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G'day Mates,
OK, it has been a while since our last blog. Apparently we have been very busy... But now we have time to catch up and tell you more about our 3 weeks down under.
Back from the New Caledonian paradise, our trip in Australia started with a night train journey from Sydney to Adelaide. The landscape was red and dry with a few hills when we went to sleep, and by the next morning when we woke up in Broken Hill it hadn't changed at all. Wow, this country is big! We were in Adelaide at the same time as the 'Tour Down Under', a big cycling event. The 'Lance Armstrong' show was a nice distraction from all the wineries we visited in the area. Besides, Adelaide has some really good museums and nice restaurants too. We picked up our new Campervan and drove to the Flinders Ranges, a beautiful nature park where we did a couple of nice hikes. And that's when we saw our first Kangaroo alive! (Actually we had seen a few dead ones on the side of the road before). These animals are so cool. The way they hop around is just too funny. From the Flinders Ranges we went Southwards direction Melbourne, of course stopping at the different wine regions. The Barossa Valley, the most famous one, had a lot of very 'professional' wineries. We visited Wolf Blass, Peter Lehman and Hardy's and were very happy to see that you can taste all their wines for free, even the exclusive ones if you look serious enough of course ;o)
After a very nice couple of days in the vineyards, we went further down to the Great Ocean Road, with a small detour via the Grampians nature park. The Grampians were definitely worth the detour with great hikes and awesome views. The Great Ocean Road was also spectacular, we even saw some cute fluffy koalas in the eucalyptus trees. Good thing is that they are so slow that it is really easy to take them into picture. After a great ride we arrived in Melbourne. This place is very relaxed. Nice beaches, shopping streets, restaurants, terraces, nature parks and very nice people. We had an excellent day at the Australian Open where we saw the Williams sisters win the ladies double final and the men's semi final with Roger Federer defeating the French Tsonga in 6-2 6-3 6-2. Yep that was a nice demonstration of Federer! The next day we visited Bram, an old friend from Holland who is living with his family in Melbourne for more than 2 years now. He took us to the nature parks a few kilometers from his house and that's where we saw the damage done by the bush fires in 2009. Really impressive all these hills covered with black trees. We had a very nice weekend with Bram and left for Philip Island where we took our first surf lesson. Sylvie and I were both standing on our boards riding the waves! Very cool, but OK the boards were so huge that it wasn't that hard ;o)
Then we drove back to Sydney and the Blue Mountains and were ready for some backpacking in Asia. Next stop Hong Kong, so see you there!
Harald and Sylvie
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