The road trip starts here

Well kind of. Adelaide is where we picked up our campervan to drive around Australia for the next 52 days. But, first we had a couple of days to look around Adelaide.

The flight in from Alice was a scary one. Up and down and side to side more than I think I'd ever had on a plane, we landed okay though. The city looked good from the sky and has a great coastline nearby. Once we settled in we wandered round to get our bearings. It's fairly easy in most places in Oz to get around as most are built on grid systems. If you head in the general direction of somewhere you'll get there no matter what road you take, mostly. We bought some food from the great market they have on ever few days, selling stuff off real cheap near the end of the day- all the garlic we bought there lasted us 2 months!
That evening Clive, who we met at Uluru, cooked us a great pasta meal for which we supplied the booze. And here we encounter one of the many oddities of Australia, buying alcohol. It's tricky, especially if you're on foot. We had to walk for about 20 minutes to the nearest booze shop and it turns out it wasn't a shop, it was a bar that had a takeaway counter near the entrance. Newsagents don't sell alcohol. Supermarkets don't sell alcohol(apart from the classic, and our new friends, Aldi). It's weird how restrictive it is compared to England but even weirder is the amount of driver-thru booze stores there are on main roads! You pull up, tell the guy what you want, he goes and gets it, you pay, you drive off. You do have the option to get your lazy ass out of the car but most people don't.
I liked Adelaide instantly. A great looking place that wasn't too big or too small, not too busy, not Perth-dead. Stuff was going on here but you could easily get away from it all in about 20mins at the beaches in the area. The weather was still crappy but it couldn't put a dampener on staying here. Right let's get the van!
In Perth we stayed near a Wickedcampers depot so we checked out the condition of the vans, all pretty new and in good nick. Of course ours was a heap, it had to be! Adelaide isn't a busy depot and all the vans looked a bit ragged but ours was the king. The Flamin Wicked. I thought it would be fairly cool be it turned out to be soo frickin cold at night due to the doors having large gaps in them. One side door was jammed shut, until it opened whilst I was driving up a hill! We could've, should've taken it back and swapped it. But as usual I thought we'd see it out.
We stayed around Adelaide for a few days though to get a decent look round the city before screwing it off into the country.
The best thing, and what we were looking forward to the most, is the freedom your own transport offers. Essential in a huge place like Australia that has a poor public transport system anyway. Also it was great to just drive up at caravan site, of which there are plenty, rather than thinking about which hostel we'd be in that night.
Glenelg that day. A sort of seaside resort for Adelaide and a nice looking place too. They are very proud of the fact that this was the point at which the first official non-convict immigrants landed in Australia. The old volunteers as the museum were very helpful and gave us a quick tour. There happened to be a cool surfing display on too, which was nice.
We parked our van, registration 'TIP190"- how apt, in the caravan park down the road and that turned out to be the best caravan park in Australia, as the awards proved. It was right next to the beach to, I'm sure it would be lovely in summer but not now! All down here from here then. As it goes though most caravan parks in Australia are very well set up. It's huge business and we ended up meeting loads of Australians taking years out to travel around their country, as well as plenty living out their retirement in different parks throughout the land.
Returning the cooking favor we took Clive out the next day in our supervan into the Adelaide hills. Superb stuff too and cracking views, to a point as the clouds were rolling in, back onto Adelaide. Adelaide is near to grape-growing-wine-drinking country, the Barossa Valley being the most famous. So the hills and country around it look brilliant and totally not what you think of when Australia springs to mind.
That evening was an excellent meal at a German pub in a German town settlement, Handorf. A nice little, and a bit touristy but good, town on the outskirts of wine regions and Adelaide.
We finished off our venture in Adelaide by visiting the museums and art gallery, aswell as walking by the river in the sunshine alongside the many black swans around. There are plenty of great looking Victorian buildings very reminiscent of England, obviously.
Every state in Australia has a different slogan on it's car registration plates, Western Australia(home of Perth) probably had something like "Western Australia - Don't bother". The Northern Territory plate may have read something like 'The Northern Territory - Hot and Red, Red Hot!". South Australia was the "Festival State". There's loads of festivals here, who'd of thought? We didn't see one but in a few days I didn't think we would.
I liked Adelaide a lot. Australians we met before coming here, some very set in their ways, told us not to expect much but it was definitely a nicer place to be than Perth and quite a good city in general. But we're off into the outback, sort of.
Right the real road trip begins. We head north for the Flinders Ranges the next day.

The bottom photo is somewhere on the way to Adelaide, probably near the Flinders ranges but who knows. The middle one is Adelaide from the hills and the top photo is the dreaded van.

Alice? Who the fxxk is Alice!?

We arrived at Alice Springs around 12am. Next to our intended Youth Hostel was a night club in full swing. We got off the bus to be greeted by an argument between some huuuge guy and the police. The hostel was shut. Everywhere else was shut. We got back on the bus. The driver thought the only places open would be the more upmarket ones. Okey dokey! We ended up in a flash hotel for the night, expensive but now and again it doesn't hurt. In the morning we walked back into town to the hostel. They had no record of the booking and no room for us. It looked a bit dire anyway so we rang another place and booked in, it was only over the bridge apparently. 5 mins walk. I took the wrong bridge and we ended up walking for over an hour around Alice Springs with our backpacks on in the heat. But when we finally got there it was a really cool and chilled out place with a garden and pool where they pumped relaxing music into throughout the day. "You're in one of the caravans tonight", said the owner. "Which one?", "The one with the clouds painted on it.". Of course. So stayed here for a couple of nights before our flight and it really was a cool place with some decent people too. Alice Springs itself isn't that great.
As with everywhere throughout Australia, the land was Aboriginal. Here, more so than other places, the presence of the white man has been fairly recent. Since the laws on banning Aboriginals from the town centre were lifted it's been even less time for the Aboriginal people to get used to a westernised culture. It makes for a very odd situation.
The Lonely Planet guidebook declares Alice to be dangerous at night due to the Aboriginal populous here but signs at our hostel declared otherwise. The main problem is Aboriginal violence on each other rather than anyone else and that isn't too common, besides it seemed fine every night we strolled about. I don't think I could get used to the place though. It's strange. There's absolutely no intergration between the Aboriginals and the rest of the population. They don't have jobs, probably because no-one would employ them, and they don't really do anything other than wander the streets, in their droves. Not that I'm trying to be unkind but it really is like being in a zombie movie. Walking around with these invisible people just moping about, some drinking alot, some just staring blankly and looking lost. It's weird. We heard that the Australian government give money to the Aboriginals just so they'd make it by but you can't help thinking they had a much better life before the white man came along. I'm not sure how long a situation like this can go on for but it really paints Australia in a bad light.
We again met up with Clive, the English guy we got talking to in Uluru, and ended up going for a meal with him at night. It transpired that he was going to Adelaide at the same time as us and stopping in the same Hostel. We arranged to meet again.
The main thing with Alice Springs is the telegraph station, as far as white man settlement goes. This was a great achievement for Australian communication as joining up a telegraph wire from north to south through Alice really meant that news could be reached to Australia from England in much quicker time. There's apparently an under water cable running from Singapore to Darwin in Australia and this is carried on south to Adelaide.
Alice was also a halfway stop for the Ghan. This is now a train but it previously was the Afghan camel train which took supplies up and down the country.
When water was found here, by the white folk(Aboriginals had known for years but the white man thought them a simple race who were very ill informed), it was in a spring and was named after the wife of the founder of the town. This was the first spot were we saw kangaroos. It was pretty odd but cool. They were just lolloping around not doing much, surprising big beasts that they are.
There is a good vantage point over the town on ANZAC hill. ANZAC is everywhere in Oz, it stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps. Memorials are everywhere from the first and second world wars and other skirmishes that have gone on over the years. The hill looks over the town and is a great spot to check out the sunset. It's a fairly small place but not too bad. It did grow on me but there's nothing really to do after a couple of days.
One story we got told from an Australian later on in the trip was quite odd. Whether it's true I don't know but here it is. The main river through Alice is called Todd River. Most of the time it's totally dry and you can walk across it, as we did. Some Aboriginals live and sleep on the river, not sure how they put up with the mammoth ants. Anyway, when it rains it really rains and the river flows fast. We were told that under the bridge in town there are metal fences, I never noticed, and apparently these are to catch Aboriginals in. The water comes so fast down the river that they get swept up whilst asleep or drunk and to stop them being washed way down river they're pinned up against these fences so that the emergency services can fish them out! It sounds odd but could be true for all I know, it wouldn't surprise me.

Where are you? Uluru

Flying out of Perth was good for a few reasons. Mainly because you get to see the baron outback of Australia almost totally uninterrupted by cloud. It's a red and desolate land with some amazing looking rifts and ridges with the odd tiny tiny town every now and then. Quite why we had to watch the life jacket demonstration on the way out I'll never know, unless the plane crashed in a creek but even then. This area is sometimes called the red centre and it's not difficult to see why. It's red. But not totally baron, trees do exist in abundance out here. They mainly look like they're dying but they're not. Uluru is the Aboriginal, and original, name for Ayers Rock. It was reverted back a few years ago when the Australian government granted the land back to the Aboriginal people. It's now loaned out from them to the government for a 99 year period. What happens then is anybodies guess. The Olgas, now renamed Katajuta, are also nearby. They're a collection of round rocks jutting from the flat landscape that also look pretty decent from the plane on the way in to land.
We got off the plane into the baron desert and it was raining. Not hard but still. We'd manage to forget where we'd booked to stop which is a bit of a mistake here. The only area the public can stop is some 20kms or so out of the national park in which Uluru lies. This area is called Yulara and is all owned by one company, meaning high prices but at least a decent set up. A free bus picks everyone up from the tiny airport and drops people off all the accommodation within Yulara. The accommodation varies from flash hotels to dorm rooms to campgrounds for tents. Guess which one we stayed in? The tents of course! And they weren't cheap. Ready erected and with proper beds but freezing at night. The warning signs for dingoes were disheartening too! At least there's a supermarket and bar/restaurant here so we can at least try and keep the spending budget down.
There are various lookout points around the resort, these are just large mounds of earth with boardwalks on but the views are great. After a beer at the bar we went up to have a look at Uluru at sunset. It was a real good atmosphere up there and the rock definitely has something special about it, it looks great. But we are still a fair way from it. The next day we get up around 5 to see the sunrise next to the rock. This was pretty damn cool. Up close in the dark the rock is menacing. A huge black monolith in the immense flat land of the dessert. Once the light appears and the sun starts hitting it all manner of colour changes affect the pitted surface. The sky was the clearest blue I'd ever seen and the rock has a kind of special look about it. It has to be one of the must see things in the entire world and I'm not completely sure why. It's an icon of Australia and for the aboriginals it's intensely sacred. That's why there are signs everywhere asking you not to climb it. You still can of course but we didn't. For one it's really steep, for two I wasn't that bothered. The best views are of the rock, not from looking from the rock. There's not much else out there! We took the 9 and a half km walk round instead and this took around 3 hours. Up close it looks nothing like we'd seen in the photos. They can't do it justice. The many different angles, holes, water pitted craters and canyons, huge rock falls, the shadows it's casts on itself, aboriginal art(although not great), the odd wave like curves and the little trees scrambling for life in cracks make it all worth seeing up close. Apparently it's a sight after heavy rain when water runs off it for days after. I'm glad it wasn't raining that day.
Afterwards we looked round the mainly dour cultural centre before heading back to the resort. At night we drank Aussie beer with an English we'd met and chatted to a couple of Aussies over an Outback Burger. This consisted of beef burger, bacon, fried egg, pineapple, cheese and beetroot. Tasted bloomin marvelous. Live music blared out, 'Tie my kangaroo down sport', 'A land down under', 'Waltzing Matilda' and so on. Good stuff though and the old guy playing guitar pulled out a Joe Satriani(mental fast electric guitar player) tune with ease. Cracking. A Spanish couple filled us in a little on South America and it all made for a great night.
Getting to our next destination wasn't so easy. We ended up getting on a tour bus just as transit passengers, meaning we had to get on the bus when the tour was heading back to Alice Springs after sunset at Uluru. We had a day to lounge about and wait for the bus. The heat during the day is intense but thankfully the bar was shaded!
We flew out from Alice Springs in a few days so needed to get there and have a quick nosey round. The bus turned up and we prepared for the 6 hour, 400km ride. In darkness. And outback it's dark. You can see stars right down to street level. We were told not to panic if we hit a Kangaroo or Emu, and besides, the bus had good breaks. A demonstration wasn't necessary at 80km/h but they gave one anyway.
I saw a lonely fire along the way that was covered up as we passed, people actually camp out here! Between Uluru and Alice there's nothing except one roadhouse, where we stopped off for a quick ale. I desolate to say the least. Getting in to Alice Springs at midnight without accommodation could be a problem though. Even the roadhouse phone was on the blink so I couldn't ring ahead. It'll be interesting I'm sure.

The Australian adventure (Perth)

And it all begins in Perth. We'd heard soo many good things about it that we'd been thinking about arriving here for a while.
Perth is the most remote city in the world due to it's location on the West coast of Australia. Most of the Australian population live on the East coast so Perth is a long was off. I think around 3,000 kilometres.
The promised land arrived with the worst landing we'd had so far. It was pouring with rain and and it felt like the plane lurched sideways after the constant up and down motion just before touchdown. But we're here non the less and the temperature is a shocker. It's half that of Singapore, around 16 degrees. And it's lashing it down, sideways.
Whoa, this feels like stepping back in time. Not far, around the late 80's somewhere. The small airport seems......I don't know, not as advanced as others we've passed through. The 'shuttle' service from the airport to our accommodation is a minibus. Public transport isn't quite what it should be. The driver says it's the worst rain for ages and they've been in drought for blah-de-blah long and so forth. Grim.
Our hostel is nice though, other than the lack of heating - apparently common in Australia(even though they have winter every year!). At the time of booking I knew we'd be hitting the tail end of winter but after coming through Asia the weather is a bit of a shock.
Our hostel was located in the 'bustling Northbridge area of the city. It's where all the bars, restaurants and clubs are located so we thought we'd go check out life on the streets that evening. Dead. Everything was closed bar a couple of places. The streets were empty and I started to wonder if we were in the wrong area. We weren't. A car pulled up and a drunk Australian got out and approached us. He was friendly enough and started talking bollocks to us almost straight away, "Hi, I'm Brad. My friends call me my father's son." He repeated this phrase at least 4 times. Interesting. We dived in a restaurant to get away, and nice it was too. Whoa, the prices here are mental!
One thing Brad did tell us of note though was about the death of Northbridge since an underground road bypass was built. Not as much through-traffic meaning not as much business. Ok. So let's head over the railway, which splits the city, to the main heart of Perth itself. Also closed. Except for MacDonald's of course. The streets were deserted other than a few rogues and vagabonds, we got asked for change immediately from some zoned out tramp. If I'm not giving to a heavily scarred 10 year old boy in Hong Kong I ain't giving to a drunk tramp to fund his booze and drug habit. Besides, I need to buy booze for myself!
Laura needed the loo so I waited outside the dirty looking MacDonald's. An arguing group of late teens wandered up the streets. This carried on to the boyfriend of the couple arguing saying to his girlfriend "Where are you going you stupid bitch? I hope you get raped!". Nice. She entered MacDonald's and after a strangely racist comment aimed at her from him, he followed her in. I then got asked for a cigarette of another scuzzy street urchin. Hmmm.
Back to the hostel then. On the way we thought we'd check out the Internet place round the corner. A dirty hovel full of pre-pubescent lunatics playing online games. The place was scruffy as anything, cockroaches up the stairs and food crumbs scattered on the tables. This was not the Australian dream.
Maybe we'd been pampered with hi-speed free Internet and up-to-date technology with excellent infrastructure. Maybe this was just a bad day. We'll see how it fairs in the daylight.
We headed out on the dirty train to Perth's port town, Freemantle. This is supposed to be a bohemian artsy type place with live street music and a flashy cafe culture. Utter bollocks. It was dead. I know this is winter but come on! We wondered round feeling fairly miserable. The free buses around Freementle and Perth are a great idea but there's so little to see it's hardly worth it. Maybe it's transformed in summer. I don't care. It's the worst place we've been. There's no atmosphere and the streets feel unsafe in comparison to anywhere in Asia.
A huge sign on a shop frontage read 'Freo(Freemantle) is dying, it needs a leader'. Looks like it's already dead. A nice beach though but clearly not the weather for it.
There seems to be a real people shortage here, but maybe this is coming from the hectic places of Asia. Some may prefer it but after a couple of days in Oz we were in total shock. This is far from the dream we were sold on and a long way behind the excellent places we'd visited so far. I didn't think it would take a while to get used to Australia. But it did.
Australia brought a few firsts on the trip for us. The first time we've seen loads of rubbish and ripped seats on public transport and the first time we've stopped in all evening. Normally we'd wander the streets at night among bustling atmospheres with sights to see and to just take it all in. Here? No. We couldn't face it.
Next day we checked out the Museum of Western Australia to find out about the culture and history of the place. It was alright and there was quite a bit of information about how badly the Aboriginal people were treated here and how many were slaughtered. There was also an interesting video about Perth in modern times. An aboriginal bloke talking about the racism he still gets everyday and many locals discussing the 'move out of the city program' which was a plan to get people to live on the outskirts rather than the centre itself. This means that after 5pm the place is dead. Odd.
Looking around you soon see how culturally diverse this place isn't. There are Chinese here but that's about it. We finally saw Aborigines though, they were just scrounging for a dollar to buy more booze. Apparently the aboriginal people you see around towns are the outcasts from their tribes, whether this is true or not we never find out.
For a place that likes to think of itself as clean, modern and forward thinking this place is still in the dark ages. Way behind Asia and not even a quarter of the fun.
Kings Park was a slight glimmer of what it could be. A great park slightly on the edge of the city. It offered great views back to the good looking skyline and river on which the handful of skyscrapers hugged. As well as war memorials there was also a more modern memorial to the Australians who died in the Bali bombings a few years back. 16 Perth citizens perished in the attack, 8402 people lost their lives in total.
Northbridge livened up a little after few days. The results of drunken brawls were evident, the first violence we've seen. But, how people choose to live here and call it paradise I have no idea. Maybe they lived under a rock all their lives. I don't think I'd come back in the summer to see if there'd been any change, it doesn't deserve the chance. The first big disappointment. We originally thought 4 nights here was not enough, we were wrong. Next stop Ayers Rock, or as it's now call Uluru.

The end of an Asia

So that wraps up the Asian leg of the trip. How's it been? An experience from start to finish. I was totally unprepared for what was involved but then you can't really prepare for the everyday life here until you live it.
China was a bit dodgy sometimes but incredibly interesting and exciting in a way. Japan was probably the highlight, along with the real surprise of the islands of Thailand. I forgot to mention we also saw the island where 'The Beach' was filmed and that we slept to the sound of croaking frogs that sounded like a group of cows had surrounded our cabin. I never knew they could be soo loud! Kuala Lumpur and Singapore were both good and are definitely worth a stopover.
All in all I'd go back to most places, China last but I'm glad we went.
At this point we were ready for Australia and a bit of normality. Or so we thought.