Easter weekend

My easter weekend here in Australia was pretty sweet. It wasn’t really a traditional Easter where families get together but everyone I live with had four days off so we tried to take full advantage of that.

Thursday night Brent and I went into the city (Brisbane) for a house party. I knew quite a few people there and also met a lot of people, so it was a really good night. I hadn’t been to a house party in a while, so that was pretty cool, and much cheaper. The next morning we drove back to Redcliffe and since we only got about three hours of sleep, we just relaxed all day. Brent slept on the floor in front of the TV and the rest of us just sat around not doing too much.

We woke up really early on Saturday and went hiking in the glass mountains near the Sunshine Coast. We wanted to climb Mt Beerwah, the tallest of the glass house mountains, but it was temporarily closed due to erosion and rock slide. So we drove a little further and found another mountain to climb. Plan B turned out to be Mt Ngungun. It’s not as long of a hike as the others, but we still found ourselves out of breath, so it was good hike all together.

After the hike we went kayaking in the ocean. We started in the canal near Brent’s parents’ house and went out exploring. We wanted to go in a little river from the ocean but it was low tide and too shallow. So we ended up just getting out of our kayaks and walking around in the mud looking for fish and stuff. They showed me some pretty cool looking fish and we found a huge crab which we poked and annoyed with a stick for a bit.

Saturday night we stayed home and drank with some Germans I met in Tasmania. We took the same tour around Tasmania a couple of weeks ago and they were in the Brisbane area so they came over to Phil and Mel’s and partied with us for a few nights.

Sunday we went to the beach and just hung around there for most of the afternoon trying to sweat out all the tequila and beer we had consumed the night before. We tried to play some touch footy and gridiron (american football), but we were only five, so we ended up kind of mixing the two games up and creating our own game. We also played some soccer and volleyball before Phil almost took an old lady’s head off with the soccer ball. After that little scare we decided to call it quits.

Sunday night we stayed in again and drank a bit, but not as much as the night before. We were all pretty tired. Today is Monday and we are just cleaning the house and relaxing again. I’m leaving for my 5 day solo camping trip on Moreton Island this afternoon. It’s raining right now at 10:30am but i’m only leaving at 3:30 and it’s supposed to be nice for the rest of the week.

Moreton Island camping is booked

I booked my campsite for Moreton Island this morning. Moreton Island is a National Park 40 kilometers north east of Brisbane. On a clear day, you can see it from Redcliffe since it’s a pretty big island – It stretches 35 kilometers long from north to south and covers an area of 170 square kilometers.

I hop on a Barge in Brisbane on Monday the 13th in the afternoon and come back on the same barge Friday the 17th in the morning. For a passenger, the barge costs $45AUD. I’m camping on the west side of the island (facing the mainland) in a campground called “The Wrecks”. My camping permit cost me $20AUD for four nights, which I think is a pretty good price. The camping on Moreton Island is quite basic. Some campgrounds don’t even have toilets and water and require you to bury “stuff”, haha. Some are only accessible by 4WD or boat. The one where I am staying offers semi-potable water (they recommend you boil it for ten minutes), has cold showers and port-a-loo style toilets I believe.

I’m going to bring my backpack, a hiking bag, my new two man tent and some food. I’m going to try to keep the food as simple as possible since I want to keep everything fairly light and I don’t have a camping stove or anything. I’m thinking of just bringing a cooler bag or something with some fruit, granola bars and stuff to make sandwiches.

I plan on spending my five days on the island hiking, going to the beach, checking out the sand dunes and the ship wrecks. There are plenty of things to do around the island, so I’m sure I won’t get too bored. I’ll have to remember to bring a book though, because I’ll be camping alone.

This week will be fairly cheap. I’ve spent $65AUD on my barge pass and my camping permit so far and still need to buy food which will cost around $50AUD. So I’ll be spending less than $25 a day for the five days that I’m camping.

• nexium adverse reactions

Tent

Yesterday I bought a two man tent from K-mart for $40. I bought it because I plan on (not sure if I’m going to go before or after my Cairns to Brisbane bus trip) catching the barge from Brisbane to Moreton Island National Park to do some camping, hiking and just laying on the beach.

For pedestrians, the barge to Moreton costs around $40 for a return ticket. Since It’s low season here at the moment and for some months to come, I might hop on to Moreton on a Monday and camp there till the Thursday or Friday. A camping permit costs around $20 and Campsites there only cost about $4/night and there’s plenty of outdoor stuff to do on the Island to keep busy and active.

I would bring my own food and try to keep it simple and light such as sandwiches and fruit. They have cold showers in the camping area, so I would be able to keep clean. I also have a sleeping bag which I brought from Canada.

I still have a lot of research to do before leaving but I’m already pretty excited.

This tent will also be useful if I decide to go back to Tasmania because if I do go back, I plan on renting a car once down there and camp and hike around the island on my own instead of with a tour.

Broncos NRL game

Friday night Phil and I went to see a National Rugby League game at the Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane. Mel got two free tickets through work so she gave them to us (thanks Mel).  The Brisbane Broncos were hosting the St. George Dragons. We got really good seats, we were three rows from the try line (end zone in American football) so were were pretty much on the field and almost eye level with the players. The Broncos ended up losing but it was still a really exciting game. The beer wasn’t super duper expensive either, we got 8 beers for $48. We took the train into the city on the way to the game but on the way back, Mel stayed at work for like 3 extra hours just so she could still be downtown to give us a ride back home (thanks again Mel).

Planning Cairns to Brisbane bus trip

I came back from Tasmania a couple days ago and I’m already planning my next trip. I think I’ll go on two more trips before working. I was first planning on going to New Zealand for two to three weeks but the main thing I want to do in the latter was to downhill bike and their downhill bike season is already over. So New Zealand will have to wait till next summer. My plan for New Zealand however was to fly to Christchurch in the south island and then make my way down to Queenstown and back. Queenstown is known to be the outdoor playground of the southern hemisphere. Although Queenstown’s population is only 7500, it’s got some of the best extreme sports in the world. There are three ski hills nearby that you can downhill bike on between January and March for a reasonable price ($160NZ for a 5 day lift pass).

Then I thought maybe going to Papua New Guinea , but I started reading up on it and it said it’s not safe for foreigners to walk around during the day and especially not at night. So that kind of turned me off the whole PNG experience.

So then I thought I’d travel in the north of Australia since it’s getting a little colder and the north would still be quite warm in April. So I decided to fly to Cairns, stay there until I’m bored of the place, then hop on a greyhound back down to Brisbane. A 2000km Greyhound pass costs $360AUD and Cairns to Brisbane takes over 30 hours. The cool part about this pass is that it allows me to hop on and off the bus until I’ve traveled 2000km (Cairns to Brisbane are 1700km’s from one another according to google maps). Stopping here and there along the way would definitely give me the opportunity to see more cities and towns along the north east coast of Australia as well as check out the great barrier reef in more places than just Cairns. I plan on stopping in the following cities/towns along the way: Airlie Beach, Mackay, Agnes Water, Bundaberg and Noosa. I’m thinking of leaving for this trip in mid-April and being gone for around 3 weeks.

Budget

After spending two months in Australia, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my budget. To do so, I proceeded to calculate how much I spend on average per day and then knowing how much money I have left saved up, this would allow me to see how much longer I could live for without getting a job.

That said I’ve been extremely lucky having generous friends all over Australia since unlike other backpackers, I hardly spend any money for a place to stay or transportation. If I was on my own, I would have to pay for a hostel bed every single night and take buses from city to city. However, I’ve only paid for roughly 12 nights accommodation in over 60 days and have been paying almost 1/10 of the price for my flights.

So far, I have been spending on average $58 Australian dollars per day. Not bad considering I’ve visited   a dozen cities, took three tours totaling 9 days and took almost half a dozen flights. If I keep spending as much as I have in the first two months, I still have enough money to last another 5 months before working. However. I think I’ll start working sooner than later because it’s going to be winter here soon and I think I’d rather work and settle down a bit during winter than summer.

Tasmania

After spending a week in Hobart, I took a 5 day tour around Tasmania. The latter is an Australian state/island located under the mainland. It’s population is only half a million and is covered with national parks. That said I fell in love with the place since I love outdoor sports such as hiking, biking, camping, etc.

We were 7 people on the tour. There were two germans, two tawanese, one french, one chinese and yours truly, a half cast. We traveled counter clockwise from the west coast to the east coast of the island and stayed in three different hostels. We did a lot of hiking in the rain forest and in the mountains. We also got to swim at two different beaches, one being the most secluded beach i’ve ever been on. It took us over an hour to hike between two mountains to get the wineglass bay on the north east coast. The water was really cold at both beaches, one reason is because it’s Fall right now in the southern hemisphere and another is because the water comes from Antarctica. We also saw some really nice waterfalls, crossed a couple suspension bridges.

During the tour, we went to a cheese factory, a place where we got to taste 50 different types of honey and a salmon farm where we tasted some really good smoked salmon. On the last day of the tour, we stopped at some place called animal world, it was like a zoo but they only had the animals who could be found in Tasmania. There I got to pet and feed some kangaroos, wombats and tasmanian devils.

I definitely want to go back to Tasmania to do some more hiking, biking and camping. Next time I think I’ll rent a car and do things at my own pace. Tours are really cool because you get to meet a lot of people, but I would have liked to have more time to hike.

I think I drank every night I was in Tasmania, so I think I’ll take it easy for the next couple of weeks. Maybe until my next trip. For the latter, I’m planning on either going to New Zealand before it gets cold so I can do some more hiking and biking or maybe go up north to Darwin, Cairns or even Indonesia.

Nick

Hobart

I spent a week in Hobart, the second oldest city in Australia and the capital city of the state/island of Tasmania. My friend Luc from Canada studies at the University of Tasmania and he and his two roommates Rob and Tom were nice enough to let me stay with them on the University campus. premarin

Hobart is a little city compared to the others I have visited around Australia so far. The International Airport of Hobart actually only has three gates, barely big enough to accommodate international flights. Hobart’s population, waterfront location and history actually remind me of my hometown of Kingston in Ontario. However, there are many aspects of the city which also differ from Kingston. Although Hobart is surrounded by water on one side like Kingston, the former has mountains only kilometers from the waterfront, which Kingston lacks of. The whole city is also built on hills. It seems like you’re always walking uphill or downhill when in Hobart, and since the University campus is about a 30 minute walk to downtown, I was walking a lot.

Since I was staying on a University campus surrounded by students, we spent many nights drinking. Luc’s got a lot of great friends which I got to meet and staying on campus made me miss the student life a bit. Until they locked themselves in their room to study that is. Their school in only a fraction of the size of the University of Ottawa and it seems more like a close knit community as opposed to the big Universities we are used to seeing in Ontario or Canada.

Overlooking Hobart from 1472 meters above sea level is Mount Wellington. I took a 3 hour tour on my second last day in Hobart. I got dropped off at the top of Mount Wellington with a couple other Australians and Englishmen with a mountain bike, a helmet and a tour guide. It was a cold and wet day so there was quite a bit of fog at the top of the mountain. Having rained the night before, it wasn’t the best conditions if you didn’t want to get dirty, but pretty awesome conditions to be biking downhill in the mud. We rode down the mountain then through the city all the way to the waterfront. I was a little confused biking because their brakes are opposite ours in Canada. Having done quite a bit of biking in Canada, I would naturally slam on the right brake to lock the back tire to skid, however Australia, the right brake activates the front brake. Needless to say, I almost went over the handle bars a a couple times.

Nick

Heading to Hobart, Tasmania

My friend Luc from Canada is currently doing his post graduate studies in Hobart, the state capital of Tasmania. The latter is an island and Australian state located 240 kilometres south of the continent. The island’s population is roughly half a million where most of it is located in the greater Hobart area.

I’m leaving Monday March 16th and plan on staying there for at least a couple of weeks. Luc lives in an apartment style student residence and said I could crash on their couch. Tasmania is known for it’s natural beauty and as a haven for outdoor activities. I bought a lonely planet travel book for Australia and New Zealand yesterday to read up on hikes and tours. The island is pretty small, you can drive across it in less than a day, so I might even look into hiring a car for a few days.

The reason why I’m going to Hobart right now is because Luc’s school term just started and he’s not too busy with homework and labs at the moment. We’ve also been getting rained on quite a bit here in Redcliffe due to Hurricane Hamish, so hopefully I can find some nice weather down south.

Nick

Touch footy

Tonight I play my second touch footy game in the Redcliffe league. Touch footy to rugby is what touch football is to football.

Brent, Phil, Shane and I play on the same men’s team every Wednesday. Last Wednesday we we lost 10-6 but I got my first “Try” (goal/touchdown). It’s a little hard for me to pick up since in rugby, you’re not allowed passing it forward, however in football, which I grew up watching on TV and playing with friends, most passes are done by launching the ball forward. Also, most passes are done underhand and the play moves horizontally on the field instead of forward. Offsides are still quite confusing to me and other little rules, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up quick enough.

I’ve been getting into their sports since arriving in Australia. Most of my friends are sports fans and are answering all my questions. I went to watch a National Rugby League game a couple of weeks ago and watch a lot of cricket on TV. We are going to go Lawn Bowling soon as well. The latter is like bocce ball but a little different since the balls have weights on one side so you have to make them curve. They don’t really watch hockey, baseball, football of basketball here, they grew up playing different sports as us in Canada.

Nick