The Teletubbies take on the Great Barrier Reef

I hope everyone is laughing as much as we did after putting on these lovely snorkel outfits. As stylish as they are, they were really needed to protect us from the Irukandji Jellyfish while snorkeling. These little jellyfish, which are almost invisible, pack quite a punch and have been known to kill people. As it turns out, this time of year is the season for these guys to invade northern Australian waters, and we were warned not to swim alone or on isolated beaches. Unfortunately, this was not mentioned on the websites when I was doing the research or booking, but was the first thing our valet mentioned as he was driving us to our condo. “Welcome to the Great Barrier Reef, Mate. Please don’t swim!!” Actually it wasn’t that bad, but the warnings were serious.

Having be that said, our time on Hamilton Island was most enjoyable, and we had a great time on the reef. In order to reach the best part of the reef, we boated about 50 miles farther out to sea and tied up with FantaSea’s floating island which is permanently anchored over a shallow section. Check out "Planes, Trains..." for pics. The reef is teeming with different varieties of fish and large Pacific clams. There are also several large resident Groupers and Wrasse. Check out “Dr. Doolittle” for pics. It was a full day on the water, and the weather/ocean conditions were perfect.

Hamilton Island is a fun vacation spot; there are no cars, only golf carts, and most units have one included. It is very focused around its yachting facilities, and there were several restaurants/bars to check out, as well as some nice shops. The highlights of our time, besides the reef, were Mat trying out the firing range and the day we rented our own yacht (actually a 14’ motorized dinghy, but who’s measuring..) and explored around the inner bays and some deserted islands. Check out “Where are the Reeve Boys”. After our four days of relaxing here, we prepared ourselves for the twenty-six hour travel day that would take us to Cape Town, South Africa.

Seal Rocks

After our time in Burleigh, we had a week house rental in a small beach town called Seal Rocks. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of this town, I hadn’t either until I started talking to some Australian surfers who all said it was a great place to stop, small and isolated, and usually had waves. The reason it gets a lot of surf is that it is a small peninsula that sticks way out into the Pacific (in fact it is the second most easterly part of all Australia). It also has both north and south facing beaches, which will catch most swells, and you can find one side with offshore wind. The second nice thing about Seal Rocks is that it is very isolated and separated from everything else by a large National Park (Myall Lakes). They were not kidding when they said “isolated and small”. To get there you leave the main highway and drive 45 minutes on a secondary road, and then you drive another twenty minutes down a country road, a good portion still being gravel. You emerge from the national forest onto a beautiful bay with incredible headlands. On the north side there are two bays, each one about half mile long. On the south side, there is one long bay about 2 miles long, and the historic lighthouse sits on the point between the two bays. The town consists of a Holiday Park (i.e. campsite), maybe thirty homes, and one small store that didn’t even sell beer! Our house was at the end of the road just before the entrance road to the lighthouse (very top center of this picture). Nothing fancy about the house; typical old style beach house with no A/C… Luckily we had some fans and the house sat up on the ridge, so we got nice sea breezes. Unfortunately, there were no waves when we got to the north facing beach, so we decided to explore the other side of the point and see if the south side was better. To access this beach, you walked through the grounds of the lighthouse, then down a short trail to the beach.

Being the beach was only ten minutes away, we thought the walk would be pretty uneventful…fat chance. Five minutes into it, as we were walking down the access road totally by ourselves, a Coastal Taipan comes straight out of the bush, crosses the road no more then ten feet from us, and coils up on the other side. Normally I would have not known what kind of snake this was, it did not look like any snake I had seen before and did not look like other poisonous snakes I have encountered. The odd coincidence was, we had just stopped by a Koala Center on the way down to Seal Rocks and besides having koalas, kangaroos, and other cuddly animals, they had a nice awry of some of the most poisonous snakes in Australia – one of them being the Coastal Taipan. In fact the Coastal Taipan is the FOURTH most poisonous land snake in the World. One bite from this snake has enough venom to kill about 50 People!! Nice way to start our time in Seal Rocks. After spending two weeks in pretty developed areas, I had forgotten that Australia’s wildlife is no joke and there is a lot of stuff that can kill you here. Now we were on high alert, not knowing if this place was full of snakes or we just really lucky to see one (Sally was not feeling lucky about seeing it.). We got to the beach safely, and it was amazing. Huge crescent shape with hardly anyone on it. There was a family in a truck close by, and I noticed they had what I thought was a dog running around them. But it wasn’t a dog, it was the resident wild Dingo, and they were trying to get it to leave them alone. After the Dingo ran off, I asked the guy what was going on, and he said that it comes down looking for easy food and to keep an eye on the small kids and your stuff. Turns out, he is a loner and comes to the beach everyday looking for an easy meal, and will steal your stuff if you don’t pay attention to him. I actually watched him scope out a few small kids that were walking by themselves and another time grab and chew on some guy’s hat that went swimming. We saw him everyday and found out that his name is “Socksie” and he has been around for about four years. Check out Socksie on “Dr. Doolittle”. As you can see, Socksie doesn’t get to eat a lot, and we really felt for him. We would watch him work the whole beach, going from one area to the next, as people would leave, usually coming away with nothing. Even though we wanted to give him some food; we knew this would be the worse thing for him. Feeding animals like this only brings on problems down the road when they get to close to humans and end up biting someone, probably a kid. Then they call the Game Warden to shoot the pest. We kept our food to ourselves, even when he sat down in front of us during our beach sunset dinner and put on his best “Pitiful Puppy” face. The next few days were spent enjoying the beach, even though the waves never showed up. Some other interesting animals we encountered were the “Blue Bottle” jellyfish, very toxic, and a lot of large parrots. Our next stop would be back in Sydney, in order to catch a flight up to Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

Surfer's Paradise

After spending New Year’s in Sydney, we got on the road headed north. I had originally hoped to spend the next three weeks slowly bouncing along the east coast, checking out different towns that I had heard of, hopefully catching some surf, and eventually ending up at the Great Barrier Reef. I quickly realized that this is the biggest travel month for Aussie’s and everywhere I checked had week long minimum stays (even the camper van sites). After a lot of rethinking, I decided to drive as far north as Burleigh Heads, stay there a week, drive south again for a week and then fly up to the Great Barrier Reef for a week. The drive to Burleigh was about twelve hours, and I ended up doing eleven hours the first day! I still don’t know why I drove that much in one day; it just seemed to go by and nobody asked me to stop.

Burleigh Heads is in the Queensland District and is know as the Gold Coast because of its beautiful coastline and also probably from the development money that has been made here. I have seen pictures of the right point break at Burleigh Heads and wanted to see if it was as beautiful as the pictures (See “Pray For Surf”). I found a nice fully equipped apartment that was half a block from the beach and a ten minute beach walk to the point. Very beautiful area, but high rise developments have turned this into more of “Condo Paradise”. We were lucky to be staying in the older section which has not changed over to high rises and still had a somewhat of a small beach town feel to it. The crazy thing about this area is how early people get on the beach. I am not kidding when I say that people are on the beach, in the water, and jogging on the trails at 4:30 AM. I know this because the second night I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, and so I decided to get up and try and get a sunrise picture. As I reached the beach, people were already jogging down the trails and there were already thirty people surfing. I got my sunrise picture (pictured here) and ran back to get my surfboard. I got in the water by 5:00 AM and had a blast. As it turns out, the waves are best in the morning because the wind comes up by 10:00 AM and blows everything out. There were waves every day but nothing great. I had a few sessions that were about head high, and the larger set waves would break for about 200 yards. The water is crystal clear, and it was wild to see your reflection off the bottom as you surf by. The flip side of this is that you can see all the rocks at the point and any sharks that might be close by. I didn’t see any, but on my second morning out, I talked to a guy that had just been farther out on the point and saw one that had a dorsal fin about 16” tall (probably 8 -12 ‘ long). Needless to say, I stayed on the inside and around other people. Not that there is strength in numbers, but statistically, you have less chance of being the one he picks to taste. Sometimes my old Engineering Classes do come in handy!!

The rest of our time in Burleigh was spent lounging on the beach, walking around town, and basically enjoying a true beach vacation. I love our summers at home, but I find it impossible to sit on the beach for more than an hour, when my “100 Day War” is raging on. Mat purchase a body board and they enjoyed the surf as well as being in close proximity to ice-cream stands. Since we couldn’t afford to fly April out to Sydney, Sally was excited to find the perfect, gay, Australian man to trim and highlight the locks. She had a fun salon experience and someone girlie to talk to if you know what I mean. Our next stop is Seal Rocks, a very remote beach town, about three hours north of Sydney.

Down Under for 2010

As long as I can remember, Sydney, Australia is where I wanted to spend a New Year’s Eve. It is an extremely distant place, but it always seemed to be warm and inviting. In fact, this entire trip has revolved around being in the Sydney Harbor on New Year’s Eve. Some things would happen before and some things would happen after, but my butt was going to be down at the Harbor on December 31st, come hell or high water. I just hoped it would be worth the investment.

We got really lucky to find a small suburb of Sydney (Coogee) that is right on the beach and had a furnished apartment available for the New Year’s week. The area had a nice vibe, a great family friendly beach, and an incredible beachfront trail system that went from one area to the next. The bus system was cheap and easy to use, which allowed us not to rent a car for the time we were there. We spent the first few days checking out the downtown harbor area, going to the Sydney zoo, and meeting up with the Aussie couple (Ben & Galli) who we had met earlier in Fiji. The weather was great and the area really started to fill up for the New Year’s celebration. We decided to go to the Sydney Zoo the day before New Years. Can you say “Zoooo”. It was OK but it took over an hour just to get in and then there were people everywhere. I really felt bad for the animals having to stare at all these crazy people all day. That afternoon we took the ferry over to Ben & Galli’s area and met up with them for a proper Aussie barbie. They live in a nice older section and directly adjacent to a neighborhood park, which allowed Ben to give Mat, Charlie, and I some cricket lessons. While we played cricket, Sally finally got some well-deserved “girl talk” in with Galli and her girlfriend, Lisa. Dinner even included some kangaroo meat. Crikey, it was good!

New Year’s Eve day started like a military operation. I had done some earlier recon while walking around the harbor, trying to find a good vantage point to see everything, but somewhere that we could get out from quickly and not be too crazy. There was a large Garden/Park right past the Opera House that had hilly areas with good views and plenty of access points. All the bus routes were reviewed, contingency plans were discussed in case we got separated, and we even had our walkie talkie’s in case the kangaroo meat hit the fan. I had also filled my backpack with vodka, red bull, champagne, and coke. Something for everybody. Well, you know how well laid plans don’t go as planned. We got there early, only to find out that the Gardens were closed to the General Public (that would be us) and everyone else had gotten there early too. Now it was a mad dash, along with tens of thousands of others, towards the harbor to find any area where we could see. Every section we got to was already filled to the max, and it started to look like the only fireworks we would see would be in the reflections off of the surrounding skyscrapers. Luckily, the very last section was open, so we hustled in hoping for a decent spot. As it turned out, this area was not very crowded at all, and we got some great real estate with a perfect view of the Opera House. We laid out our towels and settled in for the five hour wait. Luckily the weather was ideal, warm and breezy, and the crowd was pretty mellow with lots of families. The time went by pretty quickly by people watching and having a cocktail or four. They put on two fireworks shows; one at 9:00 for families and the big one at midnight for the crazies. The first one was good but rather short and then the place really started to get packed. I guess all the barflies use the first show as their alarm clock to leave the bars and head down to the waterfront. At about eleven the party really kicked in, the restaurants that are on the Harbor turn into club mode and music starts pumping from all directions. The mood stayed festive, and we never saw anybody getting out of control. There is no ball that drops at midnight, just a huge explosion of fireworks from the bridge and at the Opera House. At this point everyone is screaming and jumping around. The fireworks lasted for about twenty minutes and were definitely the biggest I have ever seen. As quickly as they started, they ended. Now the dash for the exits began.

Getting down close to the action is great, but after it is over, you realize you are the farthest away from where you want to be and there are a lot of people in between you and home. Luckily the Red Bull and the cokes kicked in for all of us, and we high tailed it to the bus pick up spots. We arrived just as our bus was loading, and we got the last four spots. As the bus pulled away, I turned and saw the masses bearing down on us. We had just beaten a very long wait, and in thirty minutes we were home. I hate to think how long it could’ve taken. The next day it was reported that an estimated 1.5 million people were down at the Harbor. We spent our last day in Sydney relaxing on the beach, recounting the prior night’s festivities, and getting ready for our next destination, Burleigh Heads. Even though the New Year’s celebration only lasted a few hours, the memories of this great night will stay with us forever.