Milford sound

I booked a shuttle bus + cruise from Te anau to Milford sound which is around 160km away. The weather looked miserable in the morning and we had to stop and put the snow chains on when we climbed up the mountainous road (nice sceneries again) towards Milford sound. There was only two young british guys in the bus besides me, off-season.



As soon as we descended from the mountains to the Milford sound the weather turned pretty clear and we could see the Mitre peak raising up to the skies. The British taught me that the mitre is the hat which the bishops wear and yes I'll have to admit that the peak resembles like one. For the good weather we had to thank the southeastern wind which pushed all the air against the mountains and not many clouds made it over the mountain ridge to the western side. The boat we had booked seemed to be quite empty. There was around 10 "normal" tourists like us in the boat which is capable to take much more(hundreds?) people onboard. Well it turned out that we had to wait japanese tourist bus which was probably delayed by the heavy snowfall on the mountains. Because of this really long and painful 20min wait we got a free buffet lunch worth 28nzd. I was surprised but didn't ask any more questions while quickly loading my plate with chinese food.

Well I could probably wrote another paragraph about the impressive sceneries in the Milford sound but it's maybe better for you to come and see it for yourselves.

What a coincidence, on my way back I bumped into these three british girls again at the boat terminal. Last time I saw them was in the Wellington when we had this Guinness cultural evening. Well, we are gonna expand this experience today on Saturday here in Queenstown. It's probably going to be a big night out. Cheers.

Fox glacier

I started my trip to Fox glacier early in the morning from Nelson. The distance between these places is only around 500kms but I still needed to travel the whole day in the bus. It might give you a little bit of hint of the landscape the road went through. I could only watch the sceneries in awe.

There's two big touristic glaciers on the West coast of the South island. The Franz Josef glacier is actually spread into more wide area and is more popular among the tourists. I made some early research to help my decision and heard that the scenery in the Fox glacier should be better with more sheer valley and you can actually get more close to the glacier without getting on it. I don't know if this is right since I didn't went to Franz josef but the Fox was indeed impressive. I spend pretty much the whole day walking to get most of the viewpoints.



From Fox village you can also go to lake Matheson which offers a superb reflection of mt Cook and mt Tasman on a calm day. The first is the highest mountain in NZ. I woke up early and was lucky since weather was calm and the lake was really like a mirror showing the upside-down image of the snowy-capped mountains.

From Fox I decided to head straight to Queenstown just for one night, then to Te Anau and to check out the Milford Sound. As the winter might be really good time to go tramping into Abel Tasman national park, it sure isn't the right time trying to do the most of the great walks. Majority of the Milford track is closed due to high avalance risk and there's probably lot of snow on the other tracks as well. I'll go to check the Milford sound probably by cruise tomorrow and then head back to Queenstown and Wanaka to enjoy the snow as it should be enjoyed, snowboarding or skiing.

Abel Tasman national park

I left Nelson after one night and headed to Marahau on Friday to do some planning on upcoming treks. Marahau is a good gateway for doing tramping or seakayaking into Abel Tasman national park. During the summer all the accomodation is fully booked but since now it's winter and off-season it was pretty quiet which is of course a good thing. This time of the year the average amount of hikers in the park is around 30 persons/day and during the summer the count gets over 250. Which one would you prefer?



I had a plan to go hiking to Bark bay from Marahau and stay a night at the hut which is kept by department of conservation. Next day I would like to take a kayak back to Marahau. It took me a whole day to book a suitable trip since the minimum number of persons was 2 for all the trips. I had already given up the hope but then I met one woman in my hostel and she had the same kind of plan and the same problem with too few people wanting to do the same route. Well we booked the full day kayak trip from Bark bay to Marahau on Sunday and it cost 130 nzd/person + hut accomodation 10 nzd. The company promised to deliver the kayaks and a guide to Bark bay on Sunday and also take our backpacks back to Marahau since there wouldn't be enough space in kayaks for them.

The track from Marahau to Bark bay was around 25km and we did it on Saturday. It was a high tide and we had to walk 4km longer route since we couldn't use low-tide passings which were now under water. The track went through beautiful coastal sceneries and tropical-like tree fern forests and along the way I noticed that my partner seemed to know quite a lot of the nature. Well it turned out that Karin was a teacher from Netherlands teaching biology to kids 12-19 years old. She was in her 30's and was pretty fit since her hobbies included trekking, running and swimming. She had also done the 4-day/160km march in Netherlands. We had a nice pasta/carrot/raisin/peanut dinner under the stars on the beach at the Bark bay.

Today on Sunday we kayaked pretty much the same route back to Marahau following the coast. We had a guide who was paddling in a single kayak and we shared a double kayak. There was a good lunch included in the trip and which we enjoyed on a beach in an isolated bay. The weather was perfect with blue sunny sky and calm waters. Saw some seals, a blue penquin and many funny looking seabirds(yeah the guide told me the names but can't remember).

My muscles are pretty sore at the moment and I want to go to sleep. It's already 9pm!
Tomorrow morning 7 o'clock I'm heading towards Fox glacier. I'm supposed to be there around 5pm so a long day travelling ahead.

Just some off-topic detail: I'm now back in Nelson and staying at YHA hostel. I met a girl from Canada and her surname is Kivimaa. She told at her grandparents had moved from Finland to Canada around 1920. She can't speak any finnish though nor has ever been in Finland.

Windy Welly

I forgot to mention that I had an opportunity to use sauna in my previous hostel at Taupo. Well, it wasn't exactly the kind of sauna we have in Finland since this one was a dry one so you couldn't pour any water on the rocks. After more than half a year without sauna this was still better than nothing.

I didn't manage to do the Tongariro crossing walk since the weather was bad at the mountains but I spent the last day in Taupo mountain biking on really nice tracks which went next to beautiful rapids and waterfalls.

After beautiful bus trip (which went next to mt. Doom in LOTR) I'm here in Wellington which is also called Windy Welly because it's really windy here. Yesterday I accidentally met two british girls here in YHA hostel. I had met them before in Rotorua and then again in Taupo. It seems that I'm gonna meet same people again and again since they're travelling the same route to South than I am. Well we ended up in Irish bar drinking guinness and listening to live band. I enjoyed that cultural experience very much. I also learnt that some English put a hint of black currant cordial into their guinness, weird.

Today I went to see the Te Papa("our place") museum here. It has 6 floors and many different exhibitions including the lord of the rings exhibition. The latter was really good including all the gear, armor, weapons, monsters, art + misc stuff about the movie. I think it was my longest stay in museum ever since I spent there around 5 hours.

Tomorrow I'm taking a ferry to South island and a bus from Picton to Nelson where I'm probably gonna meet these other travellers again. On Saturday my plan is to head towards Marahau which is just next to Abel Tasman national park and a great base camp to do some sea kayaking and walking.

Jumping off the plane

I'm currently here in Taupo at the North island of New Zealand. This is probably the cheapest place to do skydive in NZ. I had prebooked a skydive from Auckland which was pretty risky since I needed a good weather to commit the jump here in Taupo. There was no refund possibility for the prepaid ticket.

The first day the sky was blue and sun was shining but I wasn't able to jump since the winds were too strong. On the second day morning I was refused to jump again since the wind was still too strong and it was a little bit cloudy. Luckily on the afternoon the skies got clear and I was able to do the jump. I blamed myself though for taking a little bit of unnecessary risk with prepaid ticket. I heard that one couple had waited for a whole week for a suitable weather so I can consider myself really lucky. However the jump was a great experience, not too hard since you don't have to do almost anything because it's a tandem jump. My jumpmaster had around 9000 jumps so I was feeling pretty safe. What a coincidence that he was from my neighbouring country Sweden, but had lived here in NZ for 5 years. I impressed him with my strong Swedish skills.

This morning I woke up at 5:30 and was ready to do the Tongariro crossing, which is regarded one of the best 1-day walks in NZ. Unfortunately the winds had got stronger and the visibility poorer on the mountains and the trek was cancelled 15 mins before departure. Tomorrow I'll give another try, but the forecasts don't seem quite good so I'll be probably off to Wellington.

I'm staying at the Rainbow lodge which is really good and laid back hostel. Yesterday we got a new person to our dorm. He's really delightful with awful smelling socks and a loud snore. This really beats most of the records!

Rotten eggs

After one big night in Auckland with a group of british and the following not so glorious day with hurting head I started to head South towards Rotorua. I made some shopping in Auckland which should ease up my travelling a little bit: 50h intercity bus time, sleeping bag and some warm clothes.

I got first warning about local weather when leaving the sunny Auckland the weather turned to really rainy and windy in no time. The landscape also transformed into more and more hilly and I had nice time enjoying the green sights on 4h bus journey to Rotorua.

You know when you arrive Rotorua because you can see little clouds of steam everywhere and you start to smell rotten eggs which comes from sulphur gases. Yes here's lots of thermal activity around this area.

After a quite uneasy night in hot rocks hostel(don't recommend to anyone). I woke up in the morning, changed the hostel and planned to go some trekking to see the Geysirs and other local things. Well I managed to walk about one hour when I met and old local man Brian at the same track. After few words he offered to show me around Rotorua with his car. We ended up going through all the local and nearby sights and I'm pretty sure we drove over 100kms with his car. I saw things that you probably wouldn't see just by going to organized tourist trips. Deserted thermal pools and waterfalls that locals use as a spa, mud/water pools with boiling water, geysirs and of course lots of sheep herding on steep green hills :).

Brian didn't even want to take anything when I offered him some money but after he had paid me into local thermal/geysir area and to see some Maori musical performances I insisted to pay him something. It still wasn't the full price though. I was thinking all the time that there's something behind this all friendliness but after the day he just dropped me to the hostel and we said goodbyes. It seems that Kiwis are a bunch of really friendly people.

So far I'm really amazed about New Zealand. The scenery is just unbelievable and it should get much more massive and beautiful when I'm going to South island! Tomorrow I'm heading to Taupo though gonna do a 12000ft/4km tandem skydive. 75euros/150nzd for that one with a free t-shirt and ground dvd. Good deal. I rescheduled my flight back to Wednesday 9th of August. That makes my total New Zealand time a bit over 5 weeks but it seems to me that it's still barely enough to see and experience everything I want.

Towards Auckland

Ok didn't succeed with my great plan which was to fly to New Zealand and wait for my Australian student visa to expire until I apply for new one and fly back to Australia. The problem is that you're not allowed into New Zealand if you haven't valid flight ticket back to country where you're allowed to enter. Since my return flight was scheduled on a date where my current visa to Australia would already be expired, I had a little problem at the check-in.

The cheapest choice was to re-schedule the return flight to Australia to a date when my visa was still valid. After few quick phone calls to Jetstar I managed to change my flight with 50nzd fee(25eur). Now I probably need to do some more strategy movements(reschedule the flight back to where it was and spend another 50nzd) to be able to apply for work&holiday visa to Australia.

Well anyways I'm here in Auckland now. I'm staying at the Auckland Central Backpacker hostel which has really nice facilities available. I'm probably staying here for couple of nights before heading South to volcanic Rotorua. We had a nice time trying to find this hostel with a British girl since the bus driver who should have stopped in front of this hostel didn't even know where this is. We got good first impression about New Zealand.

Well, the impressions just got better since I had a damn good lamb-kebab with hot chili and garlic sauce for only 7 nzd(3.50 eur). Ode for strong currency!

Fitz's farm

Last weekend I had a great oppoturnity to visit my aussie friend at his farm. The farm is located around 400km northwest from Newcastle near Armidale and the road there went through beautiful hilly landscape. Sometimes the hills tried to beat up my van but with 2nd gear and 35km/h we managed to climb them up. Craig was keeping me company in the van and as a geologist he was able to tell everything about rocks surrounding us.

The farm was really beautiful and huge. It was nothing compared to farms I've used to see in Finland since this one contained many many kilometers of bushland where cows, sheeps, goats, kangaroos, horses and other animals were herding. There's also an airstrip at the farm with cessna 172.

We had fun time taking the farm's five working dogs and a pig dog for a run and driving around bushy hills with quadbike and two 250cc dirtbikes. We also did some kangaroo spotting in the night by driving around with old 4wd landcruiser equipped with bright spotlight.

Overally I would say that it was a great and relaxing weekend before my journey to New Zealand would begin.

Finnish midsummer festival

Last day was pretty good. I woke up 5am to watch the Australia go through the next round in world cup soccer. At 8am I went surfing to Newcastle beach for few hours.

There's a midsummer in Finland and during this weekend heaps of people tend to have a party. We also had a nice traditional bbq with few beers here at the campus with the finnish Matti. We tried to speak a bit more finnish to each other during this special moment, since we hardly ever use finnish. Well it turned out that speaking our native language isn't so easy anymore and we ended up using stupid sounding finglish which combines words from both languages. Had fun time though :)

New pet

I managed to reserve my flight from Sydney to Auckland yesterday. I'm departing 3th of July by Lan Chile air company. From Auckland I'm gonna travel all the way South to Queenstown and atleast do some tramping/kayaking/snowboarding along the way. I'm probably flying back to Sydney after a month in 8th of August to begin my Oz-tour.

Surf has been really bad recently. One of the reasons might be that the sandbanks in the Newcastle beach have transformed so that all the waves seem to be closing out, which means that the whole face of the wave crashes at the same time. Well I'm going to beach again to check if it has got any better...

..yes and we had a new pet in our house yesterday. When we were watching telly, my aussie mate told me that I have something moving on my leg. It turned out to be a spider and it didn't take long for me to recognize it when I saw the white tip on the spider's tail. It was a male white-tail spider which is one of the poisonous spiders in Australia among the redback and the Sydney funnelweb spider.

It's not living in the house anymore.

Blackbutt reserve

I went to this funny sounding reserve this Saturday to finally see the koalas, wombats and other unique aussie animals. The reserve is located just here in Newcastle and you can see all the animals for free. I went there with the dutch guy Sjoerd who had so fun time with the emus that occasionally he looked like one himself. We also managed to pat the koala and weird looking owl which the friendly staff kindly introduced to us.

I'm currently checking out the airfares to New Zealand. It seems that I'm gonna flight to Auckland in the beginning of July and return back to Sydney in early August.

Tonight is the soccer game Australia against Brazil. The party is going to be massive if the impossible happens...Good luck socceroos.

Free Willy

I was surfing today(surprise) and soon realized that there was lots of bluebottle-jellyfishes in the water. I might be a sissy but the tentacle of this creature really burned my hand when it tangled around my fingers and I had to get out from the water. This nice experience combined with shitty waves made my surfing quite lame.

As I was listening to Stewart's laugh about me being sissy, the lifeguard told in the loudspeaker that there's a humpback whale around 200meters from the beach. And there it sure was making huge splashes in the water. The east coast of Australia is pretty good spot to sight these huge creatures since they're on their way migrating from Antartic to North.

This was my first time seeing a whale and so the day ended up being quite special. We decided to celebrate this unique moment and went through liquorland on our way home.

Animal spotting

The major reason I came to Australia was the nature and the unique animals. I haven't got disappointed.

I already wrote about surfing with dolphins in Anqourie. Actually it's not very rare to meet these friendly mammals and I also saw some of them this week while surfing here in Newcastle. They seem to be really used to surfers and don't mind to come nearby while doing the daily fishing.

Yesterday I didn't saw any dolphins but a funny looking seal who was lurking between the waves with it's long whiskers. Yay!

Monstrous performance

I have finished my major assignments for this semester and therefore I have had more time to go surfing lately. Paddling to the waves and being in the right spot are still the hardest parts but standing up and steering(right) goes without bigger problems.

Last night they showed the Eurovision song contest on telly. The UK commentary was great with it's sarcastic comments making fun of the singers and countries. I wish we would have that kind of commentary in Finland as well. I had a fun evening watching the poor performances and playing texas hold'em in my unit. I had to answer questions like "Is pop like that in Europe?", "Do you listen to that kind of music?".

Well, luckily the monster-band Lordi from my home country made a good show and atleast the Aussies liked the costumes they were wearing. I made also some background research and managed to find a picture of Lordi without mask. It's interesting to see how many heavy bands there are in the next year's Eurovision.

Pizza

There seems to be a pizza war in Australia and I'm fully enjoying the results. For example you can use the competitors' discount coupons in both pizza hut and domino's. Well we don't need to go to domino's since the pizza hut offers delicious large pan pizza with 5aud(3 euros) when picked up. That's ridiculous because as far as I can remember the similar Pizza Hut large pizza in Finland costs over 10 euros... 8]

Shopping

Earphones which I got with the Iriver mp3-player broke so I ordered the Sennheiser CX300 in ear headphones. Sound quality is way better than with the previous ones and the amount of bass they can produce is really good. Good buy.

I also got enough of getting cold while surfing and bought a full wetsuit. Brand is peak and it is 3/2mm which means 2mm in the arms and 3mm the rest. It's also fully sealed which means that it's a little bit warmer than without proper sealing.

I went surfing yesterday to the Bar beach and got really happy with the performance of the wetsuit, even though my surfing performance wasn't anything to mention of. Result: 2 hours in the water and didn't got cold at all.

Surf trip on east coast

I'm trying to get back to the normal university life after two and half week easter break in the sweaty van which I took up North along the East coast with Matti and Stewart. I'm doing really well since I spend the whole last day studying for a test which I believed to be on this week but which is actually after two weeks. Luckily I studied with the online poker on the background so I didn't completely waste my time.

So we drove North along the beautiful, green and touristic East coast of Australia. The whole coast consists of nice sandy beaches and there is plenty of surf spots between Newcastle and Northern Sunshine coast where the great barrier reef starts to block the ridable waves. Our plan was to stop in every nice looking spot. We also got a list of must-see places from Stewart's 38year old flatmate who has been surfing for 30 years. It turned out that we completely relied on this list...

Mentionable places where we stopped included: Diamond head, Crescent head, Delicate nobby, South West rocks, Coff's harbour, Yamba, Angourie, Nimbin, Byron bay, Surfer's paradise, Noosa heads, Seal rocks and the notorious(explanation later) bar beach in Newcastle.

The whole trip was around 2600kms and we managed to survive without bigger problems. The van seems to be eating quite much oil though, but it might be that long ascends combined with high temperature, small engine and three guys just need a little bit more lubrication. If you're Finnish you can read what these ascends did to Jarkko's Honda in the desert of Mojave.

We started driving North from Newcastle after the healthy meal in Hungry jacks(burger king) and were accompanied by pouring rain. This was the only day when it rained but that's what you can expect in Australia, the place where the weather is perfect(excluding occasional category 5 cyclones). On the first day we took the van to shaky gravel roads and arrived to a place called Diamond Heads and suddenly realized that we are not the only persons who want to do camping. Locals with huge caravans and tents had conquered the camping site in this national park but luckily we found a nice spot for our van and smallish tent. I had to rub my eyes couple of times when I saw the first, quite tame, wallabies coming bouncing out from the bushes. One even had a baby peeping from it's pouch. I had only seen wallabi once before but it was a roadkill and not so exciting than these live ones. Wallabi = small, cute kangaroo.

The first surfing day didn't start very well. I got a little crack to the nose of my board when it hit the bottom after I succesfully managed to make the nose-dive maneuver while trying to catch the wave. The previous owners of the van had left lots of useful stuff in there and after a little search I found a board repair kit. The craftmanship skills which I achieved in the primary school came into use when I successfully put some resin/glue in the crack, let it dry and polished the result with sand paper. To make the day perfect I decided to step on (wallabi?) shit. The result of repair looked good though and after pretty successful surf I completely had ignored the bad mood I had before.




From Diamond Head we continued north till Crescent head. We didn't camp in the Crescent Head though but headed to gravel roads again and found a place called Delicate Nobby's. Camping site here was the most liberate with dogs and camp fires allowed(saw fireworks and exploding gas bottles as well). This fact combined with good surf resulted that we spent two days in the Delicate Nobbys on our way North and two more days on the way South. The picture shows a part of the quite nice beach in the Delicate Nobbys. We met quite interesting people in the camping area including a group of local guys who every once and then come to visit this same camping site and haven't actually been travelling outside NSW or Australia. I think this is quite common case among Ausralians, but can't blame them when living near a spot like that.

On one day the surf in Delicate Nobbys was massive extreme. The biggest waves when I have been out seemed to be raising way over 1.5meters and crashed with honourable power. Still remembering my previous experiences in the washing machine I tried to make my best effort to choose a spot where I could possible catch a wave but still avoid the crashing big waves. I didn't succeed.

I think everyone should go through the thrilling experience of laying on your board and seeing a big wave forming in front/back of you. The moment when you realize that it's going to crash on you is priceless. In this point you should do a duck-dive(short boards), turtle roll(with longer boards) or just jump out from your board and dive deep under the wave to avoid the biggest force of water. The latter is not preferable since the board can hit the other surfers. Well I tried to duck-dive my 8.6 foot mini-mal which is almost impossible since it has a very good buoyance. The result was that the wave catched the board and of course me lying on it. I don't need to describe the ride under the wave but after I got to the surface again I headed back to the beach and had a break. After the day surfing I had sea water coming out from my nose for a long time. Surfing could be used as a good alternative for this.

From Delicate Nobbys we went to Coffs Harbour. A nice town but not much going on at the moment so we only stayed for one night. Surf was ok.

From Coffs we headed to Yamba(name reminds me of the irritating tv commercials back in Finland) which only had one camping site. The surf in Yamba wasn't good at the moment so we headed 10km away to Angourie, the village where everyone surfs. In the water you could see all the family members. Small kids in the smallest waves and grandpa waiting for the big ones in the behind. Daughters, parents, dogs and others in between. Pack of dolphins came playing just next to us and the sight of them popping out from the collapsing waves was remarkable. Every jump was followed by the astonishing cheers of the surfing ladies.

Later on Stewart locked our car with keys in. We had to scratch our heads for a while since we were only wearing our surfing equipment. Stewart finally ended up going through houses with his wetsuit on and trying to phone a locksmith. Locksmith had come from Yamba to Angourie to open the doors. It took quite a long time from even this guy to get in the steal-proof Hiace. Bill 50aud.

After 9 days of intense surfing we felt like chilling out and headed towards hippy town Nimbin. The road there went through nice green and hilly landscape. The town of Nimbin was a bit like we expected but it seems that the original hippy idea has died out a bit and made way to the expanding tourism. The YHA backpacker camping-hostel was really beautiful place though just next to herding cows and horses. In the morning the sound of birds was so loud that you just had to wake up around 6 am when the loudest singing started. Well this was no problem for us since we usually went to bed around 9pm.



We headed to see the protestor waterfalls to nearby rainforest. This was the first time I had been in the real rainforest and the darkness of the place was a bit surprising. Beautiful place.

After a good rest from surfing we headed towards Byron bay and were really exciting about upcoming surf and nightlife. I have to admit that the long waves in Byron Bay were maybe the best I saw during the holiday. The major disadvantage was the crowd. So many surfers in the water that you couldn't really enjoy it a much. Catching a wave was really difficult since there was usually couple of guys(girls) usually riding the wave when you could have caught it. There's no taking off if someone is already on the wave. The strategy to stay off from the most crowded place and wait for the infrequent waves paid me off very well and I managed to catch the best wave of my long surfing history. It was a nice right hander and I managed to make a long ride. I got stoked(word used to describe the feeling riding a good wave).

On the evening we headed to see the night life of Byron Bay. I got a little bit disappointed since it was almost a sausage party and the clubs were not anything special. Well we drank _few_ beers anyway just to celebrate the ongoing holiday.

Next day we wanted to take it easy with Matti and decided to took an easy trail to Cape Byron, the most eastern point of Australia and the lighthouse. Well the trail wasn't so easy with some altitude differences and we were still feeling the previous night in our legs. Eventually we managed to get to the Cape Byron and I have to admit that it's a place worth to see. Really nice high cliffs combined with dark blue ocean and bright white lighthouse is again something that you enjoy watching.

Now it was time to go the Surfer's Paradise. The place which I had so long waited to see. We drove there through the beautiful coastline and checked out the waves in couple of really famous surf beaches along the way. The Surfer's Paradise looked a little bit like Miami(which I have seen on the TV-show Miami vice) with nice boulevards full of palm trees, long beach, high buildings and of course lots of tourists.

We were staying with our finnish friend Timo who has an 5th floor apartment 150meters from the main street and just next to the ocean with beautiful views to the sea. A quite perfect place to spend your time as an exchange student. We checked out the surf immediately but it seems that surfer's paradise isn't paradise for surfers at all. The waves were crappy whitewash the whole time we stayed in Surfer's. Luckily a little drive to the South and the famous Kirra beach had really good waves. The disadvantage was again the huge crowds which made our surfing almost impossible. But surfing wasn't the main thing we were here for since I really wanted to see the pumping nightlife of Surfer's. I was waiting similar parties that you can have in Mediterranean holiday resorts or atleast a good clubbing night out. Well we headed out on tuesday night and I have to say that the nightlife was quite lame and nothing special. The best partying is probably in the big cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Still have to check those ones out.



From Surfer's Paradise we still decided continue towards North till Noosa which is over 1000kms north from the Newcastle. I had heard that Noosa should be really laid back town with a big upper class and good surf. On the first day the surf wasn't really special and we went hiking to the trails of the national park just next to the town. We saw again some good looking beaches and had a break in one of them which was actually a deserted nudist beach.
The next day I had a really good surf and managed to get many waves. Unfortunately they weren't really long ones but it was still one of my best surfing days.

We headed back to Newcastle in three days from Noosa and wanted to end up our holiday with style, surfing. We went to Bar beach where, after little surfing, Matti ended up having a nasty cut in his arm from sharp fin of his board. I drove Matti to the hospital where we spend around one hour and Matti got seven stitches for his cut. I'm not sure about this, but getting in to a public hospital in Finland would atleast have a queuing time of five hours instead of half an hour we had here.

Our holiday had become to an end and I went back to campus to do some laundry.

Thanks to Matti for taking all the pictures during the holiday, there's some more in his picture gallery. I shot some of videos as well but I probably need half an year editing it :)

More beaches and surfing in Newcastle

Last week I went first time to the Bar beach which joins to the Merewether beach. Two beautiful beaches more to already beautiful beach category of Newcastle. Swell in Bar beach was very good but unfortunately this also means that it gets a little bit crowded. I'm a bit worried to take off to the wave when there is someone in front of me, mostly because I am not very sure if I can always steer my board. This isn't a very good thing since I usually don't manage to paddle fast enough to get many waves during a session and my chances to get a wave get even lighter when there's a crowd taking the same wave.
On the same trip we had a nice conversation with the local police after Matti took a short run against a one way road with his purple Volkswagen Kombi hippy van which is built around 1970s. Didn't get fined.

We also went surfing to the Nobby's beach yesterday and I managed to get my biggest wave so far. It's hard to describe what the surfing feels but for me it's something like when you combine nice powder outback riding to the excitement of park riding with snowboard. Challenging, fun and very good exercise.

I have a test on monday and wednesday which means that no surfing for couple of days. There's a big surfing event going on in Newcastle and the men finals are held on Sunday. Got to see that.

On Wednesday I am taking an early start to my Easter holiday with Matti and the dutch guy Sjord. We're packing 3 surfboards to my van and taking it up north along the coast for two and half weeks. The plan is atleast to stop in Port Mcquarie, Coffs Harbour, Byron Bay, Golden coast(Surfer's Paradise) and maybe continue further north from Brisbane to Sunshine coast and Noosa. Of course we are also going to stop in any good looking beach and have some quality time surfing. Accomodation is mostly in the van but we might also get a roof over our heads when we visit couple of our friends along the way.

More stuff about the road trip coming in future postings, stay tuned...

I got some wheels

Bought a car this week. Toyota hiace 1987 campervan, 2.2l engine with 250k km in odometer. 4 speed manual. Double bed in back with room for 3 persons to sleep. Runs well, so far.

Driving on a left side causes a little confusion in the beginning. It doesn't help that the blinkers are on the right side of the steering wheel and the windshield wipers are on the left side. Couple of times I have accidentally put on the windshield wipers when I was supposed to use the blinker. Roadrules are like in Europe except that you could suppose that in the intersection, when you're driving on a left side, you should give way to the cars who are coming from the left. Wrong, it's like in Europe as well so cars from right can go first. They have weird rules of using the blinker in the roundabout as well, but I'm still doing my research about it.

Human mind is difficult to understand. I remember to dreamt about buying a convertible here in Australia when I was back in Finland. When I got here, I was looking for a suzuki sierra softtop 4wd but luckily didn't buy one, because there's no room for your surfboard and it's not probably good car for travelling. Then I thought about buying a hatchback toyota corolla with a roofracks, which should be economical and you could get your surfboard on the roof. Thought of living in a small corolla made me to look for a station wagon("farmari" in finnish), which are very popular cars among the people who travel in Australia. The disappoinment is that even if you manage to get your 8.6foot surfboard in the car, it's not going to be very comfortable sleeping with it plus nobody else is not gonna fit in. The station wagons here in Australia are usually 3.8l V6s which are not very economical with their 12-15l fuel consumption. That's why I chose a van which has heaps of space and which should also be fairly economical. I hope I can still agree with these 'facts' after trying to travel over 15 000 km around Australia, equal distance than from Sydney to Helsinki.

First impressions about Sydney

Saturday morning I headed to Sydney. My plan was to check out some cars and I went to see them in traveller's autobahn and King's cross car market. The first one was a little bit expensive but offered some kind of guarantee and payback options for their cars. The latter was a great place for everyone who is looking for a cheap car since the place is packed with backpackers who are in urge to sell their cars. Most of the sellers have to leave overseas and that's why you can hear really impressive sales speeches and watch as the prices go down when the departure date gets more close. I didn't buy a car yet but probably this week you will get more update on this matter.

The king's cross was a really weird place. I got there about the midday and was lured to buy doner kebab from a genuine turkish place with loud playing techno music. Well I didn't get disappointed, good kebab, good music. Things that seem to be common in king's cross are backpackers, pimps yelling at the street and massive nightlife.

After king's cross I went to see the harbour bridge and opera house. They are more impressive when seen with your own eyes than in pictures. A bit earlier I wrote about the big screen of IMAX theatre in Kuala Lumpur. Well here in Sydney they have the world largest screen and I went to see a "walking on the moon" 3d-movie there. Summarum: Impressive screen, impressive effects and crappy documentary.

The first impression about Sydney was that it's really beautiful. There's lots of water elements around and many cafes/bars around harbours. I have no doubts against people who say Sydney is their favourite city.