07.01.2013
It is the morning of Monday 7th January, and we are about to embark on our 48 day road trip stretching 7,250 km (4500 miles) across vast Australia. Ours was to be a smaller journey than originally planned by the two naive, newly arrived Poms who finally touched down in Sydney after a monstrous, 54 hour journey via Amsterdam, Bangkok and Taiwan. It isn't until you arrive down under that you truly appreciate just how big the place is; it takes 5 hours to fly from east to west, even longer than it takes from London to pretty much every corner of the entire continent of Europe. This is even more mind-boggling to us as just 2 of the 640,000 Brits that visit Oz every single year from a tiny island which would fit into Australia 31 times over with room to spare. Being the travel geek that I am, I knew all of these facts & more before taking off from Terminal 5 at Heathrow, but until you visit, travel & live here, until you road-trip around this endless country, you truly do not realise just how much there is to see, visit, travel to & live in.
We had initially talked of circumnavigating the entire country and visiting the scorching red centre too. Amazingly, the infrastructure to do so exists in the the holy grail of motorways, or freeways as they are called here. Highway 1 stretches 14,500 km (9,000 miles) around almost the entire coastline, barring just a small part of the Northern Territory coast. However, both financial and time constraints meant we had to be a little bit more realistic in what we could achieve on this 'little' adventure of ours.
The planned route vs. the actual route we ended up taking!
By this stage, we had spent an amazing 5 months travelling and living in this sunny corner of the earth, and it was sad to say goodbye to the amazing city of Sydney. When first arriving in August, we were initially surprised just how chilly it could be, even in the southern hemisphere's winter, but soon enough, the Australia from the tv commercials back home (and the dreams of inhabitants back home) surfaced and these 2 two pale Englishmen were sizzling in the sun. It was on one of these roasting hot days that we picked up our camper, who we duly named Priscilla. In reference to the classic Australian movie, and as two gay guys travelling across Oz, we couldn't call her anything else. With all our belongings crammed into our two massive, and very heavy, backpacks, we struggled to stand upright to admire our new home for the next 6 or so weeks, but she was ours and this was going to be one hell of a ride!
Destination #1 was to be Canberra, 280km and 3 hours away down the free way with the 110 km/h (68 mph) limit. It was chosen as the nations capitol as a compromise between rivals Sydney & Melbourne, both cities vying for the honour and we had heard very mixed reviews of the place. Needless to say, we couldn't wait to experience it ourselves and make up our own minds.
On my next post, coming soon, we arrive in Canberra!
No comments:
Post a Comment