Month: November 2019

Coming from Perth (~4 hour flight) we arrived late at Denpasar International Airport. Visa was easy, you don’t need one when staying less than 30 days. We took a Grab Car to our stay at Ubud, central Bali.

There was lots of traffic on the 25 km road to Ubud, so it took us about 1 hour to go by cab. Indonesian driving is different to recent Australian driving, i was happy not to have to drive a car in the night on these narrow roads.

Ubud is the Yoga capital of the world, as it seems. Lots of single women in their middle-ages seeking for their inner peace of mind. Vegetarian/vegan food is the common food in here in addition to healthy fruit-shakes detoxifying your guts … so you get the power for the next yoga session. Ubud is also the cultural centre of Bali, with the famous dancings and shadow puppet theatres. Overall it is very calm besides the traffic, only disturbed sometime a little by the gongs and singing of gamelan orchestres with their , to our ears, “arhythmic” music. Bali itsef is mostly hindu, while the rest of Indonesia is muslim.

We stayed at a small hotel called Griya Kartini, one evening the owner’s mother introduced us and another couple and invited us to some balinese tea-ceremony in the evening. Madame Kartini told stories about her life, her lovers , her businesses, … a 82-year old dame with style wearing her colour-matching gems with nails and Chanel’s No. 5.

She named her first dog “Dollar” , when Dollar get pregnant, the puppies were called Euro, Rupie, Pound and Yen.

In Ubud we rented a scooter, just to go to the rice fields north of it. Which was disappointing, as the rice-terraces seemed to be constructed for the sole purpose of tourists shooting themself swinging the terraces and shooting photos for their instagram followers. Sooo touristic… rice-terrace disneyland.

After our 4 night stay in Ubud, we took bus-ferry ticket to Gili Islands in the east, to be precise, Gili Air next to Lombok. The boat was full, lots of party-people most of them heading to Gili Trawangan, the party island of the three islands. Looked like Ballermann in Mallorca, gladful that we moved on to “our” Island – Gili Air.

On Gili Air ( “Air” means water in Indonese) there are no scooters and cars, just bicycles and horse-carriages pulled by Ponies. Crossing the island takes 30 minutes by feet, surrounded by crystal clear waters , excellent for snorkelling. Underwater-sight is about 10 meters, we saw lots of colorful fish, soft corals, but unfortunately no turtles yet.

We stayed 3 nights in Perth, which we realized as a city worth visiting. It’s the headquarter to many mining companies in Western Australia, has ~ 2 mio population and is just “nice” and laid-back.

The city centre contains some “old” buildings (Aussies say “antique”, to everything older than 100 years as it seems) and some nices shopping arcades. Besides that great museums and in general a more relaxed and easy-going attitude of the people compared to eastern Australia. And also some great beaches, what u need more. The “Swan river” divides the city, so they have both freshwater and saltwater in their city and everyones seems to go fishing by own boats during weekends.

From Perth we took a flight to Denpasar on Bali / Indonesia. More to come…

Here’s some pics of the trips we’ve done nearby our stay in Jurien Bay.

Green Head Beach: nice beach with crystal clear water. some sea-life underneath. There’s also showers and bathroom available near the parking lot.

I wanted to go to a place called North Point, only accessible via sand roads. While going there, we discovered some piles of stones, built by passing people over the years. At that moment a herd of cangaroos crossed the street. I went out of the car, did some pics, went into car again, just to find a small spider climbing up my shorts … Aaaargh !!!. Out from the car again, getting out of my pants and my underpants… Being naked in the desolate outback, next settlement 50km away, i examined my private parts, just at that time, a car passed by . I wonder what the driver thought at that moment.

We did a trip to the “The pinnacles”, a national park full of limesand formations, some of them 3,5 m high. You just observe the park by car, walking would be too harsh because of temperature.

It is still not known what caused the forming of pinnacles.

Included in our ticket (15 AUD per car) was the entrance fee to Lesueur National park, a little bit further northwards from Jurien Bay, where our hotel was.

As it was near dawn we arrived at Lesueur NP, we were the only car driving the 18km loop road of the park. While driving slowly and as silent as possible, we encountered lots of kangaroos, wallabies and some ostrich (whoa, they are quick).

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From Perth Airport it was just an easy 2 hour drive to Jurien Bay, where we rent a hotel for 4 nights.

By driving the Indian Ocean Drive up north, we could get a impression of the vast distances. Soon after leaving the city of Perth, it feels like being in the middle of nowhere. Just bushland, small trees, nearly no shadow, sanddunes … only interrupted by cadavres of kangaroos rotting in the kerbsides.

As Jurien Bay has only one supermarket with very limited offerings and we needed to get some provisions , we decided to take a trip to the next bigger town up in the north – Geraldton.

Short trip of 200km for the supermarket – but we enhanced it with some stops at nice beaches, did some swimming in the emerald green waters of the indian ocean. The journey is the reward.

What is not so good in here is the constant winds – which makes the current 40°C more convenient but also dangerous if forgetting your UV-blocker.

And the road to the smaller beaches can be “blocked” by sandheap, piled up from the dunes. I guess, that’s the reason everyone driving 4WD vehicles in here.

some cities you love , some cities you dislike. Sydney was for sure first choice.

very cosmopolite, nice beaches, interesting architecture, cozy hidden districts and lanes, friendly people, various markets , Sydney has it all. We stayed 3 nights in Haymarket District, also known as Chinatown.

We stayed at Broadbeach, which is suburb of Goldcoast. The same tall buildings, same retirees as in miami.

We went to springbroke national park, which was a curvy 45 minutes drive from us. The drive was the highlight of the curvy trip as it was near perfect for motocycles, but also enjoyable by car.

At the end of the street we did some walking to, guess what, … a waterfall.

Quite unimpressive cos of lack of water…

Whole Australia is lacking water/rain currently, which results in bushfires. News is full of warnings where not to go and already 3 people died.

Another trip we’ve done was to famous Byron Bay – a place famous for surfing and its therefore laid-back and hippiesque livestyle. “Eeeazy mate…”

The beach was gorgeous, rather windy and cold water, but nice.

Besides of those 2 trips we’ve been lazy, shadi got a little cold, mine was also feeling not to well, so we kept it low and relaxed.

After Goldcoast we flew to Sydney, and this city was great and enjoyable.

Compared to Melbourne, Sydney was much more interesting to us. We stayed there 3 nights and had some discussion on where to move next. Both of us wanted to leave Australia, both no the other hand both are interested in western Australia too.

So we’re sitting currently at Sydney airport waiting for our 5 hour (!) quantas flight QF581 to Perth in western Australia.

Quantas rocks : i’m currently waiting from 10000 feet as they have FREE onboard wifi on their continental flights.Network connection was sufficient to upload photos, downloading podcasts and doing maintenance on my blog’s server.

And for sure, i used vpn/wireguard as quantas privacy declaration was too nebolous for me… They are storing data of webpages you are surfing to … Fuck off

In addition each seat has an ipad available for use of their entertainment program.

And onboard food was also good.

And you get icecream …

I’m happy ????

Next stage was Cairns, the entrygate to the Great Barrier Reef. Correct pronounciation is “Kans” – like in “Cola Cans”. We stayed 5 days there at Trinity Beach, about 20km north of Cairns.

The area is mostly rainforests and mountaineous, with some sugar-cane plantations. The main attraction is the reef ~ 1.5 hour by boat. We discussed about doing a tour to the reef, but decided instead to go to “Green Island” – to be honest, all the reef tours seemed overpriced and too touristic – and we were right. So we saved our money and did only some snorkeling at the island.

We also visited some wildlife park, where we had the chance to see some birdlife (the mighty Cassowary) and caressing supercute wallabies. Koalas were also present, but sleepy and hidden.

Another trip we did was to “Barron gorge” – where an old train routes crosses the scenery.

Cairns holds the massive “Flecker Botanical Gardens” – free of charge and a must-go if interested in plants.

On our last day in Cairns , we got visited by a huge owl-like bird sitting for an hour at our balcony.

We moved then by plane from Cairns to Brisbane, where we hired another care and moved directly to Broadbeach at Goldcoast. Goldcoast looks like Miami Beach, an artifical disneyland-like area with wide beaches and tall skyscrapers and shopping-malls.