Quick chinese takeaway

We got the flavour for China when we visited Shanghai last year. Since China have introduced a free 72 hour transit visa this year, we took advantage and stayed two nights in Beijing on the way back to Bristol.

We went from late 20s temperatures to -9, ouch, and neither of us had a coat! It was just too cold to do too much. We did go and see Tiananmen Square, one of the largest city squares in the world:

And the Forbidden City, where the emperors lived exclusively for 500 years from 1400.

(I know this is naughty, but here is a photo from Wiki that shows the magnitude of the site as viewed from Jingshan gardens to the north, we were staying in a Hutong just next to these gardens):

We managed to squeeze in as much local food as possible! We also went to watch an acrobatic show one night which included a death defying motorbike stunt in a metal globe, google "Chinese acrobats motorbike stunt" if you want to see it on youtube!

Leaving Australia...

We felt a bit down about leaving Australia and a bit depressed that our 12 months off is already over halfway through. So for our last day, we checked out early, had a full cooked breakfast and spent the day at the Sydney aquarium on Darling Harbour. It was super. The displays were good and the fish were really colourful. They had a large tank full of big sharks which was a bit spine-tingling!

They also had dugongs, platypus and penguins!

After the aquarium, we went for another wonderful ice cream at Messina. Salted caramel with white chocolate being my favourite and pavlova flavour Pete's! 

Then we headed to the airport in good time.

More Sydney

In our last few days in Australia, we explored Sydney a bit more. We stayed at Wesley College at Sydney University as the students have finished for the year. After a deep clean and new beds, the halls of residence are available to book as hotel rooms. It was a beautiful building set in lovely grounds that reminded us of Hogwarts!

We walked to Darling Harbour to see the Christmas decorations!

We ate and drank out plenty including seafood at the fish market, the best gelato ever at Messina, drinks at the Opera Bar overlooking the sun setting over the bridge, opera house and city. 

We went to see a classical concert in the Sydney Opera House, in the main concert hall in the further most "sail". The view out across the harbour as the city lights were coming on was fantastic.

We walked around the Botanical Gardens and enjoyed more views of the harbour.

And we topped up our tans as this is the last sun we'll be seeing for a little while.

Shake, rattle and roll

Our favourite thing about New South Wales Art Gallery?

 ....... Salted caramel milkshake!

Howzat!

Me + Adelaide Oval + Ashes 2nd Test + stupid Xmas hat + beer.

Need I say more?!......

Phew, sold it!

It took a few gumtree ads and posters in lots of hostels, but we managed to shift the car, only making a small loss, definately a lot cheaper than renting. Bonza!

We spent most of our time in Darwin sorting the car. We ate out a fair bit and enjoyed the wharf and the fish feeding! We also went to an open air Christmas Carol concert near the beach which had lots of singing along and amazing fireworks. Then we were back on the train, The Ghan this time to travel from Darwin to Sydney.

It's such fun travelling on these trains, seeing the changing landscapes. I must have been a train spotter in a previous life!!

The train stopped in Alice Springs for a few hours. We squeezed in a lush brekkie, walking tour and a brief walk up Anzac Hill. I love the gap in the distance formed by a river many years ago:

We would have liked to stop off for a few days in Alice to go to The Big Rock, but alas not possible this time with the quiet season's reduced rail timetable. Next time....

The route involved a four day stopover in Adelaide. We found Desiree's place on AirBnB and what a gem! She was an ace host along with a great random bunch of people staying in her home, including a celebrity TV chef from Malaysia! Too much fun each night!! We took in some sights and sounds of Adelaide, including museum, art gallery and a nice botanical gardens which is well kept and free for the public. Lucky public!

Jumping crocs!

Our last night in the tent was on the edge of Kakadu National Park. It was raining so we camped under the shelter of the BBQ area! We had to put the tent down early before people started getting up and wanting to use the kitchen area!

On the drive to Darwin we stopped at the jumping crocs river cruise! It was brilliant! The Aussie skipper dangled pork chops out the side of the boat and made the massive saltwater crocodiles jump out the water to get them. We were amazed the crocs could jump so high, it felt like some might jump into the boat! Apparently most of the crocs have missing limbs from fighting each other, but we didn't notice anything missing, more focused on the jaw region! This one was 5.5 metres long and called Nifty:

The skipper wasn't quick enough with one pork chops and he lost it to the sharks who were also in the river! He also threw meat to the big kites who often caught it before it reached the water.

And now we're in Darwin trying to get our car sold before we leave on Wednesday. It's a bit tight, but fingers crossed.

Alessia and Kakadu

Even though cyclone Alessia was kilometres away, it has bought plenty of rain and storms to the Northern Territory of Australia. We went canoeing in the rain in Katherine Gorge which was beautiful, but the colours haven't come out in the photographs.

We swam in the rain at Edith Falls.

We got soaked at Pine Creek when it rained all night and was still raining the next morning so nothing had chance to dry out, the car and tent were soaking. But we enjoyed Pine Creek, we drank the cheapest "schooners" of beer and had delicious home made snickers ice cream!

We headed on to Kakadu National Park where we saw rock art which had been painted by aboriginal people who lived in Australia upto 50,000 years ago. We were pretty impressed by this until we read that much of the art had been touched up in the 1960's by local people to keep the art looking fresh!

Last night we got caught in a terrible storm, there was lightning all round us and the rain was so hard we couldn't see the road in front of the car. It felt like we were about to be struck by lightning any moment! We decided not to camp and checked into a dry room!

We went for a walk in the wetlands the next morning.

And climbed up to Ubirr lookout between rainstorms! The lookout had 360 degree views and was one of the most brilliant landscapes we've ever seen, though you can't see all the brilliant colours in the photos.

Some like it hot

With temperatures reaching 40 degrees and humidity hitting 80% Selina has understandably taken me to three hot springs in the last 24 hours. You might be familiar with hot springs in countries where steam comes off the springs as it hits the cold air! Not in Aus! Here the water tends to be COOLER than the air temp!! But crikey they are fun!

Last night we settled into our campsite in Katherine, then trundled off to the local hot spring. After a lot of bad navigation by me (I blame the poor local map quality!) we got to the springs just before dark, after watching the most amazing sight of something like 100,000 flying fox bats flying up the river at sunset, wow!! We ended up sharing our "tub" with a couple of true ozzies in their late 20s. It was really interesting getting their perspective on current life and relations with local Aboriginies over a couple of tinnies.

Today we went 100km south to visit some truly natural springs. We swam in a lazy river in Bitter Springs which was surrounded by green slime (algae) which was hard to avoid, then we went on to Mataranka Thermal Springs which had translucent blue water:

We're now ready for the wonders of some national parks that are meant to be open and then on to Darwin. We are hearing of a category 2 cyclone heading our way, but hopefully it will have calmed down by the time it reaches us and not impact us.

20 Sydney Harbours

Lake Argyll gave us another highlight from Australia. Britain might have mind blowing history, but Australia doesn't half do nature! I keep finding myself saying "that's the most amazing XXXX I've ever seen" and I'm not talking Castlemaine!

Lake Argyll holds 20 times the amount of water in Sydney harbour. It is the second largest lake in the Southern Hemisphere. Basically it's bloody massive! We went on a tour of the lake and we saw so much wildlife: baby crocs, rock wallabies, kangaroos, pelicans, archer fish, catfish and bush turkeys. For me, the most fascinating were the cattle that had lived on one of the islands in the lake since they were cut off from mankind in 1971. No GM influence and they still had four legs and two heads!

We stayed in a caravan site with the nicest pool we've ever seen. It was an infinite one with the water merging into the distant lake water:

The overnight involved a lot of lightening and thunderstorms which we watched from the infinite pool. Lightening and big open space of water - hmmmmm!!

1,000 km later....

Due to the bush fire season hitting full speed and the wet season starting early, the drive from Broome to Kununurra passed pretty uneventfully. We drove a thousand km stopping off in a free 24 hour stopover and Halls Creek, but weren't able to go into any of the National Parks on route as they were all closed.

Kununurra was fun, there was all sorts to do. We went to Ivanhoe Crossing which is normally a road open to 4WD vehicles, but in the wet season:

No crocs spotted! We also went to a Rum distillery and a national park that was open(!) with some great mini Bungle Bungles:

We also got chatting to our neighbours on the camp site who ended up taking us to a really quiet spring in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. They reassured us they go there every week and we ended up staying there for a few hours swimming in the cave surrounded pool and drinking beers. You might think we're crazy, but we got to bed at 3am in one piece!! Too much fun (and no photos!).

Salt stacks, 80 miles of sand and camels

After fire ushered us out of Karijini, we moved on to Port Hedland. The place has a bad write up as only an industrial town with not much going on. We bucked the advice and stayed next to a golf course for a tenner(!), there were loads of warnings about snakes which was a little off-putting! All the sources of natural water had warnings about recent croc attacks, so we ended up in their Olympic sized swimming pool for a cool down. There was a nice art gallery and we had coffee in a real silver train carriage. Here's me in front of a big pile of salt, I am impressed honest, it's just the heat that has made me look so depressed!

We moved on with the extreme heat to 80 mile beach and got to see loads more turtles, flat back ones this time. We even got to see one laying eggs, amazing!!

Upon arriving in Broome. We decided it was just too hot, so checked into an air con room costing double a normal tent pitch. Worth it considering the 40 odd temperatures we are enjoying at the mo. We did all sorts in Broome, including being extras in a film called High Tide in the oldest open air cinema in the Southern Hemisphere (we went back the next night to actually watch a film!) and riding a camel at sunset!

It was such good fun riding the camels. We both had trainee ones that had been wild six months ago! We're still trying to figure out if they are better off now or not, at least they get carrots at the end of the ride.......

The walk was on Cable Beach which is regarded as one of the top five beaches in the world. We did love it, but pretty sure we have seen better (I keep thinking of the big red sun on Chowpatty Beach in India).

Lots of driving towards Darwin now, the rain has moved in .....

Bush fires

As the bush fires continued to burn, the national park stayed shut. So we climbed part of the way up Mount Bruce instead, the second highest mountain in WA.

There were 15 separate fires around the roadhouse we stayed at, some with bright flames we could clearly see.

A few days later we passed a bush fire that was right at the side of the road, you could feel the heat through the window, there was no one else around but the road was still open, so we just drove on as fast as we could!

Karijini adventures

This was one of our favourite days so far, we had a super time. First we trekked to the lookouts over the amazing gorges...

And then we followed marked trails down to swim in the water at the bottom. These marked trails were brilliant fun to follow, they took us through water, down rock faces, and ladders, over waterfalls and through streams and pools. We were the only people in the gorges as we are travelling in low season, so it was really exciting and peaceful, but we knew we had to be extra careful as help was so far away. It took 13 hours for the last person to get help!

These are the markers we followed through the gorges...

Climbing through a narrow passage in Weano gorge...

to handrail pool...

Swimming in handrail pool...

Pete swimming back through Hancock gorge. The amphitheatre is in the background, then we climbed through slippery Spider's walk to get to Kermit's pool.

A real adventure for us, we had a great time, then watched a bright red sunset back at the eco retreat and watched lightning flashing all around us.

The final piece of unexpected adventure came at about 9pm when the woman from reception came racing over to our tent to tell us there was an out of control bush fire heading our way. We were told to get in our car and drive to reception immediately to join the convoy of cars to be evacuated. We sat in a line of about a dozen other vehicles waiting for the police. Pete was worried that in our hurry to grab our passports and get in the car, we hadn't picked up the last of our dinner, and he was still hungry! And I was worried that in this convoy of vehicles, we were the only 2 wheel drive, all the others were big 4x4s with bull bars on the front capable of escaping much faster than we were, the nearest town was about 100km away and the first 20km was unsealed which meant we could only travel at about 15 miles an hour without getting a puncture, not much good for escaping raging bush fires! So we were both relieved when they told us the wind had changed direction, we weren't being evacuated after all. In fact the campers from the other campsite were later evacuated onto our campsite and the other campsite got burnt down in the night. 

The other gorge we wanted to see remained closed the next day and firefighters from Perth were being flown in to get the blaze under control. We were planning to camp at a layby at the side of the road last night but when we got there, it was deserted, everything was black and then Pete spotted thick smoke nearby, so we drove on! Tonight we are camping behind a petrol station, which sounds dangerous, but there is method in our madness, the Aussies are pretty laid back about the bush fires ("you just gotta let it burn mate") we figure if they are going to protect anything, surely it will be the petrol station. We are heading back towards the coast tomorrow!