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Capital: Canberra
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Finally Australia! I had always been curious about what I would find on the other side of the earth from Montreal. I flew into Melbourne in the south and bussed up the east coast to Cairns, visiting the major cities (Canberra, Sydney & Brisbane) and several towns and beaches along the way. From Cairns I travelled west and south into the rugged but beautiful desert interior then north to the tropical city of Darwin from which I flew to Indonesia. Overall, I stayed seven weeks and travelled 7600 kms on a Greyhound package ticket costing 380US$. I left Tasmania, Adelaide, Perth and the west coast for the next time... |
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| Lonely Planet CIA | ||
As for New Zealand, there is not much culture shock to be enjoyed in Australia. Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane would no more be out of place in North America than Christchurch and Duneden in Europe. Values are similar but not the same, they speak English, but with a different accent... The day after my arrival beautiful Melbourne was full of people celebrating Australia Day.
The Australia Day celebrations were quite colourful as it should be. There were acrobats, jugglers, unicyclists. fire eaters, hucksters and all sorts of amusements. What impressed me most however was this excellent hard rock band formed by members of the Victoria State Police! They were really good but more importantly they put on their show with an a most refreshing irreverent atmosphere. It was definitely good public relations, I wish that the staid and self-important Quebec Provincial Police could do the same!.
Here, the crowd was enjoying a jazz festival sponsored by the Victoria Arts Center on St Kilda Road next to the Theaters Building and the Melbourne Concert Hall. Just across the street the Queen Victoria and Alexandra Gardens open on a succession of parks leading to the remarkable Royal Botanic Gardens. A most pleasant place to go for a stroll.
This attractive "Theaters Building" houses several theaters and two art galleries.
This great sculpture outside the National Gallery adds to the very arts conscious atmosphere of this part of town. Sydney has its Opera House but Melbourne has a whole arts district to bolster its claim of being "more cultured" than its sister city...
Like New Zealand, Australia is very well organized to handle packpackers. In Melbourne, I stayed in one of the several hostels of the St Kilda district not far from the namesake amusement park shown here. Over seven weeks, the cost of accommodations averaged 10.40US$, slightly more than the N.Z. average of 10.10US$. From Melbourne went to Canberra to satisfy my curiosity. It did not take me long to realize that I was allergic to artificial showplace capitals just as I had been allergic to Brasilia in Brasil. I scooted out of there and went to Sydney full of real people, noises and odours.
This great Opera House is without dispute a work of art. It is truly impressively beautiful and beautifully impressive. Anyway, I'm sure that it does wonders for the Sydneyan egos in their competition with Melbourne for being more or less "cultured". Personally, I find that competition mildly amusing. A similar competition between Toronto and Vancouver or Miami and Los Angeles would be seen as completely ridiculous. Do some Australians have a greater need to appear "cultured" because of their Botany Bay origins?
I like both cities, both have fine museums, galleries and parks. Frankly, I din't stay long enough to judge weather the population of one was more "cultured" than that of the other... and little did I care. I met fine people and had a good time in both places.
Sydney Harbour certainly offers great views, but so does the Yarra River Near Melbourne's "cultural precinct".
Both cities are beautiful, if anything I think I preferred Sydney for its dynamism, its variety and its beaches.
Maybe that preference is not completely fair, I stayed longer and had more interesting encounters in Sydney...
Beaches are beaches and nothing resembles a beach more than another beach. This is Coogee beach about 10 km south east of Sydney.
For a month I went from beach to beach all the way up the east coast. This is the famous Bondi beach about 8 km east of Sydney.
Manley beach is about 12 km north east of Sydney by ferry. The ride on the ferry is worth taking just for the views of the Harbour.
After enjoying the Sydney beaches I tried the beach in Port Macquarie (I mostly watched the experts because the surf was too strong) and came here at J's Hostel in Byron Bay..
I really enjoyed Byron Bay largely because I got adopted by four British girls who wanted a chaperone to accompany them to the hippie town of Nimbin in the hills..
Nimbin, a tiny village about 70 km inland from Byron Bay harbours a colony of past middle aged hippies who proudly flaunt their attachment to an alternative way of life that has completely disappeared from the places that spawned it. The whole village is a museum, not only the museum shown here. It was an interesting experience, it reminded me of the atmosphere in New York's Village in the late '50s. One can imagine that Nimbin could very well be maintained unchanged long after the original inhabitants have left for better pot-growing fields and still be a great tourist attraction like the "authentic sourdough villages" of the Yukon.
Byron Bay was one of the places I enjoyed the most partly because of the good company but also because it was friendly and not overly touristy like some of the places in Queensland.
I stopped a few hours to have a good look this place but no longer. It seems that a high concentration of hotels, shops and services aimed at beach going tourists produces exactly the same results. I saw very little that could distinguish this place from Mexico's Acapulco, from Chile's Viña del Mar, Argentina's Mar de Plata, Uruguay's Punta del Este, South Africa's Durban Beach Front or Cannes's Croisette. I came, I looked and I went away to Brisbane.
At 1.3 million, Brisbane is small compared to Melbourne's 2.9 million or to Sydney's 3.7 million. I did not stay there long enough to meet people as I was looking forward to the renowned Queensland beaches.
Brisbane was a lovely place. I had to search to find a cyber-cafe to check my e-mail but people were helpful and I finally did find one. I should have stayed longer as I found the places north of here too touristy for my taste.
After Brisbane, I stopped in Noosa, Hervey Bay and Airlie Beach before landing at the Globetrotters in Townsville. Noosa was OK and I met an interesting Canadian frov Victoria, but the places where I stayed in Hervey Bay and Airlie Bay turned out to be party places and... Here, things were looking up, the place was quiet, the owner Dave was a nice chap and I met Alain, a young backpacker from Quebec living a few blocks from my place in Montreal.
I liked Townsville but Alain was going to Magnetic Island the next day and I decided to join him.
Magnetic island was lovely, and a bit away from the rush. I enjoyed much needed "rest and recuperation" after too many late nights on the Queensland coast. There was a small dive shop here. I should have used their services to go diving on the great barrier reef instead of waiting to do it in Cairns.
After a couple of days, my friend Alain continued on his way south and I went north to Mission Bay before comming here. Cairns is not as bad as Surfer's Paradise but it definitely is an industrial center, (tourist industry that is...). There was a large number of big dive shops but very little competition between them as to the service packages they offered or their prices. They did not have to compete, the demand was so great that most of them were booked up for several days ahead!
I should have known better and gone back to Magnetic Island but I booked two nights into this great dive factory called the Atlantic Clipper..
There must have been 40 of us on board... That would have been great if it had been for a party cruise or it would have been acceptable if there had been enough dive masters to form small groups.
With only two active dive masters, we were a herd to be dived, fed, slept and dived again before being replaced by the next herd to be processed. Moreover, ours was not the only dive factory going to the same spot and the visibility on the bottom was rather poor. So much for the "Great Barrier Reef". If I go diving on that reef again it will certainly not be from Cairns!
After wasting a week in Cairns, I travelled west and stopped for a night in Mount Isa and in Tennant Creek. It rained most of the time but both these outback places were interesting. Mount Isa the mining town (copper, lead, silver & lead), was drab, rugged and unsmiling as all mining towns are. Tennant creek had several bars and a large aboriginal population like some towns in north western Canada.
This is an Australian road train at Three Ways where the east-west Barkly highway meets the north-south Stuart highway from Darwin to Adelaide. There is nothing outback but scrub and the odd outback town such as Tennant Creek 25 km south of here.
Personally I find an impressive beauty in deserts, be they hot like this one, the Sahara, the Mojave, the Atacama or frozen like the Canadian Arctic; they put me in a dream mode and I love to sit and contemplate as if before th sea. Some places are less desolate than others like this green patch north of Alice Springs.
This prosperous tourist town in the middle of nowhere, illustrates the paradox of catering to tourists who want to enjoy being exposed to experiences they would not find at home without having to sacrifice any of the comforts of home. The success of Alice Springs has transformed it into something that has little to do with the rugged Australian Outback! I'm sure that I would have enjoyed my visit here a lot more if I had come 30 years ago before Alice became prosperous.
Of course, 30 years ago I would not have enjoyed the comfort of this fine hostel and would have found very few other tourists to talk to. That is just the point, l would have been able talk with the local people about their life in the outback and they would have been interested in finding out what life in Canada is like. The local people's curiosity about individual visitors wears off with each new encounter. It becomes nil when the concentration of tourists reaches a saturation point beyond which they are seen no longer as individuals but as members of a herd of customers for tourist services. I have found that the same mechanism applies to the travellers themselves.
Naturally, there is much more interest between fellow backpackers in a small group travelling where very few strangers pass than in a busload of sightseers going to tourist spots like this camel farm on the way to Ayer's Rock. Especially when you have to wait for the crowd from the preceding bus to clear before getting close to have a turn taking a photo!
I'm definitely allergic to crowds of tourists but I'm a sucker for the hype about all the "must see" places. Sometimes I think waiting in line can be worth it like snapping a shot of this sexy camel... Just look at those eyelashes!
This is the principal "must see" place in Australia's interior. It truly is a great sight. If you are interested I recommend that you hire a car and get there on your own. Otherwise, you have to become one of a great crowd of tourists bussed and herded to the right spot for the ritual viewing. That of course is a very subjective matter, some people just love being lost in a crowd.
It's a long 23 hour bus ride from Yulara (the Ayer's Rock tourist village) to Darwin on the north coast but it's easy with overnight breaks at Alice Springs and Katherine, especially if you enjoy watching the empty desert hour after hour as I do. Darwin was hot but I enjoyed it and spent a week there before flying to Kupang on the Indonesian island of Timor.
The Melaleuka was a nice place to stay with good facilities and a friendly bunch of travellers.
All hostels in NZ and OZ provide kitchens where most backpackers cook their own chow and some places offer an evening special like this one. Here the special was a great bar-b-que for 2.50US$. Kitchens and dining rooms are good places to socialise, in the evening each one brings his or her own beer or wine and sometimes a party gets going... Such is the life of the backpacker in NZ & OZ.
Darwin had tourists but it also had a life of its own with a University and enough normal economic activity that it could do without tourists and survive. In other words, it was a real town as opposed to "places that tourists made" who would become ghost towns and disappear if the flow of tourists dried up.
My Australian trip was over and now I was on the way back home. I enjoyed travelling through New Zealand and Australia there were interesting places to see but I learned no more about myself than I would have travelling the same distance in North America or Europe.
