The End

Soooo after Sunshine Coast we had enough of wandering around for a while. We decided to settle at Gold Coast. This means the travelling part is done and after a transition phase, day to day life takes over. The transition phase is full of applying for visa and finding jobs and boring things like that. Things that I don't want to go through, much less write about them afterwards. So the interesting stuff is no more. It ceased to be. It is expired and gone to meet its maker. Ahem!

Thus it is time to say goodbye to this weblog. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it ... most of the time. Thank you for accompanying us on our journey. Till we meet again, in whatever country it may be!

Base 31 - Sunshine Coast

We reached number 31. In my head they are far fewer than that even though I can still remember every one of them. Perhaps having written about them is the reason I remember them so clearly. I often asked myself if it is even interesting or meaningful to write about them but in the end of the day, they are part of the trip and I write a bit more about the experience that that goes beyond the houses themselves. And since we didn't go to hotels, it is interesting to see how people live.

Desk \o/

This one had a very small bedroom but on the upside it had a desk which made me very happy. This is the second house that had some kind of sound system, so the sound I didn't have to endure the sound coming from the TV speakers. It was a soundbar and a subwoofer but that was more than sufficient. Our host was a make-up artist and she offered small samples of everything you could image when it comes to bathroom necessities. I didn't use any but they were appreciated. She and her husband were generous in every other way too.

Airport.

The house was next to an airport - literally. I mean their backyard and the airport were divided by their fence. It wasn't as bad as I assumed though. I only conciously took notice of the airplanes perhaps two or three times a day and you only heard the airplanes for a couple of seconds which was surprising.

This way please!

One of the best things of our stay was the beach. You could reach it on foot in a matter of minutes, the weather was good but not too hot. The sand was good enough so I went jogging a couple of times. After the first jog, I went into the water and was alone even though it was the weekend. The lifeguard (who looked like 55) asked me:

- Hey mate, did you enjoy your swim?
- It was great. Did I go too far?
- No, you were perfect. I was watching you the whole time.
- Thanks!

Jogging route.

The second time was the most difficult because I had to run on stepped on, softer sand which gave in and so every step was three times as tiring as the first time I did it. On the way back I hated jogging, I hated myself, the world and you. Diving in felt like freedom. I asked the lifeguard how far the next lifeguard is, to find out how much I jogged and he said I did around 4,5 km which is a km above my record.

Third time was low tide with harder sand and it was so easy, it felt like cheating.

On our last day, our hosts took us out to dinner at a fish and chips place that had fresh fish fished locally. Fish! It was nice. No, it was awesome! Perfect! I have to think like an Australian here.

Sunshine Coast

By the time we were leaving Bali, we had enough of travelling and wanted to settle somewhere (meaning Gold Coast) but after a bit of a debate, we decided to go to the Sunshine Coast first because I was curious and it was close enough. I expected something like the Gold Coast but smaller but it felt completely different. Like one of our many smaller stops between Sydney and Gold Coast.

Noosa. The most popular place.

It was touristy all right but less for twenty somethings and more for families. We lived in the most "unimportant" place between Noosa with its shops and beaches and its national park and Maroochydore (I am not even going to look it up) which is the biggest town complete with a shopping mall.

Sand castle.

There was nothing to complain about, everything was nice but it seemed to me to be lacking something spectacular or having its own character. I don't know what I expected. The national park was nice. The shopping mall was good and had an interesting twist in that it was divided in two by a river. The salsa party we went to was dissapointing. This was balanced out by Diana finding a Zumba trainer which became one of her favorites.

Viewing point at the edge of the national park.

We stayed for a week there and that was OK. Now we know what the Sunshine Coast is all about and will go to live there once we are old and retired.

An impossibly wide tree.

Base 23, 24, 25, 26 (Damn!)

Like I said, four apartments in two weeks. Let's get it over with.

West End 1

The first one I picked because Diana arrived at 6 in the morning and didn't want to wait until 12 to check-in. Most of the room are only available after 12 or 2 pm. It was in West End and would be a nice place to say in the summer but the winter nights were 12°C outside and inside this apartment it was considerably colder.

West End 2

Not for us then. The second one was in Highgate Hill, more modern, a more comfortable stay with pretty impressive views.

Highgate Hill 1

It was a bit warmer and more comfortable. I had a nice desk to work from for a bit which is where I took the photo above.

Highgate Hill 2

The negative was that it was pretty far from anything that wasn't more apartments. In order to reach a restaurant or to go buy food or something, you were best advised to get a bus. Still nice enough but a bit expensive. Let's go to Hamilton next.

Hamilton 1

There were a couple of good things there. We had the whole apartment to ourselves. It was modern, beautiful, it has a nice desk for me to work, although the chair needed some kind of cushion to make it bearable.

Hamilton 2

The apartment gets bonus points for having its own underground parking place but we had to go through a labyrinth with two lifts to get there. Also restaurants and a super market very close by. And a great view. But because of bad timing with booking the place and a flight to Bali, we had two days left to fill. Enter Nundah.

Nundah

This one was close to the airport and close to where we wanted to leave our car before going to the airport. Nothing remarkable about it except from the part that the guy who lived there had his own "start-up" together with three other people and they worked on their e-learning website in order to sell it. I have never heard it being said so explicitely before that you make a company not in order to do something but in order to give it value and sell it. Damn!

Brisbane Revisited

Back to basics! Or Australia! One of those two!

Last time when we left Australia, we have only seen Brisbane for a day. Actually I did. Diana left pretty early in the morning. The impressions I got from the city were not good but a bit promising. I liked it much better when stayed there a second time.

Closed cabins, so Diana was not interested.

We lived in a record-breaking four rooms in two weeks so we had the chance to see lots of Brisbane (but not much of the beach). The downside of Brisbane is that it doesn't offer anything spectacular as far as we have seen. The upside is that as far as big cities go, it seems like a nice place to live.

Not the center.

The center of the city is centery and offers everything you'd want but is not overcrowded. The rest of Brisbane offer some nice walks along the river, nice streets with restaurants (probably close to where you live), some malls, also with good restaurants, good weather even in the winter. It's not as expensive as Sydney, more cosmopolitan than Perth.

The center.

What I also liked was that traffic was bearable considering the size of the city. Brisbane is full of tunnels and bridges that often let you get out of the way of congestions and it relieves some spots you'd assume would be more problematic of much of the traffic.

I liked Brisbane.

One Day of Brisbane (also Base 22)

Where were we? I was lazy with writing the last couple of weeks.

Ah, Gold Coast. That was the last couple of weeks in Australia, before leaving to lands unknown. Before going to the airport we had one stay in Brisbane in a skyscraper on the 64th floor.

There was not much when it comes furniture but
there was everything I needed.

We arrived in the evening, found a street to leave the car relatively close to the airport but far away from the centre of the city where we slept because there were no parking spots in the centre and certainly no free ones. Then we took the train back. Brisbane wins the prize for the ugliest interior of all Australian trains.

We went for a walk and then to sleep. Didn't get to see anything impressive in the first half an hour.

But the view from the room was great.

On the next day, Diana was leaving first so I brought her to the train station and went to find a supermarket to buy some nuts for my own flight. That was the day I found the shopping district.

Brisbane impressions getting a bit better.

The day was warm, the place was open and clean and I liked it. I went and ate at a Vapiano, bought some excessively expensive nuts, walked around a bit and went home. A suitcase was packed. A key left behind. A ridiculously small airport for a city this big was reached by train. A continent was left behind.

Goodbye Australia!

For now.

Base Twenty and Twenty-One (Gold Coast)

After the first couple of days we moved to our second home in Gold Coast. It was approximately 50m away from the beach (good) but without a beach view (bad). I want my money back!

Not the bedroom.

We moved into a bedroom of a couple that left for vacation. The guy they left behind was from Argentina and he was the friendliest and most social guy in the whole of the east coast. Although I am not a fan of football (the real one, not one of those played with hands) I admired his childlike enthusiasm for the game and his team. For him, every time his team played it was like a kid unpacking his Christmas presents. So that was fun.

I'll explain the size later.

Still, after that we wanted to have an apartment for ourselves for a while. So we threw a family with two little kids out of their home and settled in. It was the most ungoldcoasty and normal of all the apartments we've been in. I mean look at the neighbourhood.

Thank you Google Street View!

The good thing about it, was that it was big and very quiet (apart from the first day when some people were drilling holes in walls for a couple of hours. The reason the first picture is small and the second one is stolen is that I forgot to take my own pics. The first one is a preview image of the ad on the internet that was still available.

Gold Coast

I was told that there are 600,000 people living at the Gold Coast area except for the summer when it's 2 MILLION BILLION (without the billion). The traffic was barely bearable as it is, I am not sure I want to find out what happens in the summer. I looked up what Wikipedia says and apparently most of the visitors stay for a night or two. We'll see (perhaps).

There was a salsa party a couple of metres from here.

The first impressions were great because the first apartment we got was great. Diana's further impressions were great and I also liked our stay there. It has lots of places to shop and eat. The place is a gigantic beach, canals and adjacent housing. The beaches are great, wide, with smooth sand, clean water and big waves. The weather is good all year long. But something feels strange.

You can find anything in this shopping mall. Anything at all.

I can't put my finger on it but I have the feeling that Gold Coast is not a real city. It seems like a place that pretends to be a city. Half of everything is geared towards the ocean and canal views and experience and the rest is merely a supporting structure for the first half. We didn't find anything missing, there are big shopping malls every couple of hundred metres that have everything you'd want. I still got the feeling that it is not complete. I didn't find a banking district for example. Not that I wanted to find one...

A view to a beach (from the Burleigh place)

Diana and I went for long walks on the beach, visited open air markets with trinkets and food and palm readings (we were only there for the food) and did some yoga. I did it once, she did it every day. The only bigger excursion we did was when we went to the beach and park of Burleigh Head. It was a great walk with nice vistas and the food at the Vietnamese restaurant we ate afterwards was excellent. We also wanted to go to Springbrook but because of scheduling conflicts, we left it for later. Don't ask. I know you won't, anyway.

Base Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen

We are going to be done with those real quick because I started with it and I just can't stop now, can I? These are the homes we stayed while driving to and arriving at Gold Coast. The first one is at Charlestown.

Bedroom

Not bedroom

I tried to surprise Diana with the amount of trees around us but some complications while booking ruined my plans. The place was beautiful if a bit cold. Our host was an older lady that was so nice to us that I got the feeling she wants to keep us as additional children of hers. Next up: Port Macquarie.

Bedroom again

Still a nice one. I think I liked it more than the owner. We only stayed one night there despite the cats. Second to last is Coffs Harbour.

Yes, we get it. Beds!

This one was the first home that had any kind of sound system. They also had the fastest internet I have experienced in Australia. The hosts were a Malaysian couple in our age. They were the people with the most interesting things to tell up until now. The male of the two had racing as a hobby. Finally, our interim solution in Gold Coast for four days before going to our main stay at Paradise Beach.

I like water.

And this is the balcony of the house.

This one was pretty cheap for what was on offer. Even though it was row house in a closed community, it was spectacular. I want to live in a house like that when we are done travelling.

Road to Gold Coast Part 3 - Coffs Harbour

Coffs Harbour doesn't have an apostrophe which always throws me off the loop. The big pull of the town is The Big Banana. Look it up. I don't understand it either. I am not even sure if the Banana really has a big pull. We arrived there off summer season so there weren't many people there anyway. There had all kinds of banana themed souvenirs, also banana shakes, crepes, smoothies, dried bananas, fresh bananas, bananas, bananas, bananas. Diana tried eating honeycomb for the first time in her life. I know, it's totally unrelated but it happened. They also had different rides, a water slide and an ice-skating hall. Diana wanted us to go ice-skating and I resisted at first. When I eventually conceded a couple of hours later, it was closed, although it said in big letters that they are open all day long.

The big thing of the day was our walk on Muttonbird Island.

The view from the island.

It's weird how it is difficult to write about the most beautiful spots. We climbed to the top accompanied by a family and some other people, enjoyed the view but the best thing was when we went on down to the other side, had some alone time and there was nothing going on except from everything being laid out around us, the gras swinging beside our feet and the feel and sound of the wind. It's when nothing happens that everything in the background comes to the forefront of our senses. It was good.

Other than that, Coffs Harbour in true Australian fashion had a street with a row of very nice restaurants that even in a small town rivals what you will find in the whole of Stuttgart that has ten times as many residents. On our first night there, we had a Vietnamese meal. The town also had this.

Guess what!

Stepping through the entry was like stepping through a dimension gate that transported us back to Germany. Everything was identical from the size to the layout, to the placement and type of the offers there.

On our last day at Coffs Harbour we did two earth-shattering things. I went to the electronics store and brought back the blender we bought in Sydney because it was too big to transport. With part of the money I bought Luigi's Mansion 2 which I was looking for for the last couple of months.

Our plan was for our next destination to be Byron Bay but it was extremely difficult to find somewhere to spend the night there for an affordable price. So we just made a stop there. The place was the most vacation-y we have seen in Australia yet but in a nice way. Also, Diana found her new favourite beach.

Diana's new favourite beach.

We came, we saw the beach, we ate a burger, we left.

Road to Gold Coast Part 1 - Newcastle / Charlestown

We had the skill, we had the will and we also had the car to go from Sydney to Brisbane ... by car. When we started, we didn't know where we are going to stay for how long. It was in the middle of the road when we decided that our next big destination was to be Gold Coast instead of Brisbane. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

While booking with airbnb, I had to decide between a room at the sea and one in the forest. Since Diana loves the forest but we didn't have many chances to be in one, I went for the one with the trees. We will look into that into the future but the important point is that we lived not in Newcastle but in Charlestown. Now that I think about it, it is not important at all.

Nobbys Head

On the way to Newcastle, we did a stop at the Entrance where I apparently made no photos at all. The Entrance at the first of a row of bridges that connect small islands. We arrived so late that there was no sunlight at all, so the place wasn't as impressive to look at as it should be and it was almost deserted. We did a break anyway and went to a restaurant close to the water called "Cantina". They had Bachata music playing, so although there was no dance floor we danced a couple of songs while waiting for our food. There were only two other tables with people and they seem uninterested. We had fresh fish and tacos and it was surprisingly good. Then we went on.

Nobbys Point

We stays at Charlestown for two nights. On the first day we went to Newcastle and visited Nobbys Head which sounds perverted but is just an elongated bit of land protruding into the ocean. It was a nice walk but really windy as soon as you walked out a bit. So windy that I was surprise to find someone going there on a bike. When we got back, we wandered around a bit in the centre of the town which has a row of cafes and restaurants that were much more charming than the rest of the town would let you assume. We had some Japanese food, a milkshake and went home full and happy.

Rainforest

After the second night and before going on the road, I found out a spot of rain forest we could visit because the place we slept, although it had lots of trees was not foresty enough and I still had to keep my forest promise to Diana. So we went to ... (wait for it) Blackbutt reserve. Hahahaha! It says "butt".

Owl

The most exciting thing that happened there was we were at a part in the edge of the forest where noone else was around and when we arrived at a big tree, we woke the bats who were sleeping there. For the next quarter of an hour, our walk was accompanied by bat screeching and bats flying over the trees.

Reptile

After our walk we visited an intergrated small zoo. The pictures are more exciting than anything I'd have to say, so here is a picture dump of the rest of our visit.

Bird ... with colours.

Frogs

Snake

Evil panda of death

Ducks commenting on other ducks in the pond

Goodbye!

Hans Zimmer Revealed

It's the first and perhaps the last time, I reacted to a facebook ad. I was probably looking at too many videos about film music, so facebook decided to serve me an ad about Hans Zimmer Revealed which is a concert with a selection of his music. I always wanted to listen to a live orchestra and since I can only listen to the most famous pieces of classical music pieces and would be bored by the rest of the concert, if I went to one with classical music, my best chance of experiencing the orchestra would be film or game music. So we went there.

Please don't stop the music.

There were three problems.

The first one is that Hans Zimmer is better at creating ambience than composing multilayered melodies. Compared to other composers his music loses more when not accompanied by the pictures it is supposed to dress. The selection we heard oriented itself more at the popularity of the films and less at how well the music lends itself for a concert.

The second one is that the orchestra was second place in importance to the Apocalyptica-style electric music instruments.

The third one is the horrible sound quality there. Compounded this meant that often we reached the end of a music piece with a crescendo of (electronic) noises where you couldn't tell the instruments apart because of the sound quality.

The concert managed to have some good phases and even some great pieces with Pirates of the Caribbean and Lion King but all in all, I can't help but feel dissapointed. The evening was still a success because concerts are an experience that I don't often make and because of my company.

Sydney Northern Beaches

In my ultimate search to find a place to live close to the beach and after being dissapointed by the beaches on the southern side, we did two expeditions to the north. In order to reach the north, we had to take a boat. A boat to Manly.

Boats.

The boat rides happen every quarter of an hour and like the rest of the public transport system in Sydney, they are comparetively cheap. I mean, it costs significantly less to take the boat for half an hour to reach the other side of Sydney than to get from Backnang to Stuttgart. This is just wrong.

So we arrived to Manly and I right off the bat, I had the best Chicken Teriyaki ever at a small stand in the harbour building. So I am already kind of happy. As expected the names of half of the shops there are funny. It's Manly Martian Arts or Manly Hairdresser. We walk through the pedestrian zone and arrive at Manly Beach.

Manly Beach

It is wide, the water seemed good, and there is a row of trees. It's also relatively quiet. So far, so good. But we were told the real gem is Shell Beach, so we continued walking. Shell Beach which I can't write about without automatically thinking about Dark City, is at the end of the path to the south and a bit secluded. It is our favourite beach up until now. The waters are quiet and the beach is surrounded by trees.

Shelly Beach

I think we slept a little there, I went for a swim and that was it for the day. I don't need anything more. Life is good.

A couple of weeks later, I wanted to see more, so went to Manly once again, this time aiming to go to the north until we didn't want to go anymore. I made a photo with interesting light on the way.

Interesting light

When the beach ended, we walked on a bridge and then up some stairs and then ascended some more over a very small peninsula and then decided that even though the houses in the neighborhood and the place seems beautiful, it's not practical to live there without a car because it was so exhausting. Now that I think about it, I am old but what is Diana's excuse? We went down on the other side and arrived at Freshwater Beach.

Surprise! Another beach.

Lots of surfers here but pretty quiet. We decided to stop here, make a break and after that go back because it was getting dark and Diana didn't have enough sleep and was tired. We had some romantic time there, I proposed we spent some more time together, we walked back a bit and waited for a bus which comes every 15 minutes and had a 12 minute delay. Australia, fuck yeah!

Manly pedestrians.

We stopped at a pizza place that was got the award for best pizza place in Sydney from Mastercard or something and the pizza (and salad) were indeed deliziosa. We packed our things, took the boat, enjoyed the lights and went home.

Manly lights.

We were happy.