Conquering the East

We can hardly believe it-- phase one of our trip is pretty much complete. We've conquered the east coast and lived to tell the tale! Tomorrow we'll head inland- after one more surfing hurrah earlier today, where we battled surfing "snakes" (one who "snakes", or steals one's wave) and the fierce waves of Surfers Paradise. Not to mention tomorrow our unpowered campsite on the Gold Coast goes up to $39 a night (as if $34 for a patch of grass near the beach wasn't enough!).

We've surprisingly grown quite fond of the Gold Coast, the flashy party beaches at the very south end of Queensland, and we've now been here for four days. Perhaps it's that mix of city comforts-- and skyscrapers-- combined with a tropical climate and a gorgeous, wide, squeaky-sand beach. It's supposed to be THE place in Oz for nightlife and restaurants... though we still prefer Melbourne for that. But if we did get really bored, at least we know we can go to a shooting range, mini-golf, cosmic bowling, a haunted house, and to countless brothels all in the same day.

The Gold Coast has been quite the contrast from our last few stops. After Coffs Harbour (where we first caught the surfing bug) we headed north up the coast to Byron Bay, a must-do on the backpacker trail, and as we found, a laid-back surf town with an interesting mix of hippie and yuppie. We resisted the urge to buy some tie-dye in what is truly the land of the VW Kombi, as well as resisted the surf (we'd heard the bay's full of sharks). But the people-watching was superb!

After Byron we headed for the mountains just inland to the otherworldly Nimbin... a sleepy town of rainbow-painted shops selling incense, patchouli oil, books on world religions and UFOs, and even some Hello Kitty trinkets. The pot dealers were out in swarms in front of the Nimbin Museum (a cobwebby, claustrophobic couple of dim rooms plastered in murals telling the story of the town), and there were lots of funny smells coming from the cafes. Some might say Nimbin is still living in 1973, when the legendary "Aquarius Festival" drew in students and hippie types from all over... some who perhaps never left. We decided to experience Nimbin slightly outside of town, in a privately-owned campground (er, hippie commune?) on a hill called Rainbow Retreat. We camped by a tree with a dreamcatcher hung from it and relaxed while a wallaby hopped around the grounds, and at dusk, searched for the elusive resident platypus. Everything from beer to internet to freshly-baked muffins was sold by the"just put the money into the box" method and it was pretty much the most chilled-out place ever, run by a man named Duck (we think?!) who got nostalgic to us about his days road-tripping through B.C. and Montana in his younger days. And at night everyone from the campground (except for this one guy who wore rainbow tiedye and lived in a neighbouring tent, we think for quite some time) gathered in the outdoor living room-- comfy old chairs around a big TV and black light decorations, just minus walls-- and watched Thelma and Louise with surround sound. Truly surreal, right up to the hand-sized Huntsman spider in the half-outdoor bathrooms at night. (eek!)

One thing we've been lacking on the east coast is some real characters, which perhaps we would have found had we stayed longer in Nimbin... the closest one we've found was a dude at the bottle shop here in the Gold Coast who informed us as we bought our Coronas, that the real reason for putting a slice of lime in the bottle is to keep the giant flies of Mexico out of the beer. Hmmm...

Another thing we're excited for in the Outback is the creatures! Yesterday we took a trip up to the Australia Zoo, home of Steve Irwin. There were lots of cool animals to check out (though many of them we've already seen in the wild... kangaroo...cassowary...crocodile... have we been here too long?) and we learned a bit as well. We saw crocs that were more than 100 years old-- Steve's dad started the zoo in the 1970s as a haven for crocs that were neglected in zoos or being nuisances in residential areas-- We finally got to see a Tassie devil, and the poor thing wasn't very fierce at all (and didn't spin in a tornado, either)-- but instead gallopped, piglike, in figure-eights around its enclosure-- impossible to get photos but quite funny. We also got to pet extremely tame kangaroos, and we even saw a fat wombat being led around on a leash! It was a pretty good zoo, aside from the endless Bindi Irwin songs played on the speaker system. Animal cruelty!

It's been a busy few weeks, but it's been exciting as well. We'll keep you posted from the Outback the best we can, as we dodge snakes (not the surfie kind), road trains, and feral camels...

A bit of context

Whoa there! For anyone who's checked out our Flickr photos lately-- don't worry, we're still in Melbourne. We've just been doing a bit of catching up with our uploads before we hit the road in November and go snap-happy again.

We've also just recently gotten our 8 or so rolls of film developed which we've been collecting since we left Canada. We often forget to use Dayle's SLR Olympus film camera, as it's a little heavy to carry around, but it's still taking wonderful photos (and has been since her Dad bought it in 1980!) Digital's great-- easy, instant, and you can fix your focusing/lighting errors right away. But we do miss that visual quality of film, and the anticipation of what may be in the prints envelope when picking them up from the camera shop! There have been a few surprises, including a very lewd humping-monkey picture we still aren't sure whether or not to post (is it porn??). Ahh, the joys of film...

So the film pics, which we've tried to label the best we can, span our travels from Thailand to Cambodia and back; from Far North Queensland to our side trip to Hong Kong; down through Sydney to Melbourne and most recently, chilly Tasmania.

The other photos are from late August to the present, random snaps of the goings-on in Melbourne, including:

- Culture Week at our ANZ: Apparently this is a huge event which happens in our office building in Richmond annually in September, and a good reason for office 'teams' to do something more fun than bank work. Each team is designated a country, decorates their area and eats lots of the national cuisine. At the time, Dayle's department was still insanely busy, so Indonesia got a bit neglected. Adrian's section did really well as Japan--there was origami, kimonos, flags, and even a Japanese prison camp encased in barbed-wire, yipe!-- and he even got recruited to wear a costume in the fashion parade. (They definitely have more fun!) This Culture Week thing is SO awesome it brought out the CEO of ANZ, who we've learned recently gets paid $9 millon a year (hopefully he does more than make appearances at costume parties for that kind of dough). Adrian got to shake his hand. Wowee!!

- Our apartment: The many stages of our little flowering balcony garden... and that pesky Huntsman spider which set up camp outside our apartment door for a few weeks. Thank god he's gone now!

-Visiting the Dandenongs: Our pics from when we took Daisy for a spin to visit the cool, rainforested mountains & William Ricketts Sanctuary just east of Melbourne.

- Exploring Melbourne: the many places to eat, drink, and relax in town; cute houses and cool window displays. There's still so much to look at here!
We hope you enjoy them...

Life With Spidey

It seems we spoke too soon-- not two days after posting the blog about that spider being gone, "taken care of", whatever... he's reappeared back in our building. Except this time he's decided to set up camp right outside our apartment.

Needless to say, it wasn't a very pleasant surprise to come home from work Monday night and find that Huntsman-- bigger than we remembered, actually-- just chilling out in the ceiling corner right across the hall from our apartment door.

Now, it might be hard to get a good perspective from these photos (it's difficult to take pictures when shaking with fear!) but you may notice the blob of light on the spider (click on the first photo for a chilling close-up)-- yup, it's big enough that its eyes reflect the camera flash. Yikes!

Since no amount of convincing could get Adrian to kill it ("It's got bones! It's like killing a kitten!" he says. Well, if a kitten came in through a vent we wouldn't mind so much.), and Dayle was too afraid it might leap if she tried to whack it with the mop, we pulled out the next best solution-- the masking tape. Unfortunately for us, Oz houses/apartments have a very strange architectural feature in nearly every room: bare slots/vents in the concrete walls placed close to the ceilings, presumably for air flow. Whoever came up with this idea was obviously unconcerned with the critters which might sneak in (some of you may remember a time when a Huntsman wandered into our caravan, through a similar air vent in the door?). And so, while it may seem frivolous to pack masking tape on a trip around the world, it has sure come in handy in desperate times like these.

So between our guilt and fear preventing the murder of our new neighbour, Adrian's other motive for keeping old Spidey around is a new harebrained theory that maybe the critter can help us predict the weather-- perhaps a little crazy, but we have noticed our spider friend hanging out on one wall when it's sunny, another on a rainy day, and upside down on the ceiling when it's windy. [Though maybe we could figure this out by looking out the window, ahem.] And while we do keep willing our spider friend to kindly exit the premises and continue his creepy ways OUTSIDE, we feel a little bad for him. Perhaps he's terrified of getting swept away by the gale-force winds we've had all week-- winds that have pushed our new balcony plants into a slant and have carried away (without any trace) an empty bag of potting soil and a tray of birdseed we'd left on the balcony. We don't really want flying Huntsmans now, do we?

Another sign of spring

Yep, we thought we could escape them in the city... but an old friend has come back to haunt us.

It wasn't nearly as huge as some of the Huntsman spiders we'd seen while living in our rustic little cottage in Stanthorpe, but after looking up at the stairwell ceiling one day on my way up to our apartment and spotting it, I haven't slept the same. I ducked every time I had to run underneath it. A snail on our mailbox door made me scream. I saw this critter move from corner to corner, happy that at least it was lurking on the floor below us, until one day this week it was gone.

We're not sure where it went, but I'm still finding myself checking the upper corners of every room, of the laundry room, and not sticking my hand into any dark cupboards... -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!