Australia, the Land Rover diaries

” All right mate. So, rule number one when walking and fishing in croc country: stay at least two metres away from the water. Salties are fast! Other things to consider: don’t fetch fresh water in the same spot, because crocs study your behaviour and will wait for you to go back to that spot. Crocs have motion sensors along their body, so they always know if there is prey close to them; it doesn’t matter if you cannot see them, they can sense you. And… if you have a sixth sense feeling of being observed, move away because you probably are. Salties are not like the lazy African crocodiles that lie around sunbathing and won’t bother much about you. These guys are mean and will not hesitate to try to get you”.

It sounds like a wildlife movie, but these were the actual safety instructions given to us by Shane Ross, our Australian friend, the day before we went on a one week bush camping/fishing trip to the Cape York Peninsula, in Northern Queensland, with him and his father, Greg. A few days before, we had visited a crocodile farm close to Cairns, where we saw some very big crocodiles – the biggest one was a 5.4mt long “salty” (Australian for “salt water crocodile”), which had reached more than 100 years of age and even though he was blind and had no teeth left, he was still able to mate and give a good beating to the smaller crocs around.

We have seen quite a lot of animals on this trip, many of them very impressive but one very interesting fact we learned in Australia, is how strong crocodiles are compared to other animals. We humans can bite our food with a strength of around 150 psi (pounds per square inch). Great white sharks can reach close to 700 psi. Hyenas are stronger and can reach around 1.100 psi, while jaguars – who have the strongest bite of all cats - go up to around 1.500 psi. Well…. “salties” can reach at least 3.500 psi, which means that if they catch you, it’s very unlikely that you can escape. The sound their jaws make when closing is very impressive.

So, the next day bush camping we went and our friends drove more than 800 km from Mission Beach, south of Cairns until we reach the Oyala Thumotang National Park, which lies along the Archer River, where Carsten and the boys expected to fish a lot of Barramundi, Saratoga, etc.

I think that drive was our very first glimpse of one of the important things we came to realize later about Australia…. how big it is. Australia’s territory is ten times bigger than Chile’s; slightly smaller than Brazil or the United States and it only has 24 million inhabitants. Of those, 15 million live in the five big cities along the east and west coast, so 9 million people to populate the rest of the country, basically means a very, very low populated country in general. So, when you travel in Australia and you are far from the big cities, that is what you encounter, empty roads, very few towns and very few people. In fact, in our one week in the National Park, we didn’t meet anyone else; which was quite nice for us anyway.

We had a great week. I caught my second fish ever (a Black Bream) and spent a lot of time reading books and taking pictures, while Carsten and the boys enjoyed their fishing time and got their Barramundi, Saratoga and other kind of fish too. We enjoyed the talks by the fire and the bird sounds that woke us up every morning. One day we saw a fresh water manta ray swimming along the river and every day we would have kangaroos and wallabies jumping close to our camp. It was funny to see how Kangaroos probably also receive their own safety instructions from their parents: “When drinking water from the river, do not drink right at the edge of the water. Make a hole at least 2 metres away from the edge of the river and drink from there”. You can see this in one of our pictures.

During our stay in the park, we also saw occasional feral pigs around, which are a pest in Australia. They started to be introduced since Australia was first discovered, but in bigger numbers when the European settlers began to arrive. Today they have grown to an estimated population of around 30 million animals. They represent the biggest threat to the survival of smaller animals and natural environments, such as the billabongs (waterholes) because they eat all the plants and bulbs and destroy the surroundings. Much like the beavers some “smart” people released in the south of Chile, the feral pigs today are a pest and Australians are free to kill them. Their meat cannot be used because most of these animals have TB and that, added to Australia’s huge territory, makes their numbers very difficult to control.

Speaking of feral animals, it turns out that Australia also has a large population of dromedaries and camels. They were introduced around 1840 to help with the construction of the Adelaide – Darwin railway and once finished, they were released, so now they live freely in the desert. They too require regular population control.

During our bush camping week, we also got our second surprise about Australia. Before we got there, we had agreed that we would never walk around barefoot or in flip flops and we would never sleep in a tent because we feared that we would find a spider, a scorpion or a snake in our sleeping bags. It turns out we didn’t even have a mosquito in our tent. Nothing at all. Shane and we agree that Africa is FAR more dangerous than Australia. In Africa, you cannot walk around in unfenced campsites at night without the risk of being stalked by hyenas, lions or leopards, or being attacked by a hippo that decides to graze close to your tent. When you are in Africa you cannot walk barefoot in the night because it is very likely that you can step on, be bitten or stung by some creature. While we were in South Africa, Carsten was spat in the face by a Black Spitting Cobra, which got scared as we walked passed it without seeing it. Luckily, Carsten was wearing his glasses, so it was not a problem, but if he had not worn them, he could have become blind and would definitely have had to go to the hospital to get antidote.. In Australia in comparison you can walk freely everywhere during day or night without a major risk of any kind; except if you decide to jump in a river and you encounter a saltie of course.

Yes, Australia is home to the most venomous and dangerous snakes and spiders in the world. Probably the main reason for that is that these animals live in such remote areas that when they finally get prey close enough to attack, they need to be sure the venom is strong enough so it cannot escape. But, while dangerous animals exist in Australia, most of the times you are not very likely to encounter them. The Blue Mountains area, close to Sydney, is known for having a lot of dangerous funnel spiders, but we didn’t encounter any of them either. Maybe we were just lucky.

A very different story though are the box jelly fish and the Irukandji, which are the world’s most poisonous jelly fish. They are common in Australia’s coast during the wet season and are the reason why most people swim around with stinger suits or don’t swim at all. In northern Queensland, you must also add the salt water crocodiles to the dangers of the local beaches, so we decided we would stay away from them altogether.

Overall, we spent more than three weeks in Queensland, which is a region you need to visit before the rain season starts. Rains are strong so many areas north of Cairns can become completely flooded and unreachable during rainy season. Cyclones have become more frequent and stronger in the last years. The last big one was Yasi in 2010, which crossed Mission Beach with winds up to 300 km/hr and left huge tree branches embedded in Shane’s parents garden and almost tore the roof off their house.

Besides the Cape we visited the coastal areas of Queensland, which are covered by tropical rainforest (the oldest in the world) and other national parks with beautiful waterfalls. Despite much efforts of all Australians to convince us to go and see the Great Barrier Reef, we decided to skip it this time, because it was quite expensive for our travel budget and we would much rather see it on another, hopefully, future sailing trip.

Ever since our trip to Africa, we have been going back and forth about buying a Land Rover Defender and doing an overland trip around the world, so Australia was our chance to give the Land Rover experience a try. We rented one in Cairns and drove 7.300 km until we returned it in Sydney three weeks later.

We had to cut down our original itinerary to something more realistic, because, as I said before, Australia is huge and it’s not fun to spend three weeks driving without time to stop and look around you. So, since we are not the biggest beach fans, we decided to skip the stops at Brisbane and the Gold and Sunshine Coasts and drove inland instead, to visit some national parks. We also did not visit Uluru, the famous red rock which lies in the middle of Australia, because getting there and back to the coast, was a round trip of more than 5.600 km and we did not have time to do it. To go there by plane is possible, however, the stay and tours have become very touristic and expensive, so we decided to leave them for another time. So, we visited Carnarvon National Park instead, which was beautiful and we enjoyed to hike along the gorge and be in the nature. There we met many “Grey Nomads”, which is the expression Australians use to refer to retired people who buy a campervan and drive around the country for an indefinite time. The longest travel period we heard of was a 70-year-old couple we met that had been driving around for five and a half years.

From Carnarvon, we continued south and had to take a detour into Sydney to change the car, because our first Land Rover, which had 450.000 km on the clock, and had not been maintained very well, broke down with a falty starter motor. Nothing serious, but we didn’t want to have problems the rest of the way, so we decided to drive the 500 km to Sydney and change the car. The replacement Land Rover Dedender, while it had much better maintenance than the other, was not as well equipped; but it was good enough to last for the rest of the trip. It obviously is not a fast car, but you can be sure that it can go anywhere. We slept one night in one of the beaches south of Sydney and continued south the next morning.

We decided to drive along the Great Alpine Road, which turned out to be very pretty. The hills are very low if you compare them to the Andes mountains, but they even have a ski centre in an area called Mt. Hotham which is around 1.845 meters high. This is the area where Australia had its “Gold Rush” around 1850, but today everything is abandoned and there are only signs to remind you about it. Around the latitude of Sydney, we started to see more vegetation and hills and for the first time since we were in Northern India in May, we had to wear fleeces and warm clothes again. We had to keep them on until we reached Sydney again, because as it turns out, the weather in the south-eastern part of Australia is quite cold. The wildlife also started to change as we travelled south, because while in the north we always saw dead kangaroos along the road, here we started to see dead wombats. Fortunately, we were also able to see a few live ones too during our visit to Wilsons Promontory National Park. That was another Australian surprise… wombats are not small and cuddly koala like animals as I imagined…. Adult wombats are massive and with an average weight of 40 kg can cause serious damage if you get to hit them with your car, same as kangaroos.

After our visit to that park and on our way to Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road, we stopped at the Vietnam Memorial Museum in Phillip Island. It was around this time that some of the information I had heard and read about Australia started to finally settle in my head and lead to some interesting eye openers.

It is recorded that Europeans sailed around the coasts of Australia since the year 1600, but until 1770, there had never been a settlement attempt. The first one to claim Australia was Captain James Cook, from the British Navy, who ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, thus “discovering” it, in 1770. From 1788 on, the British colonization of Australia began as they declared New South Wales a penal colony, as we all have heard about.

The interesting fact of this is if you look at the dates, the above means that until 1770, Australia was only inhabited by aborigines. So, when the United States were 6 years away from declaring independence from the British Empire and Chile had already been a Spanish colony for 230 years, Australia was just being discovered.

I found it strange that both in Namibia and Australia I was asked about my origins: “Where in Europe did your family come from?”. This to me was a very strange question, but to them it seemed completely logic to ask. It was not until this trip that I understood the reason behind that question. Both those countries were colonised around the 1800 and in both countries the European settlers did not mix with the local aborigines, so white people in these countries today can easily trace their family roots back to Europe. Many Australians take great pride in the fact that their ancestors were free settlers and not prisoners. I’m not sure if I was successful at explaining well the fact that, to start with, the non-English Americas were colonised since the early 1500. This, added to the fact that the Spaniards and Portuguese mixed with the local population when they arrived, resulted in us having been a mix of races for more than 500 years.

Today’s life of indigenous people in all continents is sadly, very similar. With very few exceptions, the indigenous people are poorer, less educated and more prone to alcoholism than the non-aboriginal population. After this year of travel, we concluded that all efforts to “modernize” them or turn them into “one of us”, have been a disaster because, to start with, we are convinced that our way of living is better than theirs, so they need to be “converted” and not us. All indigenous policies are based on simplistic and narrow minded ideas, which completely disregard the indigenous own traditions and beliefs. Perhaps the most notorious difference of beliefs is our use of nature as a resource for us, while all indigenous cultures see themselves as part of nature itself. Their existence depends on nature’s existence itself.

Many of you might have watched the movie “Australia”, which showed the real story of the “Stolen Generations”. From 1905 and way until the mid-1970s, the Australian government enforced a policy of “assimilation”, which resulted in the removal of kids (aboriginal and those born from mixed racial relationships) from their families, so they would be raised by white families or institutions as per western standards. The kids’ names were changed, they could not use their native language and obviously, their traditions and social links were lost. Most of them never saw their families again and those who did, had no connection to their culture anymore, so they were lost between two worlds that did not accept them. Neither did they get the education they were supposed to receive, so most of them ended up working as servants or field labour. When you know that, you can easily understand one of the reasons why alcoholism is such a big problem in aboriginal communities in Australia and why fines are so high if you bring alcohol in to them. Nevertheless, where there is a will, there is a way, so some people in Australia (and not only aborigines) make alcoholic drinks by mixing Fanta and vegemite (which is almost pure yeast).

Today, all national parks in Australia have relation to aborigines. They stand on aboriginal land and therefore contain sacred aboriginal elements. Aboriginal souvenirs are for sale everywhere around Australia. You can attend aboriginal shows, learn to play the didgeridoo, throw a boomerang, or hear stories about the Dream Time for a price. However, as it happens in the rest of the world, aborigines are not part of Australia’s daily life as you live it. The only aborigine we encountered on our trip, was one of the clerks in Jervis Bay National Park who sold us the ticket to get in. If you ask any Australian about aborigines, they will tell you that “it is a complicated matter”. But I guess all of us who come from colonized countries unfortunately don’t have something much different to say about our own aborigines. Carsten has been joking with me for years about when he is going to see a Mapuche aborigine (the main Chilean aborigines) in real life. He has come to believe they are like unicorns and don’t exist ;-)

Anyway, so after this anthropological mental detour, let’s go back to the Vietnam Memorial Museum. It was opened in 2007, it is very interesting and has a lot of real equipment (helicopters, cars, tanks, clothes, etc.) and information that veterans donated. There is a wonderful holographic video which explains Australia’s involvement in the war and how it developed. This museum was founded and built by Vietnam veterans as a way of remembering and showing to Australians what their experience in Vietnam had been like. Around 60.000 white (non-volunteer) Australians were forced to fight in Vietnam and when they returned to Australia in 1972, they were received with hatred and contempt; which resulted in them having a lot of difficulties readjusting to a normal life. It was not until 1987, that a formal parade was organized in Sydney to honour them and celebrate their safe return to the country.

After this interesting history lesson, we moved on further south to travel the famous Great Ocean Road in Victoria, where you drive by the coast for around 250 km from the south of Melbourne until the city of Allansford. The road’s construction began in 1919, basically as a way of giving work to 3.000 soldiers who were returning from the First World War. It goes along the coast and crosses the beautiful Otway National Park, which we entered many times in different sections. We stopped at the most famous landmark of the road, the Twelve Apostles, which is a collection of limestone pillars off the shore of Port Campbell; very similar to our La Portada in Antofagasta, Chile, except that these are many pillars instead of just one. We had a funny experience here because the day was very grey and cold and we wanted to wait to see if there would be a nice sunset. While waiting we were starving, so we decided to cook in the parking lot. Upon seeing the back of the car open and a lot of things lying around, a very nice Chinese man came over to us and asked what we were selling.

We had two cool experiences in the Great Ocean Road. In one of the sections of the National Park, we stayed overnight and could see glow-worms; which was the first time for the both of us. Not as spectacular as the pictures we had seen from the caves in New Zealand, and we also had a full moon night, so it was not dark; but we were still able to see them and it was very interesting for us. The picture looks terrible, but you can see the blue coloured light they project.

The second experience happened in Lake Elizabeth and on our trip to get there. We decided to take a gravel road at the Kennett River, close to Apollo Bay, where you can see koalas in the wild. We saw some of them and then continued driving through a beautiful rainforest until we arrived to Lake Elizabeth, where we had been told we might be able to see platypus. We walked around the lake, which is very beautiful, and when we were having lunch, we heard a koala moving in a tree very close to us. It was funny to see him moving around and doing something active, compared to all the other ones we had seen who were always sleeping. Then again, koalas eat exclusively manna gum tree (one type of eucalyptus) leaves and they provide them with so little energy that they need to sleep a minimum of 16 hours a day. Their metabolic rate is very slow, so they can maximize the energy they get out of the leaves. After lunch, we spent a lot of hours waiting until dusk and then we walked to the lake again to search for the platypus. We spent three hours in the rain until it finally began to get dark and we could see four of them swimming around feeding in a small pond at the end of the lake. Yet another Australian surprise…. Platypus are much smaller than we imagined them to be.

Now it was time to start heading to Sydney and we decided to do it inland again, so we drove through the Snowy Mountain National Park, where we stayed one night at a beautiful camping site in Willis Camping Area, where we had a kangaroo family spending the afternoon with us. On our way around Australia we met some nice people too. Two of them we met close to Jindabyne. They were motorbike riders who were joining the Horizons Unlimited convention that weekend. This is a group of motorbike fans who are travelling the world and meet in different locations. We had a good chat, fixed the world situation together and we parted again to continue our journey. We headed for the coast and spent the following days sightseeing around several beautiful beaches and coastal areas. We visited Jervis Bay National Park hoping to see the humpback whales that had been spotted the day before, but we were out of luck. We didn’t see whales, but we had a lot of kangaroos trying to eat our breakfast in the morning.

From Jervis Bay we did our last leg towards the north and headed for a weekend in the famous Blue Mountains, which lie around 100 km from Sydney. Our first visit to the famous “Echo Point” where you can see the (even more) famous Three Sisters rocks, was very chaotic. While the Blue Mountain rock formations are beautiful and look very much like our beloved Roraima in Venezuela, a lot of towns have been built around them, so the place is very touristic and it is strange to see people zipping lattes as they look at the mountains. So, we headed for less touristic routes and that was a lot of fun. We walked the National Pass trail and it was very interesting to discover that it was built more than 100 years ago. Australian National Parks are very well maintained and the trails are built with rocks and fences, so they are very easy to walk and allows for all kind of people to get there. Carsten made me laugh with his comments of: “You see? If Wayna Picchu in Peru was like this, people would have no problem going there!”. Well, our trails in South America are very different to these; but some of us like them that way, because that means less people around and more beautiful spots to find. We had a great time in the Blue Mountains and we especially loved the view from Anvil Rock, it was awesome and we want to go back there for some more hiking another time.

Sydney was our last stop and we were lucky to have Katie McHugh, a friend from the old “Maersk” times, as our companion and tour guide for one day. We spent our first afternoon in Sydney taking pictures at the Opera house and Harbour Bridge. On the next day, we jumped on the ferry to Manly and crossed the harbour to Manly beach. When we returned, we walked along the botanical garden to Woolloomooloo and had lunch in a very nice fish restaurant in Potts Point. After that, we caught a cab and went to Bronte beach and walked from there to Bondi beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon in a restaurant remembering old times and having a good laugh. It was an excellent closing to our 14 months of travel and we were ready to head back home to Denmark and enjoy Christmas with Carsten’s family.

As I write this post, we are in Copenhagen and we will spend a couple months here and use this time to think and study all the things we have lived and experienced in the last 14 months. Hopefully some good work ideas can come out of that. We also hope to be able to travel to Svalbard, the United States and Canada in 2017, so we will keep you posted on that.

We want to thank Shane, Greg, Helen and Katie for allowing us to spend time with them and showing us around in Australia. It was heaps of fun and we still have a lot of places on our list that we want to see there, so we will probably be back in a not too far ahead future. We hope to meet with you soon again either in Australia or somewhere else in the world.

To all of you who are reading this, thank you for reading our stories. We wish you all a merry Christmas and our best wishes for next year.

Big hug

Claudia and Carsten