Hey guys! Hope you're all well!

As Vassilis mentioned in his blog entry we are now in Darwin at the Top End of Australia. We did a 2-day tour in Kakadu here, which was quite nice. Unfortunately though because it is the wet season at the moment (i.e. 40+ degrees, extreme humidity and tropical showers) the majority of the important sites are closed off, plus the animals are hiding away to escape from the sun. So we didn't get to see much, we just got the general idea. We did see some vicious crocs (crocodiles) though, among them "Hannibal the Cannibal", 6.7m long, 1.5m wide. I am glad I was watching him from a 2 meter height distance. We also saw sea eagles and kites these amazing, big birds of prey. Some nice waterfalls and aboriginal rock art (this is paintings on rocks :D). It was a nice trip although it was extremely hot and humid. The last day we were rewarded with a nice tropical shower in the evening it was really cool, this is when I realized what they mean by "wet to the bones". I really enjoyed walking under the fierce rain unlike Vassilis who was carrying our bags with the cameras etc in it and was cursing all the way through ha ha!

We reached Darwin on the "legendary Ghan" (short for "Afghan", the Afghan camels they used to have to transport goods and people in central Australia until they were replaced by the train). People say it's an amazing experience, I don't know what's so amazing about it, it's just a train, perhaps this comes from people who have travelled on the "Gold Kangaroo" seats, i.e. luxurious cabins, posh restaurants etc. We travelled in our humble 120 dollars reclining seat :D. The landscape of course is beautiful, although we did not get to see much of it as we travelling overnight. The train stopped in Katherine for 4 hours, really a place in the middle of nowhere, where the hairdresser comes every Thursday and weekends :D.

We travelled together with some very nice people we met in the Uluru-Kings Kanyon-Kata Tjuta tour we did from Alice Springs. I loved this tour, both for the tour itself (people we were with and a really good guide) and the places we visited. To me this is definetely the highlight of our journey in Australia. We had a really good time, slept under the stars in "swags" for 2 nights, did not take a shower for almost 3 days (thankfully we were all so smelly so we couldn't smell how bad it must have been :D), we ate kangaroo and the witchetty grubs Vassilis mentioned, and we did some beautiful hikes in Kings Kanyon and the Olgas. It was really-really great and the cheapest tour in town, Mulga's adventures for only 250 aussie dollars. It is defnetely a place worth visiting in Australia! The flies were indeed relentless as Vassilis mentioned, I looked so hot in my fly net :D. Vassilis of course refused to wear it :D.

I also liked Alice Springs, I thought it is a very special place. This is where the first telegraph station in central Australia was built, we visited that original setting and it felt like a time travel back in late 1800. We also visited the "School of the air" (http://www.assoa.nt.edu.au/" title="http://www.assoa.nt.edu.au/" target="_blank"http://www.assoa.nt.edu.au/), which I found amazing, it is basically a "virtual classroom", a system whereby children that leave in remote areas, cattlestations etc attend school over the radio waves. It was really really cool, I was so impressed and moved.

Tonight we are flying in Melbourne where we will stay for the weekend. On Monday the 28th we embark on our long journey to Dublin and then Athens. I can't believe we are already at the end of our journey :(. We do feel a bit tired but I will miss travelling so much. We're already contemplating our next journey (you get so many ideas by fellow travellers :D). Once you start, you can't stop!

Take care guys! Oh, and by the way, Vassilis goes beserk at the sight of a single, tiny leech! Jumping up and down, screaming etc. How I wish I had a video camera with me :D!

Pinelopi

Picture this: It's 10 p.m. in Byron Bay, you were on a bus for 13 hours, you carry 20 kg on your back, it's 35 degrees, you smell like a pig, all accommodation is booked out because there's a market fair the next day and an English girl comes to you and asks: "Do you know where the Cheeky Monkey is?" Do you blame me for suggesting to look up her arse for the cheeky monkey? The funny thing is that this stupid woman was running around in a 20 meters radius and was asking the same people all over again about the bloody monkey. Short memory problem obviously. On top of everything else, it was quite obvious that the people she was asking had only just arrived, checking in at receptions and stuff.
Apparently though we were the only people who didn't go to the Cheeky Monkey. We met Kate, a nice English girl (it's so funny how everybody was telling her that she was a nice English person and how not nice are usually the English tourists) and she was dragged to the bloody cheeky monkey. The main attraction there was that they had the boys and the girls dancing on two separate tables and the aim was to pull a member of the opposite sex to your table. Kate was wondering whether that was civilization.  

Next stop was Airly beach and the Whitsunday Islands. We went on a sailing boat with a skipper that looked just like Keith Richards and 11 of the most boring people in the galaxy ("as long as there are sausages, I'm happy", guess the nationality). We had 45 knots wind, only in the opposite direction, so we couldn'd go anywhere and we spent two days anchored. On the first night everybody got romantic and they decided to sleep on the deck. When they finally shut up, after some drinking and singing stupid songs, the wind and the rain came and they crawled back to their beds. Nobody dared to brave it the second night, hehehe. Anyway, we saw some nice coral, swimming in our stinger suits cause the y have two species of deadly jelly fish there, of course.

And then we experienced the life in the tropics. Rainrainrainrain until we reached Cairns. Flew to Alice Springs, nice e xperience landing when the temperature is 40 degrees, bumpy as hell. We booked a 3 day tour to Ayers Rock and off we went. The night before the tour I got massacred by bed bugs, some very nasty ones that left a trail of bites on my devine body. I know the name in Greek (korios) cause I had made their acquaintance in the army, please translate if you know the English term. On the first day the temperature was 41 degrees. Then we got of the bus and that's when it started. Have you seen pictures of cows in Africa or India with flies in their eye sockets, ears, mouths and everywhere? That's exactly how we were. The flies would go in your ears, up your nose, in your eyes and they are so persistent that they won't budge even when you chase them away. People with glasses get the bonus effect of having flies walking on the inside of their glasses. The highlight was that what I thought as toasted bread at lunch time was actually white bread covered in flies. It's undescribable really, we must have eaten a few flies each. Despite the heat and the flies it was quite interesting though. On the second day we dug up a few fat white worms, called witchetty grubs which we grilled and ate. Funny enough, they don't taste like chicken, they tasted like roast walnuts. As for the toilet experience, aka "the shovel", I just have to show you. Actually we can arrange a demonstration in M&M's garden.

The plan after that was to drive to Melbourne but we couldn't find a relocation (=return a car to the company for 1$/day) so we decided on the fly to go North by train, to Darwin. A small diversion equivalent to the distance Vienna-Athens. We'll do the Kakadu national park there, same camping style and then it's Melbourne and then the 36 hour trip I'm looking for to Dublin.

Vassilis

I'm sitting at a computer in Hervey Bay in Australia and the thing is slower than the ones in Laos, great...

First of all I want to thank our Italian friends Stefano and Elisa (whom, after careful planning, we met by chance and at the wrong place. The phone calls to organise this have cost us more than the entire trip) for introducing us to the joys of the free camping and smelly life. But that was OK, we saw some great places while looking for a place to camp. And some great public toilets too. I particularly liked the ExeLoo. Everything is automatic there, from the doors to the soap dispenser and it also self-cleans. The only minor anno yance is that it runs on a timer and after ten minutes an alarm sounds and the door swings open much to the delight of the next user. Believe me, I had nightmares about this.

Other than that, I think I liked the North island in N. Zealand better and not just to disagree with every other person on the planet. It's just that apart from the wild west coast, the rest in the south is a lot like Ireland, which although pretty wasn't a novelty for me. Plus it's full of little towns where the main entertainment options include sheep shearing and grass carting.

The sheep though in N.Z. are picture perfect. They are unebelievably cute and wooly. And some of them have wool that runs down their forehead and they look a bit like Elvis. You sort of understand how Gene Wilder and the Greek guy, Titos Vandis fell in love with that sheep in "Everything you wanted to know about sex". (I know, I'm a very sick and twisted person).  

The best thing with the N. Zealanders is the pronunciation of vowels. They say "i" for "e" and v.v., e.g. yis=yes, sex=six.
At a zoo, the guide was telling us how the eels feed on "did (=dead) animals". There was an English woman there who had to ask 3-4 times "They feed on what?" And the answer every time was "did animals". Hilatious how the native speakers couldn't communicate. BTW, we didn't see the Seven-Eleven store chain in N. Zealand. Small wonder, try it in N.Z. accent.

As mentioned we're in Oz, somewhere on the east coast, just came back from a 3 day safari on the world's biggest sand island. You could pick your way to die there, from the dingos that mauled a boy to death in 2001, to the sharks and the undertow in the sea. To that I would like to add the python that had made his home just behind our tent (kills the mice they said, yeah right) and the venomous spiders that were in abundance where we stayed. No matter what Penelope writes in future blogs, keep in mind that I had to bring her to the toilet cause she was afraid of the dingos (if she writes anything about a leech and me screaming like a little girl, don't believe her either).
Plus, I think she's gone completely mad. She was crossing the chaotic streets in SE Asia like nothing and she won't cross the road until it's green in N.Z. and Oz. Plus, whenever I was driving our car she was always jumpy and afraid that I'd kill us both and now that I was driving a van with the wheel on the wrong side and on the wrong side of the road, she was sleeping. Psycho I tell you, I have to get rid of her before she kills me in my sleep.

Vassilis

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