as a sort of amusement park in the 1930s by a Spanish immigrant. And we've bought plenty of fresh fruit and veg from farmers' roadside stands... yum! It's just funny where the days disappear to...

We're at a crossroads now-- there are a lot of cool Outback things to do (dinosaur museums!), as well as lots of pretty coastline to see (sailing and beaches!). We're amazed we've only made it this far, since many people do the entire east coast-- Cairns to Sydney-- in a two weeks to a month, but we're enjoying the leisurely lifestyle and have discovered the secrets of the "CAMPS" book-- a manual of every cheap and free place to camp in Australia. It's amazing! (the only dud so far was the mosquito-infested rest stop where we shut the van door and slaughtered for about 15 minutes straight...) Thinking of you all from the road... let us know how things are on your end of the planet! xoxox, A&D

Into the Outback…

Lately we’ve been pondering where the infamous Outback really begins. Everyone seems to have a different answer. As Daisy took us out of the greenery and into a vibrant, dusty landscape of red sand, road trains, and grasslands, we figured “We must have found it!” But then, we’re only about an hour or two from what’s called the Tropical North. We still plan to head further west, to a town called Mt Surprise (yes, of course just because of the name) and asked an Aussie traveler if the town is “in the Outback” and she just laughed and said it’s not the Outback till way past that. Sheesh!

Right now we’re in a place called Undara (which, by the way, looks like our idea of Outback anyway), home to a national park and these mind-blowingly huge caves called the Undara Lava Tubes. We took a tour deep into the tubes this morning and learned all about how lava formed these massive holes in the earth about 190,000 years ago. We’re in a volcanic area right now, where even though it’s dry, the soil seems pretty rich. It’s cool to see a chunk of history that scientists are still getting excited about.

And we also got excited about seeing our first bunch of kangaroos and wallabies in the wild! (Wallabies have little rounded ears, while roos have pointy ears). What a sight yesterday when we set up our campsite just before dusk and a big kangaroo and a baby in tow just went hopping (quite high!) through the campground. We’ve since seen the pair, along with a mum with a joey in her pouch grazing anywhere they can find grass… and they’re pretty tame. We also saw Mareeba rock wallabies acting cute on some rocks near the lava tubes, and a gigantic snake (a python?) stretched across the road when we came into Undara (we'll put the wideo up soon). And we watched the full lunar eclipse (go from bright to dark to red and back over 6 hours) from around a campfire last night as well (though we’re not getting any better with our astronomy yet).


The night before we got into what really looks like Outback, we stayed for a drizzly night in Ravenshoe (pronounced “Ravens-hoe”), Queensland’s highest town, which sits 920m above sea level. It didn’t look much like we were in the mountains, since we’d already been up in the Atherton Tablelands (a giant plateau full of farming west of Cairns) for a few days. You feel the altitude more by the cold temperatures and the wind—we also visited the Windy Hill wind farm, which powers 3500 homes with 20 turbines, quite a cool sight. Ravenshoe’s budget campsite was actually an old railway yard on the town’s main street, complete with old trains and rusted-out railway paraphernalia everywhere… and it costs us $2 to stay there, a bargoon! We got down into true hobo-mode and barbequed up some veggie kebabs, garlic bread, and Adrian had steak… living on the wrong side of the tracks indeed.

We heart camping

Hartley's 102
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

This entry comes straight to you from us at the trailer park. Yes, i'm writing from the inside of the van in a caravan park... the train goes by sometimes, planes fly quite low overhead (prime real estate by the airport) and yesterday morning we got woken up by a dinging seafood truck that was touring the dirt roads around the sites, trying to sell seafood at 8am! Yay for trailer park life!

Nah, it's not that bad, it's actually pretty fun. We're in the middle of Cairns city right now, after doing some shopping (neon has gotten huge here again in Aussie malls!) and we went to a outdoor concert festival that was nothing like it was hyped up to be (Edgefest was better by 1000, even the Creed one) but maybe pretty big for northern Queensland. Had some beers with our Aussie friend Bruce and his German girlfriend Iris and snuck them into our trailer park and now we're groggily waking up to head for the hills (we hear there's some gorgeous waterfalls in the mountains).

We're still pretty excited about cassowaries, but spent our time in the last week checking out crocs instead... we used Adrian's winning pass to Hartley's Crocodile Adventures and spent a day there, oohing and aahing at all the cool "salties" (saltwater crocs) and freshwater crocs. We met our first koalas (they made the WEIRDEST noise, we'll put up the video) and saw some cool poisonous snakes. But it was definitely weird seeing all these animals in pens after seeing so many in the wild in the Daintree.

What else? We found a heavenly deserted beach and spent some time there, and even saw a pair of doplhins skimming the waves. I guess we've been catching up with old friends before leaving them for who-knows-how-long. And now it's time for the open road.... don't forget to check out the full lunar eclipse that's coming on August 28 (I'm assuming it's worldwide). Miss you all lots! xoxoxo

Cassowary-spotting & Birthday in the rainforest

First off... thanks for all the awesome name suggestions for our van! Somehow along the way, she just became "Daisy" (sorry Adrian), which was Geneva (from the Gazette)'s suggestion. A good cow name, and rolls off the tongue well when we're coaxing her up the hill :) But I think she could use some middle and last names! Lots of updates in our videos, so be sure to check 'em out!

So the big trip began on Friday (August 17) when we woke up just down the street from our old apartment...in our new "apartment", Daisy the van! Thought we'd try our first stint at camping-in-a-park, down at Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas. It was a little odd (kinda felt like we ran away from home, only to pitch a tent in the backyard) but worked out fine. Worked out a couple of glitches (ie. our freshly-painted kitchen cupboards were stuck shut!) but a little sanding and we were off.

Everyone in Port Douglas was always talking about heading north to Cape Tribulation, a jungly/white-beaches kind of place that's a national park and World Heritage-listed, and where Captain Cook's ship originally ran aground in 1770. Since we worked too much and never got around to it, we thought it's about time! All geared up, we started the trek north though sugar cane fields and with the mountains on our left and the ocean on our right, it was a pretty, windy-road drive that put Daisy's gears and Adrian's manual driving skills to the test. We crossed the Daintree River (a wide, croc-infested, densely-forested 5-minute ride on a "ferry", or a moving platform for cars), and visited beaches along the way. Cape Kimberley was the first stop, a long deserted beach with squishy sand, and then we stopped for the night at Cow Bay (Daisy comes home!), where we saw a snake slither across the parking lot and it was so dark and windy that we hid in the van for the rest of the night from yetis and other creepy forest beasts.

Saturday morning we woke up early and headed to our legit campsite in Cape Trib, right by the beach as well. We got to use out Hello Kitty toaster (yay powered site!) and had a long walk up the beach, trying to find this mystical Beach cafe that we really don't think existed. We did a lot of walking and kept our eyes out for cassowaries (none yet) but Dayle got a cute stuffed one from the general store, which Adrian named "Dong-aleeza Rice" (for the quandong fruits we kept seeing everwhere, which these crazy dinosaur-like birds like to eat). She's our trip mascot for the Far North now! For the evening, we had this wonderful plan to have a campfire and wine and cheese on the beach that night, but then we found out (A) fires are probably illegal in a National Park and (B) as soon as we got there it started raining. Yarrr! So much for that.

Sunday was Dayle's birthday and we woke up to a grey day... no suntanning for us! Instead we had some lazy breakfast and hit the Bat House, a local sight that sounded like it'd be chock-full of bats everywhere (or as they call them here, flying foxes), but there was only one out, a funny-looking thing up close named Pushkin, who was flightless due to a hole in his wing. He was a squeaky thing who kept wrapping his leathery wings around himself everytime we tried to get a picture with him! Later we went for a walk on a boardwalk in the rainforest and that's when it started pouring rain... and it was no quick tropical shower... it kept raining till the next morning. It was brie and red wine under a quilt in our van, till we finally got out the umbrellas to hunt down a restaurant... quite a spooky walk in the pitch-black (there's no power lines in Cape Trib-- just solar-power and generators running the place). But we made it to the Dragonfly cafe, an art gallery/restaurant with a huge porch and a turtle pond, the perfect place to have some food and chocolate cake in the jungle. Yum! A happy birthday feast!

Of course, the day after Dayle's b-day was sunny and gorgeous... and we went for another rainforest boardwalk in the arvo (that's afternoon!). And we were lazily strolling, reading plaques about mangroves and forest, when we both jumped when a huge creature crossed the path ahead. Hearts pounding, we look at each other and whisper, "CASSOWARY!" and scramble for the camera. It was so scary... way bigger than expected, with a big black feathery butt, HUGE feet, bright red wattle and a bright blue head. When it turned to look at us, we immediately thought of the veloceraptor scenes from Jurassic Park. We had read you should back away slowly and make lots of noise if it seemed like it would attack, since this thing is known to disembowel humans with its foot-claws. It was EEK! and YAY! at the same time-- there are thought to be only 1200 left in the world, an endangered bird that's so prehistoric and rare,and we were seeing it in the wild, not even at a zoo. So we had to stick around, and video and snap it (Check it out on our video and photo links), with some other tourists. And then, just when we lost it, we found a tour group on the path who were following ANOTHER cassowary-- a young one. It was about 5 ft tall, and not as bright. And it grossed everyone out with a huge reddish poop of still-intact rainforest fruits on the trail (and yes, we giggled and snapped a photo of that too). Late on we saw the dad (or the mom?) lope down a swamp, and it felt in a funny way like we were moose-spotting in Algonquin.


Cassowary in the Woods! from BigQuestionMarks and Vimeo.

Now we're back from the Daintree (in Mossman, the sugar town that neighbours Port Douglas) and soon it'll be off for the outback and for the coast south of here. Queensland is a huge state and I think we'll be exploring it for a while. We'll be posting more on the blog now that our lives are a little more exciting (on the road!) and hope we can hear/read your updates too. miss you all lots xoxoxo A&D

Big Questionmarks--on the road

And we're off! Today's the day the hit the road for real. No more tourist towns like Port Douglas... at least for a good couple of days. We're heading north... into the jungles of the Daintree, a World Heritage rainforest filled with all kinds of awesome nature. Daisy, our trusty campervan, gets to do what she does best... navigate the roads of Australia!
We'll keep you all posted as we travel the east coast of Oz...

Yay Van!!!

COWS!
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

OK, we know it's been a while, but we're back and here's what's up...
And we’ve got some wheels and itchy feet!
Yes we are now the proud owners of a 1985 Toyota HiAce PopTop! It’s an awesome van, we have a sink, a stove, and a futon bed so we can sit or sleep with plenty of foot room. Lest we forget the cow patterned seat covers, (they were kinda nasty so we washed off all the hippy patchouli oil, now they’re awesome). It’s a manual, so Adrian has been trying to master the art of stick shift. It’s a little jumpy now, but he’ll smooth out with time (hopefully).
It’s a pop top too, that means that we can push the roof up so we can stand up straight inside, plus it helps to ventilate the van so we don’t cook to death.

The only thing we need for the VAN is a NAME, so get us your suggestions for our VAN NAME! Dayle is set on “Daisy”, while Adrian is gunning for “Thorzon the Overseer”, or “Figgins the Mute”.

Some good fortune has fallen on our heads! We got into ‘Cane Toad Racing’ at the Iron Bar (the local pub/restaurant). It was a lot of fun, basically if your number is called you get to race a toad, (there are 3 races per night). There’s a bit of a ritual when you get to the podium, first you need to fish you toad from a bucket then give him a kiss and put him into another bucket. Then the race is on, armed only with a party blower (those kazoo things), you need to get your toad to the side of the table and onto your hand – then get him to the bucket across the room to win big prizes.
Adrian lost his first race, his damn frog wouldn’t move no matter how hard he blew, so he came in dead last.
Dayle’s frog was eager to please and jumped right off the table after a couple nudges, but he jumped off the far side of the table and freaked out some old lady. After some ‘icky’ faces she got the toad and came in 3rd.
The last heat Adrian was back up, this time his from was more cooperative, from the first blow the frog jumped from the table, Adrian scooped him up quick, and came in first.
To our surprise he won some awesome prizes: a reef snorkel trip, a trip to a croc zoo, and a hat with cane toads on it.
It was an awesome time, so if you’re ever in Australia try to catch the famous Cane Toad Race!