Great Ocean Road and Grampians

Well we've been out of touch for awhile!  We have been in small towns and camping where internet access has been difficult so we've chosen to do a big update all at once now.  The next day after taking surfing lessons in Byron Bay we decided to go for a hike in the woods to this waterfall that Dan hiked to 5 years ago.  He said that at that time the path was closed but he went anyways, and he was adament about doing it again so I agreed.  It really felt like we were in the jungle, especially since it was raining and soggy...perfect weather for a walk...ha ha!  About 1/2 hour into the hike we came accross this CRAZY lobster (in the forest..wierd) that was red and blue and snapping his pinchers together to try and scare us off!  He looked really pissed off!  As we were stopping to watch  him, we all of a sudden noticed that we were covered in leeches!  There were these land leeches that were holding on for dear life all over our shoes and legs and moving upwards!  Yikes!  Dan said the waterfall was about another 2-2.5 hours away so we decided to bail and spent the next 1/2 hour after getting back trying to rid ourselves of leeches...gross!

Next we flew back to Melbourne and rented a car and took the next 4 days driving west along the coast called the Great Ocean Road.  The coast is beautiful!  Craggy cliffs and winding roads....It was pretty cold and rained on and off all day so we only camped one night but we saw lots of koala bears which made me very very happy!  Then we headed north to Grampians National Park to do some camping and hiking and spent 3 days there.  We had a really really nice time, despite much of the park and hiking trails being closed due to (you  guessed it) flooding.  There is no flooding there now but in January the floods and storms caused significant damage to roads and tracks so a large portion of the park was unaccessable.  There were, however, plenty of hiking trails to keep us busy and the weather during the day was absolutely perfect!  At night I had to break out the longjohns though!  The town in the centre of the park was amazing for seeing Kangaroos at night too!  At around 6pm they came out to graze on front lawns and there were like 25-30 that you could see all at one...I was in my glory!

Today we have driven to Adelaide and plan to head to the Flinders Ranges (mountains and national park) for more camping and hiking tomorrow.

Hope you are all well!

Love Hanna and Dan xoxo

Koala bear on the Great Ocean Road

 Great Ocean Road

 The Twelve Apostles

 Kangaroo at the Grampians National Park

 Our great campsite at the Grampians

 View during our hike

Surf's up!

Well, we've arrived in Byron Bay, which is a hippie-beach town type place on the east coast.  Dan was here 5 years ago, and he says a lot has changed!  It's a little more party-town like now (rather than hippie) as like most nice places to visit and hang out in has been "discovered", but we are still enjoying it.  The accommodation is more expensive here too, but fortunately we've found a nice place downtown close to the beach and the grocery store.  It's very new and clean, and you can get pancakes in the morning for breakfast, which has made Dan very happy.  I am sticking to cereal since no pancakes can compare to yours Peter! 

Today we did the typical Byron Bay thing and took surfing lessons.  It was great fun and we were both standing up the board so that was pretty exciting!  There were these kids (about 14-15 years) from France who are like world's best surfers practicing when we were having our lesson.  They apparently come over every 3 months to train, and they were pretty amazing.  They make it look so easy!  As for us, we are pretty sore this afternoon and I got a bit of a sunburn despite liberally applying sunscreen (ah the nordic blood...)  Yesterday we just hung out at the beach and relaxed all day which was pretty nice.  We've become pretty lazy since we've arrived here in Byron Bay and have been having afternoon naps pretty much daily ...I havn't done that in so long and I've forgotten how nice it is!

We have a bit more of an active day tomorrow, however.  We rented a car for the day so we can drive out to this nature park and go for a hike.  Dan remembers being there on his last trip and that it was really beautiful so he wants to go again.

A few of you have also been asking for more pictures so I added some to some of the previous posts starting at the Goodbye New Zealand if you want to check them out!

Well bye for now! xoxo Hanna and Dan

Cool chair at our hostel in Byron Bay

 The beach near Byron Bay

Great Barrier Reef

Well today was our Great Barrier Reef tour!  It turned out a day later than expected.  The trip got cancelled yesterday because of bad weather so we went today which actually worked out perfectly because it's Daniel's birthday!  There were still some pretty big waves heading out to the island and I made an excellent decision to take some gravol before we left in the morning.  It was about 1 and a half hours boat ride out to the island and surrouding lagoon and reef and soooo nauseating!  There were tonnes of people vomiting on the boat (Jess Brennan...I thought of you!) and this must happen a lot because they were well stocked with barf bags!  So it was nice to finally get there.  They first took us onto the island which is only 700m across for a short tour.  The island is 6000 years old and is formed entirely by all the dead coral from the reef which is pretty amazing.  There are these birds that come every year to nest on the island so there were tonnes flying about when we were on our walk.

We spent the next several hours snorkelling, which was, of course, amazing :>)  The fish were so beautiful, colourful and plentiful!  Even the coral was pink and purple in some areas.  And the highlight....turtles!  There are green turtles that hang out on coral reefs near the island that our guide called "turtle cleaning stations" and the little fish clean the algae off them.  At one time we saw 3-6 at once and sometimes they swam right by us when we were snorkelling.  It was soooo amazing, like being in another world!  It's so wonderful and peaceful under the water too, I just loved it.  In the afternoon the sun really came out and it was lovely the way it was shinning through the water and lighting up the fish.  The lagoon was this picture-perfect turquoise colour, so it was pretty much like swimming in paradise.  I can also proudly say I was the last to come out of the water and they had to blow the whistle at me :>)  And fortunately the trip back was way less bumpy than the trip out to the lagoon.

We are still in that fantastic hostel in Agnes Waters and it has a great kitchen for cooking that we've been taking advantage of so Dan bbq'ed himself a steak and I made some salad and potatoes for supper.  At dusk there are tonnes of little toads who come out here and hop around as we eat dinner...so cute.  The hostel's dog also kept us company..although I think it may have had something to do with Dan's steak.

Tomorrow morning we are returning our rental car in Noosa and will take the bus the following day to Byron Bay for a few days.

One other point of interest that I forgot to mention from before...when it rains in this country, it really rains!  Apparantly they have had drought here for like 10 years and 2 years ago hundreds of people were killed from bushfires, and this is the first season in a long time that they have at too much rain!  We've asked around, and apparantly most of the flooding that happened in Queensland in Dec/Jan has subsided and cleanups are underway, but there have been huge damages to the sugarcane and bananas, so they are expecting prices to go up.  The major recovery/rebuiling that is happening now is is Cairns, where the cyclone hit.  We did, however, experience some pretty crazy rain and flash flooding when we were in Melbourne.  One night all of a sudden you could see the clouds moving in and then literally 5 minutes later is started raining sooo hard and we stopped for shelter and stood on this step about a foot high beside a restaurant and within 10 minutes the water that had accumulated from the rain was already at our feet!  Then these crazy bugs who were also trying to get away from the water started crawling up my legs and I kind of freaked out!  So we decided just to make our way back to our hostel and we were literally knee deep in water!  It was crazy!  Your could see the water going under the door of the restaurants downtown!  The next day I asked at the hostel if this was "normal" and the lady said it usually happens once or twice a year...crazy!

We'll talk to you all later!

Love Hanna and Dan

Lady Musgrave Island and our snorkelling spot...paradise?  We thought so!

Our little retreat in Agnes Waters

Well we've had some haphazard days since we left Tasmania.  Our plan was to fly into Melbourne and rent a car and drive along the Great Ocean Road and maybe to some mountains called the Grampians but we neglected to read the fine print when we filled out the car rental form the day before that they require at least 48 hours notice so we arrived in Melbourne and couldn't get a car!  So we took the tram into the city and found a decent place to stay right in the downtown area and booked a flight for the next day to the Sunshine coast.  Dan really wanted to see this area anyways since he didn't get to see the great barrier reef the last time he was in Australia so we decided to do that first and that way we would have lots of time to organize a car rental for when we get back to Melbourne (although we havn't yet decided when and how we will do this.)  We booked a place in a town called Cotton Tree for 3 nights.  They didn't have any double rooms for the first 2 nights so we opted for the dorms...big mistake!  I really feel we hit the low point in our accomodation!  We stayed in the dorms a few times in NZ and it was fine, but the vibe in this particular hostel was early 20's surfer kids and the dorms were sooooo messy and stinky!  I wanted to take a picture to show just how gross the kitchens and bathrooms were but then I decided it wasn't worth space on the camera card.  For for someone like me who hates a messy kitchen it was torture!  On the upside however (there always has to be one, right?), we did save some money on accomodation and we took a day trip to a nearby town called Noosa where we arranged all of our accomodation and travel for the next week...which is so unlike us (normally we are one day at a time) but it's kind of nice to know what we will be doing and not have to be constantly looking things up.  We had a nice day in Noosa on the beach and wandering from cafe to cafe having cappucinos and then moving onto wine or beer (figuring we saved it on the hostel...ha ha).  The next day we rented surfboards from our hostel and headed down to the local beach, although I've never surfed before so I pretty much rode the board on my stomach when the waves came but but it was still a blast!  I think we may take some lessons when we get to Byron Bay next week.

Today we picked up the rental car we will have for 4 days and drove to a place called Agnes Waters.  We have booked an all day snorkelling trip tomorrow to Lady Musgrave Island to enjoy the Great Barrier Reef!  It's a MAJOR splurge, but we think it will be worth it, especially since it's my b-day gift to Dan since his big day is quickly approaching.  This area is actually supposed to be really good for enjoying the reef because it doesn't have the crowds that the towns further north along the coast have.  We have always had a huge step up accomodation wise!  We found this backpackers place that is HUGE and we have our own cabin and bathroom and TV and fridge and porch with lovely wooden table and chairs.  The weather is just perfect...it's warm but with a nice cool breeze so we are enjoying wine and beer at our little table while we play cards...heaven :>)  And because we will be here for a few days I bought real milk for my cereal (rather than the powdered stuff)...ahhh the little things that make me happy.

Well I guess that's it for now.  We will keep you posted!

Love Hanna and Dan

Flash flooding in Melbourne - 

Tasmanian Devils!!!!

Well, you guessed right from the title, Hanna's childhood dream of seeing a Tasmanian Devil has been fulfilled!  For some reason when I was a child I chose to do a school project on the Tasmanian Devil ( I think because it seemed sort of exotic) and have since wanted to see one in person!  And they are REALLY cute!!!  Unfortunately we had to make our way to a wildlife park here in Tasmania to see one because they are endangered, primarily because they seem to be susceptible to this type of cancer that is spread like a virus called Devil Facial Tumour that eventually causes suffocation and starvation (poor little guys).  They also feed off of dead animals so they frequently get hit by cars when they are feeding off roadkill.  So because their numbers are so small in the wild now,  it's pretty hard to see one if they are not in captivity.  There are numerous breeding programs that have been put into place to try and make sure that they don't become extinct, but unfortunately efforts to find a cure for the cancer have been (as the article put it) "depressingly fruitless."  Anyways, we went to this Wildlife park and saw them today and they are always on the move, kind of skipping around and they look so ragged and ugly that they are cute.  I could have watched them for hours.  We also got a close up encounter with some kangaroos and got to feed them so I was kind of freaking out over that.  The one Kangaroo ripped the whole bag of food out of Dan's hand and ate the paper bag before the food...apparently that was tastier!

We had another few nice evenings of camping at another National Park in Tasmania.  We saw some more wildlife including some baby Pademelons (kind of like mini-kangaroos) that were maybe one of cutest things I have seen in my life.  I still can't get used to the wildlife hopping rather than walking or running...it cracks me up every time we are sitting at our campsite and something bounces by!  This particular national park also allowed us to make campfires (and even supplied us with firewood!) so that made us (in particular Dan) very happy.  At nights we would drive to the flat grassy areas and wait for the Wombats (kind of like little teddy bears) to emerge and watch them for awhile, and then head back to our campsite and enjoy a nice fire.

Tonight we are flying back to Melbourne and will spend the next month on mainland Australia.  We just booked a flight for the beginning of March to Singapore, so that will begin our Asian adventure.  Hope you are all well and we will keep you posted!

Love Hanna and Dan