April 21st-22nd
For mid-semester break (all of the Americans kept calling it “spring break” and getting corrected by the Kiwis, since it’s actually fall here), I had known all along that I wanted to travel somewhere in Australia, since who knows when I’ll next be back in this part of the world. I (quite easily) convinced my flatmate Amanda and fellow Ole Sarah to forgo the calls of the island paradises of Fiji and Samoa and accompany me. We also intended to travel with a guy from Slovakia, who unfortunately had to cancel last minute, but to our good fortune he introduced us to Kathleen, who goes to Ohio State University, and she decided to join in our adventures! We all met a couple of times to form a basic outline of our route down the lower half of the east coast and decide which stops were on the top of our “To Do” list. Somewhere we had heard that there was a bunch of free camping in Australia so we borrowed a couple of tents from one of Kathleen’s friends, one of which I had the pleasure of packing in my newly purchased tramping pack! I’d decided to order my own pack for the trip and future excursions, since it would be very inconvenient to drag a suitcase around, not to mention trying to camp with it. Packing was a bit of a struggle, since we had limited space and didn’t know exactly what to bring or what the weather would be like compared to Dunedin’s dreary climes. Luckily, Amanda and I were able to yell at each other from down the hallway as we were packing and try to decide what we actually needed or not.
Thursday night around 9pm found Amanda, Sarah, and I making our way down Cumberland St. to the bus stop, wearing our tramping packs on our back and our smaller bookbags on our fronts. We felt like quite the spectacle, but most everyone else heading that way were also going to be travelling on the Night Bus so we didn’t look too out of place. Our friend had told us about the Night Bus, which travels, as its name suggests, in the evening between Dunedin and Christchurch. This was perfect for us, as it would take us to the Christchurch airport in time for our early morning flight but we wouldn’t have to miss any of our Thursday classes. By the time the bus rolled up a little after 10, my lack of sleep during the week due to assignments and the excitement/stress of packing was seriously starting to catch up to me. This was a blessing, as it enabled me to sleep for most of the 5 hour ride north. The bus rolled into the airport parking lot around 3:30am and we all stumbled off and gathered our packs, half asleep and feeling more like zombies than humans. In typical New Zealand fashion, the check-in area didn’t actually open until a little after 4am, and then the gate area couldn’t be accessed until 5, so we parked it on the floor and played the waiting game a couple of times before we could actually get to the gate and sprawl across the chairs for another short nap before our flight boarded around 7. Not the best night’s sleep, but better than nothing!
Our flight took off smoothly, but we were very disappointed to find that they did not even give us free water, much less free snacks, for the entirety of the 4 hour flight. I managed to get some work done on my history paper, but it definitely would have been aided by some complementary coffee! I was too indignant at the lack of service to pay $3 for a measly cup of black coffee and wasn’t yet feeling so urgent about the looming deadline of the paper to make too much of an effort to stay awake and write rather than catch some more zzz’s. When we arrived in Brisbane I was the first to get off the plane and was greeted by warm air! This was very exciting after the cold front which had been moving over Dunedin for the past few weeks, and I couldn’t wait for the others to get off so that we could meet Kathleen, who’d been on a slightly earlier flight, and start our real adventures! Going through customs, I had to take the tent out of my bag and have it checked for any dirt or other foreign substances which they didn’t want entering the country. I didn’t know when it had been last used, but fortunately Kathleen was still waiting on her tent’s inspection only a few tables away and was able to yell across that it had been used in the Fjordlands in New Zealand. Apparently, the customs official hadn’t liked that she was travelling alone and didn’t have a specific intended destination for the night, since we hadn’t booked anything ahead of time. This, combined with the fact that she wasn’t part of a group, caused her to look more suspicious than the rest of us and allowed Amanda, Sarah, and I to catch up to her.
Picking up our rental car was much more of a trial than we’d anticipated. When Sarah had booked it online, the final price had appeared to be only a little over $400. When we arrived at the Hertz counter, however, we were told that there would be an additional charge for being under the age of 25 which brought the total, including insurance, to around $1,000...that was an unpleasant surprise. We checked with the other rental companies that were in the airport, but they all gave either the same or greater prices so we were left with no choice but to go with Hertz and pay the extra charges. Darn fine print got us in a big way, but the lesson has definitely been learned! Rather disgruntled, especially by the fact that we were not provided with the promised road map of Australia, but were only given a little piece of paper with the Brisbane city layout, we were directed to the parking lot to pick up our transport for the next 10 days.
Our moods immediately improved when we walked outside and were greeted by sunshine and temperatures in the 20’s (70’s F)! Even the sight of the pocket-sized, hatchback Toyota Yaris, into which we were expected to cram all of our stuff, along with ourselves, could not dampen our spirits. That might have been partially due to the fact that we were all running on very little sleep and no food and by this point we were getting slightly slap happy, but it just made the situation all the more entertaining! We extracted our shorts and t-shirts from our tightly packed bags and made a quick change before attacking the logistical issue of how exactly we were expected to pack everything into our itty bitty car. After the realization that not even one of our packs could comfortably fit in the hatchback, we ended up buckling one in to the middle seat with another on the floor in front of it and the other two on Kathleen and Amanda’s laps in the backseat. The smaller backpacks we managed to stuff into the hatch, but, needless to say, it was quite the full car.
My friend Blake lives in Brisbane and promised to take us to lunch at a pancake house which we actually managed to find without too much difficulty. First Australian driving experience = success! It was so good to see a friendly face when he arrived and we congratulated him on choosing one of the few places that was actually open. We hadn’t counted on the fact that a lot of the restaurants and shops would be closed for Good Friday, which was especially disappointing when we sighted our first Target store in months only to find it closed for the holiday L The menu at the restaurant, named simply “Pancakes,” was overwhelming to our empty stomachs and sleep-deprived minds. There were heaps of different options, most including ice cream along with some sort of fruit and nut combination. I finally settled on the “Hot ‘n’ Tropo” which had buttermilk pancakes with chocolate ice cream, grilled bananas, walnuts, and chocolate sauce, yum! While waiting for our food, Blake pulled out 4 chocolate Bilbys, which are the Australian’s special version of chocolate rabbits, which his mum had gotten for us as an Easter present! What a great example of Australian hospitality J Apparently, the Bilby chocolates are going extinct, so we’re now part of the lucky few who’ve gotten to experience them!When the pancakes (finally) arrived, I’m pretty sure all of our eyes actually popped out of our heads and our jaws dropped to the floor (imagine the cartoon-style animation upon seeing something extremely wonderful/surprising, Bugs Bunny style). We now had huge plates of food in front of us to devour, which effectively stopped conversation for a good 10 minutes. After our initial efforts, the pace began to slow as we reached that tricky state where you feel like one more bite might actually make you burst, but it’s just so good that you keep trying to take smaller and smaller bites to fit everything in. I almost made it to the end of my plate, but finally realised that I might actually have to be rolled out if I took one more bite, so I ceded defeat and we all left feeling very full and much happier.
Blake was a great tour guide around the city, walking with us down to the river and across a huge bridge to an enormous Ferris wheel in the park. We all declined a ride, as it was rather expensive and any sort of swaying motion did not seem like the best idea for our very full stomachs. Next, he took us to an amazing market, which had so many beautiful things for sale, from dresses to jewellery to garden art to corn on the cob! That was a surprise! One of our few regrets from the trip is that we didn’t get more things in Brisbane, choosing instead to wait to buy our souvenirs in the other cities. For one thing, most of the items were less expensive in Brisbane, and for another they were just plain cool. Part of our tour took us through the “Lagoon” which is an outdoor, public swimming area which was completely decimated by all the flooding and only recently was able to open a very small section. Too soon, it was time for Blake to catch his train for work and for us to hit the road with our newly purchased Lonely Planet guide to Australia’s east coast. We said good bye with the promise of keeping in touch and many “thank you”s for the Bilbys and the wonderful day in the much welcome warm air and sunshine J 
One thing we noticed immediately about Australia is that the roads are not only much bigger than those in New Zealand, but they are also much more well-marked. It was a relatively easy drive down the coast to Surfers Paradise, where we planned on spending the night and then exploring the next day. We rolled into Surfers Paradise a little before sunset and made the rookie mistake of stopping to check out the beach before finding a campsite. It was really pretty as the sun was starting to go down, but this left us trying to find a place to pitch our tents in the growing dark, with the added complication that everywhere in the city was completely full due to the Easter holiday. Shoot. We decided that the best plan would be to stop at a McDonald’s (or Macca’s, as they call them over there) to use their free internet to try to find a place to stay. On the way, we stopped at a gas station where Sarah and I picked up a can of beans for dinner since we were still quite full from our pancakes. We ended up eating these in the corner of the Macca’s outside seating area, feeling like homeless bums (probably because we kind of were at this point...), eating our beans out of the can with a collapsible mug and camping spork. No camping was to be found, so we piled back in Yarrie (our pet name for our wee red vehicle) and started driving, hoping that something would present itself to us, perhaps a nice park?
We were getting rather desperate when we passed by a large church on the outskirts of town that had its outside lights on and was conveniently located next to a field, which at this point looked like the perfect camping spot. One of our friends had camped at a church when he was travelling around the North Island, so we decided to give it a go and Kathleen and I went in to ask if we could use a small corner of their field for the night. I’m thinking that we looked pretty desperate and sad by this point, having been travelling for quite a few hours and not having any clue what we’d gotten ourselves into, but this may have helped our case. There was some sort of youth gathering that night, so a boy led us to the pastor who immediately consented to let us pitch our tents for the night and even offered the fenced in playground! We were so relieved and giddy that when we got back out to Amanda and Sarah in the car we couldn’t spit out that we had a place to stay because we were laughing so hard at the ridiculousness of the whole situation. Hauling our packs out of the car, we utilised Sarah’s headlamps and pitched our tents in a little grassy patch next to the playground equipment. When Sarah and I crawled into our tent, we immediately realised that it was a wee bit too short when neither of us could stretch out without either our feet or heads hitting the sides. Well, it could be worse, right? Right. The tent could end up being a junior-sized tent from Wal-Mart which doesn’t have a cover and can’t handle the slightest amount of dew before it drips on you... Let me just advise you: if you’ve ever considered buying a tent from Wal-Mart...don’t do it!! However, when we were woken around 6am by the birds and full sun shining upon our little playground camp and were able to get out of our sleeping bags without freezing on the spot, we still agreed that it could definitely be worse...first full day in Oz, here we come! J
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