Upon first blush in Lightning Ridge, you may find an opal-mining town with very little to keep you here for more than a day or so. It reeks of an environment trying a touch too hard to be attractive to tourists. The one and only road to leading into and out of town is lined [...]
“I’m sure I’ll eventually get tired of seeing all these kangaroos, but for now I just can’t get enough of them,” I said, as I apologetically snapped off a few more pictures at one of my many kangaroo photo sessions. It seems that we’ve happened upon a mecca for wildlife here in Warrumbungle National Park. [...]
Uralla – a very small town in the New England Tablelands (read: high altitude lands) was a painful shot to our tropical arms. If we thought we were cold in Springbrook, we didn’t know what cold meant. We knew we were in trouble when we started seeing our breath before the sun was even down. [...]
Byron Bay is lovely. It is a surf town full of surf shops, surf food places, surf cafes, and more surf-y stuff. Everything is horribly over-priced, but that’s what you get in a touristy town with tons of character. It was the small towns and people we met outside of Byron Bay that make this [...]
“I hope you don’t mind having a corpse in the back of the van,” Wendy said in her ever-cheerful demeanor. She was loading the body of a pademelon (a small kangaroo from the looks of it) wrapped in her raincoat onto the back seat. It had been hit by a car, and when we came [...]
Caravans (meaning trailers in Australian) and caravan parks are everywhere in Oz.Trailer Parks. Tornado Bait. Trailer Trash. Drunks on welfare raising families of six kids born from three different fathers (or mothers). Lots of stained white tank tops with beer bellies poking out and LOTS of scratching. There are any number of negative connotations associated [...]
As with Edmonton, Hawaii, and Thailand, we are always on the prowl for little differences and idiosyncrasies that add character to a place. And Australia is home to many such charming qualities. I remember reading a book that described Australia as being “almost home” (the author was American). They speak the same language, but with [...]
“Be careful of the crocs,” Sergio says as we steer our kayaks up a small creek deep in the mangroves. “Really? There are crocs here? Cool!” I say, feeling only a little nervous with scenes from Crocodile Dundee flashing through my memory. I didn’t really think that there would be crocodiles in this part of [...]
Here’s how Lonely Planet primed us for the town of Nimbin: Landing in Nimbin can be like entering a social experiment, particularly at noon, when Byron day-trippers arrive en masse and find themselves hectored by dreadlocked, tie-dyed pot dealers on the main street. This is the stereotype, of course (not all pot dealers wear tie-dye), [...]
In researching our World Nomads Ambassador trip in Australia, we knew that we would be charging headlong into winter. And after having avoided the frigid winter of mainland North America by being in Hawaii, I had started to think that maybe we would never see winter again. We could somehow manage to travel around the [...]
