Week 11 (Brisbane - Sydney)

Brisbane to Syndey!!
(by Jen)

17/12/07 - 24/12/07

We have found the roads over in Australia very confusing, lots of highways, freeways and so mnay different routes that are not always clearly signposted. So when I directed Rob onto Route 3 from Brisbane I was very proud of myself, it was only after 30 kilometres that I realised we were in fact going north when we needed to go south! Not a good start, especially as this was rush hour!! However, we did eventually get on the correct road and in the correct direction and off we went!

Our first stop was Surfer's Paradise which was incredibly industrialised, the complete opposite to what we thought it would be. It really reminded us of Miami or Florida, with its Sea World resort and hundreds of shops and hotels. We spent the night just outside of the city and in the morning watched the early surfers before deciding that we were ready to leave.





On the road we have been taking full advantage of being able to pull over wherever we can, we have been able to visit so many national parks that we wouldn't have been able to do when we were travelling by the Greyhound.







Some of our highlights from the road have been visiting Mount Warning where we took a good walk up to a huge lookout point right in the rainforest. We also visited a crazy tiny town called Nimbin where everyone seemed to be a hippy even of they were 70. We chatted for about an hour to two local Aboriginal men about their life, how they feel about Australia etc. Which was very interesting to hear their side of the story.




We decided that we should treat ourselves to some CD's for our long road trip, however, as we visited a rather small town to buy these CD's we were stuck with either Hanson, Elton John or Ray Charles - so we opted for Elton and Ray! We have nearly learnt the whole albums by now!!

Byron Bay was a beautiful little town, we were pleasantly surprised as we thought it would be very similar to Surfers Paradise. It really reminded us of Newquay, which made us think of home. We also bumped into some of the friends we made at the Fraser Island trip so it was really nice to catch up with them, even though it had only been a few days since we had seen them.

We drove most of the way on the pacific highway so we have had many opportunities to visit some gorgeous beaches along the way, including Diamond beach, Saphire beach, Emerald beach (bit of a theme going on here) but so far one of our favourite beaches was at Coffs Harbour. We daggled our legs of the side of the harbour wall and shared a portion of chips, at that moment in time we could have been at Padstow - the chips let it down though, not traditional, still I'm not complaining!!

We went off road a few times to visit some inland National Parks, one of our favourite National Parks was the Dorrigo National Park.

We drove on a route called the "Waterfall Way" and it was stunning. We drove deep into the Rainforest, followed trails on the Rainforest floor, walked on skywalks in the canopies of the trees and also saw some stunning waterfalls. It was a great experience.

Forster was probably one of our favourite holiday towns. It had a lovely beach as well as gorgeous lakes. We chatted to some local young kids who were on their summer holidays and were spending their days in the sun fishing. They used "soldier crabs" for bait, which were a really bright blue colour - although Rob and I weren't sure that they needed all the hundreds of crabs they had collected! We also did some canoeing on Lake Wallis.

We visited a lovely old lighthouse at "Sugar Loaf Point" but it was so windy up at the top of the cliff that we really had to hold onto the rails!

All in all our trip from Brisbane to Sydney was a beautiful trip, we saw what we feel is the "real" Australia. We couldn't believe how green the country is, we were expecting it to be almost baron. We were so pleased that we opted for the less lazy option of driving ourselves down the coast instead of sitting on a greyhound, we have found it so much more rewarding!!!!