Last OZ adventure

A week or two ago on a Skype or FaceTime call with my brother Mike I was asked the question, "are you bored?" What an insanely accurate question!? Close to what my true feelings were yet I felt guilt in the fact that I could be bored of travel? Who gets bored of travel? Isn't travel the all encompassing one way street to nirvana? I can tell you I had been bored in the past of travel but that was for work. After flying 130+ flights in 2009 and 75+ in 2010 I had my fair share of time in the skies. I didn't rival Clooney in "Up in the Air" but when you watch that movie and can completely personally relate to a lot of the crazy things he did for "points" or "fun" on his business trip… well… lets just say it was a bit of a wake up call. Then again I loved my job before I left! I loved the role I had, the people I worked with and the environment I was surrounded with. Medical was extremely good to me and I feel humbled by the opportunity I had to learn and grow with Covidien/Confluent.

So yeah, I was a bit tired of Australia? Not bored, just ready to move on? Now that I'm writing this blog post in retrospect from a hotel bar in Bali things look a bit different. Prior to coming on this trip I was MOST excited about Australia and second Thailand. I cannot even begin to figure out where these obsessions came from. Hilariously enough Paul said that to me the other day when I was talking about my obnoxious interest in these two countries. He plainly asked, where the hell did I get these ideas from? I honestly don't know. Part of me thinks its rooted in the last time I was in the Asia-Pacific area. That was… no… it can't be… SEVEN years ago! How can it be SEVEN years ago I was meeting Joe and tooling around New Zealand in an RV… At the end of my study abroad semester I had convinced myself I needed to spend $4000 on a trip to Thailand. I felt it was the best thing I could possibly do because I'm in New Zealand and its SO close to Thailand that if I didn't do it then it would be a LONG time until I'd get the opportunity. I guess I was right since it took me seven years to grow the balls and save the cash.

I called both of my brothers and a few friends back home at the time to talk with them about the idea of extending my study abroad experience another five or six weeks. I'd miss thanks-giving but think of the experiences I'd have!? Looking back I do wish I had done it. $4000 was a TON of cash to a kid who was still in college and working at J.Crew for $10 an hour. I came out of college with a bit too much debt and it took me a long time to recover but I still think leaving a pro-western country like NZ and heading to a truly asian country like Thailand would have done me a lot of good. Not that I didn't have a great experience in New Zealand.

So I guess my "reading break" trip to Byron Bay and Fraiser island that semester together with my failed trip to Thailand in 2004 were still lingering as Paul and I planned our itinerary. So why am I going ON and ON about Thailand and Australia today? Well because they are cool but I now expect to have completely more amazing experiences in other parts of the world. I have changed my enthusiasm from Thailand and Oz to Vietnam, Nepal, Africa and South America. In my head my stream of thoughts went like this, "first I go to OZ then we make it to Thailand! Yeah! My most wanted is out of the way! Everything else will be cool too…"

Australia was completely awesome! It was also completely expensive. Could I dare even say over-priced? Using that term seems sacrilege because I consistently tell myself that I'm paying for the opportunity to have new experiences. Just like I say the high tax rates in California give me access to incredible weather and unbelievable natural surroundings. Even when I say these things it can be hard to swallow them. So after spending over forty days in Australia and seeing many of its most revered land marks I was getting a bit sore of the same rub.

Hopefully my comments above don't fall on deaf ears. I can picture many of my friends and family back home thinking to themselves, "hmm I wouldn't mind being in Australia right now…" I'm just trying to convey what a long period of time in one place can do to a traveler.

Its also a bit hilarious that I'm talking about two months as being too long of a time to spend in Oz. Most of the other backpacker travelers we met along the way would be on a six to twelve month journey around Oz. Most of them would be working part of the time but still it puts things in perspective. We flew in, hit the major spots: sydney (coogee, kings cross, bond, royal national park), whitsunday islands, cairns/great barrier reef, melbourne, tasmania and then finally perth. That took us 40 days!! It was a lot of ground to cover.

Okay Andrew, move on. You've already killed this subject.

So we had a lovely time in Western Australia. Paul and I debated back and forth about how to get around on the west coast prior to arriving. We talked with a lot of travelers and they all pointed us toward a cheap rental car. And thus we decided to give it a go. We rented a Hyundai Getz. It was a nice little four door hatch-type car that felt more like a go-kart than a car but also got 35ish mpg. We also leaned toward this as all of the hostels in Perth were fully booked up when we arrived and we figured if we drove an hour or two south the options would open up.

Thankfully that was true but we also found out that the temperature was significantly cooler in south western australia. We spent the night in a YHA in Bunbury before heading down to Augusta. This is called the "margaret river" area of SWA. Margaret river feels as if Napa was picked up and dropped down in Pleasanton or even Vegas. Its really a dry arid climate but they use lots of water for their recently discovered vineyard capabilities. Margaret river has only been in the process of making wine for the past few decades but it is recognized as some of the best to come out of Oz. We cruised down to Augusta on one of the farthest south points of Australia. We hit up the light house (thanks for instilling this tradition in me MOM!) and made our way over to the beach. We heard from a great british couple about a beach nearby where you could feed live sting rays. (this is my mothers worst nightmare - she's probably flinching just reading this). What were to mature young lad to do after being told GIANT SEA MONSTERS were right there at our feet for the feeding!?

We hit the beach and were not disappointed! These animals were so incredible! I'm not joking when I say they were at least three to five feet wide. Their eyes were the size of baseballs and their tails must have been another three feet long. It took me a few minutes of watching a tiny ten or twelve year old australian girl feed the things before I put one toe in the water near them. It was majestic!! They would come right up to your feed and kind of "sniff" around to see if you had any fish. A family of australian fishermen were up the beach cutting up bait fish for them and the little girl boldly went around throwing fish at them. The real feat was the fisherman father who came down and put his hand under the beasts to make sure the fish got all the way in! I think the rays had a good idea of what they were doing buddy but thanks for making me feel like a total wimp!?

It was an amazingly beautiful day at Hamelin Bay. Paul and I headed a bit down the beach to set up shop with our books and read for a while. We threw the frisbee that we had bought in Christchurch (more on the disaster later). It was simply a low key day of feeding sea monsters, playing frisbee and to our surprise topless mothers?! Yeah I went there. Where do these women get off taking their tops off? Literally twenty yards off of Pauls left shoulder was a mom feeding four kids sandwiches with no top on? It turned out she wasn't Australian, she was French. That made me feel more comfortable - at least for her children.

I'm sort of laughing to myself right now thinking back on this. Could you imaging the little boy when he invites his buddy to hit the surf with him when he's in middle school and when he and his mate come up for lunch his buddy gets a topless sandwich from mommy dear!? Simply hilarious.

We headed down to Pemberton where we were sure the mothers were well covered. Pemberton really smacked me in the face. This was a fruit picking / farming town and it really started to feel like western australia. I felt like we were getting closer to crocodile dundees hood. Where men were men and crocs killed men. We were out of luck when we took our first gander at the YHA. It was full of smelly fruit pickers and the windows were open (no A/C). Not that we HAVE to have AC but the farther away from the ocean we got the warmer it was. So we opted for a budget hotel and splurged for a real mattress and sky tv. We dropped $77 that night so thus dinner was light. Anyway we were able to climb some Karri trees the next day and go for a sweet 10k walk through the giants. It was really cool being in this forrest setting as I had just been up to see the Redwoods five hours north of SF before I left. Thankfully America wins again. The Karri trees grow to 90 meters and redwoods grow to 100! Take that Australia!

So of course we had heard you could climb these trees. Yup, leave it to the Aussies to allow tourists in a FEDERAL park to climb up metal spikes hammered into the sides of a 90 meter tree. No fear of lawsuits will really let you do a lot! We polished the laminate off of our travel insurance policies and headed up the tree. Funny enough our manly image was shot down as four Chinese girls scaled the behemoth in front of us and giggled the whole way up. We climbed to the top in complete silence and concentration. At one point I could hear Paul breathing heavily and thankfully it was just heavy concentration breath and not a freak out coming on… We made it to the top and from around 140 feet up we could see for miles. It was a bit of a let down because you can't see the floor below you because the branches block it. You almost don't even feel that high up. The trees were formerly used as fire watches by the national fire program in Australia until they discovered planes could do the same thing. Then while one of the planes was being serviced a fire broke out and due to the delay it burned quite a bit longer than necessary. Thus in the mid-1990's the trees were reactivated (think Lord of the Rings!) and are now used again.

It was quite a day. We headed back to Augusta to our comfy YHA for one more night before we headed back up to Perth. We had booked ourselves into Fremantle for a few nights. Fremantle is supposed to be a nice little surf town south west of Perth. I don't know much about it because the only hostel that would take us in let me to have a mini-heart attack. We made it to Fremantle around 5pm and it must have been 90% humidity and 100 degrees outside. We took one look at the six man rooms with no AC, no fan and no windows we'd be baking in all night and decided to try somewhere else.

Side note here on weather patterns. Clearly I don't have much of a historical point of view when it comes to Australia but we managed to miss some of the "largest" natural disasters in recent history everywhere we went on this trip.

Sydney - excessive heat after we left

Cairns - Cyclone Yasi hit it dead on!

Brisbane - crazy floods bigger that took the entire city out

Christchurch - earth quake in December and now another one yesterday!

Melbourne - huge floods shut down the city for a few days

Tasmania - thankfully NOTHING happened there. Whew!

Perth - cyclone on its way when we booked it to Bali.

click the links above to learn more about the weather!

Either a. we brought the bad weather (lets hope not!) or b. there are some crazy things going on in this world. Interestingly enough on a TV News Poll in Australia I noticed that 70% of the country doesn't believe in climate change. Wether you believe in global climate change or not I can't help but feel lucky to have missed each of these disasters.

So after booking it out of Fremantle and changing my t-shirt for the second or third time (who's counting) we made it to the governors hostel in Perth. They took us in but only had openings for one night. Every other hostel in Perth and Fremantle was sold out for the next three days and that would mean we'd need to head out of the city at least 40k to find a cheap place to sleep. Hotels stared at $200 a night. All tours north were canceled due to two cyclones coming in off the coast so all travelers were staying in town.

Paul and I debated what to do and finally came up with the idea of just calling it quits on Western Australia and heading to Bali. We felt we had given Australia a good run and were ready for a new experience in a new culture. The flight change ended up costing us a good chunk of change but since we've been here we've saved BOATLOADS of cash every day.

I have limited internet in our new posh luxury hotel so I'll try to write up some thoughts on Bali and get them uploaded in the next week or two. We stayed for the first five nights at the Three Brothers Bungalows in Legian - we've now moved onto the Grand Balisani Suites in Seminyak.

Tomorrow we're heading up to Ubud to check out the monkey forest!