Dear readers!
It’s 7 April 2012 and Marjolein and I have arrived in Perth. Exactly according plan 🙂 It was a great journey with many highlights, good weather and a lot of animal sightings. I started in Sydney and the Blue Mountains before continueing to Melbourne. In Melbourne we took the camper van to travel the Great Ocean Road including a visit to fabulous Grampians NP. The route along the coast brought us further along the ocean and beautiful national parks such as Coorong NP, ultimately finishing close to Adelaide in Milang. In this ladeback lakeside town the camper van started to smoke blue air from the exhaust pipe. Just on the last day of the trip. Fortunately this dissapeared and were able to travel the last 80 km to Adelaide via Warrawong NP. Time flew as I enjoyed Adelaide and it was not any longer towards the departure date of our train: The Indian Pacific! We left on Thursday evening and arrived early morning back in Perth, not making this only the longest train journey in my life, but also a memorable one 🙂
Sydney and the Blue Mountains
Marjo and I met each other on the airport, since our arrivals were shortly after each other. As usual we did far too much walking on the first already. And we kept this pace, so we basically had seen every attraction in Sydney by the end of our stay. Sydney is, in contrary what most people told me, a pleasant and vibrant city. And yes, it is busy and quick, but this compensates for the beauty of the sky-line, Botany Bay, the Harbour Bridge and the Sydney Opera House. World land marks in a cosmopolitan metropole, that is how I would describe it. The people are very friendly. If you stand with your map in the hand, it will take maybe 5 seconds for someone to come up to you and ask if you need some help. Most of the time the offer turns into chat or useful information. Something i missed from ‘cold’ Perth. Then there was the weather too: as there was no summer at all this year it was amazing to have a whole week of sunshine wit temparatures up to 30 degrees! Even in the Blue Mountains. Another bas ass beautiful spot in New South Wales. With forestry areas, blue haze covered hills (caused by eucalptus oil) and incredible rock formations. The famous Three Sisters, but many more impressive ones too. The second day was rainy, but fullfilled of what I had seen the day before we left for Sydney. From Sydney we took the night train to Melbourne.