i left my shoes in sydney

they had to make a new south wales because the old one was full of sheep and welsh people. heyo! new south wales, aka. the first state, is home to sydney and some other places that you've probably never heard of. like byron bay for example. have you ever heard of byron bay, australia? well who are you, ken jennings?

byron bay was nice and almost exactly like a queensland city aside from actual territory. it felt in most ways like cairns or airlie beach. all except one that is: no lagoon. yes, it seems that the lagoon is indeed a unique feature to queensland cities. probably for the very reason i first guessed last post: the all year round warm weather. which i can now attest does not exist in the southern states.

yes, byron bay was to be our last of dose of the immaculate weather we had all throughout queensland. although it only takes about 6 hours to get from brisbane to sydney, the weather change is considerable. days in new south wales are mild, often pleasant, if not downright hot. nights however pitch deeply into the cold zone. lately i've taken to sleeping in double pairs of socks. sometimes i wear jeans in lieu of pajama pants or sweats. sleeping inside the camper, as opposed to the tent-top, has become a luxury.

most of new south wales was one innocuous coastal town after fairly similar innocuous coastal town. and then you hit sydney. sydney felt a lot bigger than brisbane almost immediately. we learned from our brizzy experience and found a hostel in city limits with a car park. this turned out to be one of the best deals of the trip – $20 a night, free parking, free wifi, and walking distance to the central business district.

we arrived in sydney fairly early and so we had most of the day to spend exploring. our first stop was for lunch around our hostel in the surry hills neighborhood. this area is akin to park slope in brooklyn. lots of restaurants, bars, etc. except not overly expensive. following lunch we walked toward the cbd and took a walk through their 1/6th scale hyde park and over to the australia museum. i think jamie was hoping the museum would be more historical and more specifically australian in context but it was much more of a natural history museum instead. some exhibits were interesting, such as the exhibit on native australian fauna, both extinct and living; others were less so, specifically the entire floor dedicated to australian minerals. 

after the museum we found ourselves naturally heading toward sydney's star attraction, the opera house. there was a tiny hope that we could get tickets for some sort of production but the only thing playing was south pacific. we decided to pass, but we did stick around and take some photos. well jamie took some photos. my camera decided to get a critical error just at this most photogenic of points – on one side the opera house, across the bay on the other, the harbor bridge, and on the opposite side, luna park. i have but few precious photos of the view. soz.

following the harbor we headed over to the rocks, the oldest part of sydney. the rocks are at the entrance to harbor bridge and therefore just across from the opera house. the views probably hike up the cost of living in the area: we had small pizzas for about $20 and $7 beers. instead of wasting money on shitty beer we headed back toward our hostel and slipped into a nondescript bar that was luckily hosting some live music. we had some whiskies, listened to some girl jazz, and called it a night.

our overall experience in sydney was far more touristy than in brisbane, which is probably just the nature of sydney. on day two, for example, we started off by taking a trip to the sydney tower eye, a large tower not unlike the namsan tower in seoul or the needle in seattle. the eye was about 275 meters tall and featured an impressive 360 of sydney – you'll see some of the photos below. what you won't see photos from is our skywalk experience. this was purely jamie's idea as i'd never give someone $60 to dangle precariously over some rails in 70 mph wind. but it was admittedly worth it. the skywalk, if you haven't guessed, is a grated walkway outside of the tower eye, actually slightly further up from the interior. you're given special suits and harnesses to wear and then taken outside to face the heights and the elements. the wind was particularly gusty on our visit and we almost had to cut the trip short. i had a momentary panic attack on the glass floored portion and again when rounding the corner and feeling the full brunt of the wind, but overall i think i managed fairly well. i didn't shit myself or puke all over someone so…great success!

after the tower we went over to darling harbor, another touristy area where you can find a zoo, a wax museum and an aquarium. the day before we arrived in sydney, angelina jolie had taken her motley crew of children to the aquarium and we figured if it was good enough for them it was probably good enough for us. it was also good enough for a massive crew of school children and so we ultimately did a speed tour. the last aquarium i had been in was the one in busan and i was massively hung over so it was nice to see all sorts of weird fishes, but then again we had just been to the reef so the separation between fish and viewer was all the more noticeable.

i used the big city opportunity to get a haircut (from a korean stylist – average men's haircut in australia is around $40, and mine was $20 and looks just fine, thank you internet) and jamie used the downtime to connect with a friend from korea. i met them after my cut at a bar up the street and we got a bit of the lowdown on living in australia from jamie's friend alex, who has been here for a little over a year. she's managed to do a bit of everything from teaching english to waiting tables, and is currently writing for a food magazine and freelancing on the side. not a bad gig. she interviewed franz ferdinand (the band, not the assassinated ruler) recently as a side thing. all in all it would seem like she was doing well. but she quickly informed us that she was not entirely happy. the reason was two-fold and i think both are fairly telling in terms of different aspects of, oh i don't know, i'll just say my generation.

alex initially moved to australia to join her boyfriend who is a native ozzie. but when someone moves to join someone else who has already established themselves in a place that tends to mean the new person is more likely to be stuck in their social sphere. she arrived and his friends were her friends and his hangouts were her hangouts. she was simply adopting his experiences without making new ones on her own. in a way jamie and i are sharing in our experience as well but at least we are forming it together. our introduction into australia may be even easier than hers even though she had a personal tour guide, so to speak, simply because we have the opportunity to head in separate directions. furthermore, a part of the reason she can't move right away is because her boyfriend has job-related ambitions tied to australia, which means its either his happiness or hers. so what's the point here? relationships are tough? travel alone? i'm not entirely sure but i think it serves as a good warning tale.

the second reason is far more common with kids my own age and that reason was she was growing bored. another term you may use for bored in this case would be dissatisfied or even disappointed. and you may be thinking, "why, how could one get bored living in a foreign country? is that not the very reason she's there in the first place – because it is new, because it is exciting?" and indeed that is probably part of why she's here. but this is also fairly illustrative of what many journalist have deemed the problem with our generation. we tire of routine, and worse, we feel it unworthy of our time. a job is after all still a job regardless of where you lay your head at night and we want something more. we want perhaps personal fulfillment rather than long-term security and in doing so we eschew the traditional values of society for the values of the individual. the traveling worker cultivates the self rather than the community, for what is community to the traveller? an ever changing cast of characters passing along their own stories. the irony of this of course is that with each new person you meet the uniqueness of your own experience becomes more diluted so that you feel, for example, dissatisfied working as a journalist in australia. you therefore desire something new, something to rekindle that feeling of individual accomplishment, another page written in the story of yourself. but what's so bad about cultivating your own personal story? that's what life is, right, and that's how we write ourselves into history beyond our limited scope, in a sense, by sharing an incredibly engaging story. our incredibly engaging story. and furthermore, with the growing dominance of digitized marketplaces, outsourced menial tasks, and not to mention an over educated general public, does an intervaled work pattern actually start to make sense? i think i've lost my original thread and have become defensive about my life choices against a non-existent antagonist. the point is that this lifestyle creates a problematic loop where one interesting experience requires another to satisfy a new idea of happiness. you can see that in alex's dissatisfaction and probably with my own bit of globetrotting. 

so ok, well anyway to rejoin the story already in progress…she showed us around the neighborhood, meaning surry hills which is where she stayed as well. we eventually parted ways and jamie and i went out for dinner and drinks. i found a trendy a gelato place which i found delightful and jamie found puzzling that anyone would want gelato at 9 p.m. and would spend as much for it. i laughed in his face and told him he didn't know how to live. no. i didn't. we had some drinks and then called it a night. 

the next morning before leaving we stopped at a bakery that alex told us about which, no lie, had the best muffin i've ever had - raspberry and chocolate, gooey, full of fat, ugh. my initial impressions of sydney were lukewarm, probably due to the overcast weather when we first arrived, but again i think i could see myself living there. particularly in the surry hills neighborhood, which is evidently not out of the question since, as i said, alex lives there. so, i guess it's still all up in the air at this point. it's all on you now melbourne.

having left sydney we made our way inland into the blue mountains and stopped at a place called scenic world, an old mining area on a massive gorge and a place of cultural significance to the aboriginals. today it is somewhat of an amusement area with a couple of cable cars and the worlds steepest train ride, which i don't doubt is true at all. i think the specific angle is 52 degrees at its steepest point. upon arriving i realized i had left my shoes underneath the bunk at the hostel in sydney and seeing as we were about half a day out i decided to give up on them. anyway, scenic world is true to its name and i hope the pictures at least illustrate it's beauty a little bit. after one last night in new south wales we were off to victoria, home to melbourne, our final destination. 

this may be byron bay but...who can say after all these coastal shots?

this may be a group of marine stingers but just a guess

these are whales as seen from the byron bay lighthouse

byron bay lighthouse

surfers somewhere or another

harbor bridge

sydney harbor

the opera house

luna park

even their swans are all topsy turvy here

victoria...something building in sydney

the sydney tower eye

can sort of make out the opera house in the middle there and the harbor bridge on the left

the exterior of the victoria building

hyde park

darling harbor

bondi beach, most famous beach in australia, bit of a disappointment

cable car at scenic world

the three sisters to the left

steepest train!

brizzy fo shizzy

everything good i had to say about australia was almost reduced to nothing by the two days that followed airlie beach. two long days of driving between northern queensland and brisbane with nothing but boring brush after brush. i yearned for one of the animal crossing signs to pay off, for a koala or kangaroo to come hopping into our path out of nowhere. our car may have been totaled but it would have at least offered some excitement. also, let me just take this opportunity to give a click of my tongue to the caravan park operators of this country: $30 to park our camper in a gravel parking lot without the use of any kind of hookups? gimmeafreakinbreak. basically paying all that money for a hot shower and the opportunity to pay $10/hr for shitty wifi.

i won't try to sugar coat things for you readers. what happens when you put two friends with international differences in a camper for long stretches of time and things stop being polite and start getting real? you bet your ass you get the real world. for the most part jamie and i get along swimmingly. we crack jokes. we drink beers. we sing a long to sing-a-longs. we fart in front of one another. we toss a frisbee. but those long stretches…they turn petty little wrist slaps into tombstone piledrivers. the worst was when we finally made it brisbane but had no idea what to do with our camper. there were no parks in city limits and the most affordable campground was a good 20 minutes out of town by car and felt like a proper trailer park. it was another long day of driving and we were at wits ends. things were said that probably shouldn't have been. glances were held far too long. nostrils flared to their maximum. etc etc. thank god for mcdonalds and their free wifi! we were able to find a hostel in city limits that had their own car park and so we said so long deliverance and hello to two cots and a hot (shower).

after that terrible dry stretch brisbane was exactly, exactly, exactly what we needed. an actual city! with things to do! man, i can't even explain how much of an oasis brisbane seemed after those podunk camper parks. and to top it off brisbane is an excellent city – the two nights we spent there have probably been my favorite so far, with the first night being a hard to knock top contender for the rest of the trip. brisbane, aka. brizzy, is a city of modest proportions however it controls the most landmass of any of the major cities in australia. the city proper is probably slightly larger than cincinnati if you include northern kentucky as being part of it, and like cincinnati, brisbane is situated on a beautiful river front. brisbane river, however, cuts through the landscape much more dramatically than the ohio, creating a rugged gorge between the halves of the city. jamie kept commenting how much it reminded him of a smaller london, probably because it had its own south bank, even featuring a brisbane ferris wheel similar to, but much smaller than, the london eye.

our first night we mostly hung out around our hostel in the trendy fortitude valley area, or just the valley as the locals call it. in the valley you can find all sorts of bars, restaurants and venues. we began the evening just walking around and eventually slipping into a bar called glass. to start things off right jamie had a 15 year old irish whiskey and i had a $9 bottle of beer. us gentlemen had started our engines. after our warm ups we were loitering about when jamie noticed a sign on an otherwise inconspicuous entryway. the sign said that tonight the black bear lodge was having the red deer festival launch party. it also said free. we weren't sure if that meant free entry to those involved or free entry to the public but we decided to test the limits of the word. up the stairs we showed our id's to a lady sitting at a table with a list but she didn't seem too bothered by who we were and if we were on it. we were obviously there in the early stages as there was only a handful of people but we got a drink and soon more people filed in. eventually a food tray made its way around and we happily partook. as we were drinking and hovering around the freebies a photographer approached us and asked if he could take our picture. we obliged and you can find us moving and shaking online at this far-too-hip website (3rd picture over). after this sudden increase in exposure we thought it best to move grounds so we left and looked for something new.

eventually we found a group of people hanging about in an open space behind a building and we decided to join them. the building turned out to be the brisbane modern art center and they were apparently have some kind of performance art. we weren't sure what it was about but we did notice they were giving away free wine so we decided to shimmy up to the bar and see what was playing. i don't claim to understand all forms of art but i give it my best. if it's something i don't understand then i assume its because the artist wants to challenge the way you're thinking about whatever it is you don't quite get. and ultimately i think that the meaning of art is in however it speaks to you. that being said this was mostly bullshit. picture a room and in that room a spotlight. and under that spotlight a snare drum with some leaves on top of it. around the drum are some other musical instruments along with some more leaves and twigs and such. the performance starts and a man picks up two twigs while another man starts rubbing some glass cylinders to produce a noise like when you rub the rim of a fine wine glass. while the glass noise is happening the man with the twigs starts playing the drums with the leaves on it with the twigs. not exactly like you might imagine a drummer to play them but holding them exactly perpendicular to the drums and sort of tapping the drums with the tops of the twigs. later he would go on to play the guitar with some toothpicks and a giant leaf. they were fortunately saved from their over-seriousness by a guy – who was obviously high – in the front row giving color commentary to the whole thing.

watching modern art works up an appetite so we followed up the interpretive strumming with some dumplings from harajuku gyoza. they were actually really good but were kind of ruined by how much screaming was going on inside the restaurant. not screaming from the patrons but by the staff who had a unique yell for any number of transactions. in the event someone ordered sake, for example, the designated sake girl would come over, yell something about sake, and then pour out the shots. this was a hit i guess because i heard her yell the same thing no less than 5 times while we were eating.

stomachs full we head off again and this time we found some live music at a place called ric's. ric's was one of your token hip hangouts with an outdoor beer garden and christmas lights strung up and skinny bartenders and what not. the weird part was the live music, which you'd figure would be put in the largest part of the venue, was shoved up in front where the smallest number of people could sit. luckily, i guess, most of the kids weren't interested so we watched a small two piece from melbourne, red x, put on what was essentially a private show. and because that wasn't enough we ended the night at a final bar called the bowery which featured an extensive whiskey collection and their own four piece jazz band. we walked into their rendition of cannonball adderley's "mercy, mercy, mercy" and stayed for the set. we got a slice of pizza and then headed back to the hostel and thus ended our first night in brizzy.

the second day was slightly less entertaining. we started the day walking around the south bank and checking out the lagoon, which yes, obviously exists. i'm starting to wonder if all cities in australia have them or if it's just queensland because of their yearly temperate weather. we'll probably get our first chance to find out in byron bay. anyway, brizzy's south bank is very similar to london's south bank even down to the concrete style of the theaters and museums. i decided about half way through the day that i wanted to head back to the hostel to work on getting my website ready for job hunting but we planned on meeting later to check out the west end of town. the west end is supposedly the bohemian side of town with some major music venues and bars so i was looking forward to it. unfortunately i think we had used up most of our funds and energy the night before so after walking around a bit and having a beer we decided to head back.

the rest i'm going to speed through because it's probably better illustrated in the photos below anyway. the following day we took the camper just outside of brisbane to the lone pine koala sanctuary. it is the largest koala reservation in the world but they have more than just koalas - oh yes - they have kangaroos and emus and platypuses and dingos and even a cassowary. the kangaroos were particularly fun because you could just walk out among them and give them a scratch or whatever, as you can see from the photos below.

after the sanctuary we made our way down to the world's famous gold coast. the gold coast is a massive stretch of beach that extends down just south of brisbane and features some world class surfing. it reminded me a bit of busan as the waterfront is crowded by massive sky rises and there were koreans everywhere. what makes the coast good for surfing makes it a poor beach for swimming and lounging however as there were only pockets here and there for swimming and the wind was so strong sand blew in your face if you tried to lay down and enjoy the sun.

our last two days in queensland were spent inland at springbrook and lamington national parks. these parks are situated in lower queensland/upper new south wales' green mountains and feature both tropical rain forests and large airy grasslands, not to mention countless hiking trails to waterfalls and overlooks. the ride up into lamington alone was stunning, if not a little hairy, as you followed a narrow road up the side of the mountain, many times sharing one lane between two directions of traffic. i decided to enjoy it despite being in a big clunky camper. we did some hikes in both spots, saw some waterfalls, hung out with some birds…at lamington we noticed that there were tiny little pellet turds all over the campsite and later that night i found out they were from little wallabies that came there at dusk to graze. there were at least 15 of them hopping about all around us. it was pretty dark though so i didn't want to disturb them with a flash. you'll just have to take my word for it. the next day we drove out the same way we came in and eventually cut south across an old scenic road made by the local lions club into new south wales. at this point we're about halfway through our journey and only one state down.

one last small anecdote: the $15 foot/soccer ball we were playing with on mission beach lasted all of one day before i managed to put a splinter in it and flatten it. at airlie beach i bought a $5 frisbee to replace it and we've had it ever since. best investment of the trip.

one of several pedestrian thoroughfares in brisbane, most of which are lined with shops and cafes

the brisbane wheel, aka. the brizzy whizzy

from the free water taxi

the lone pine koala sanctuary

"selfie" #1

four pairs of legs??

"selfie" #2

whoa!

shy cassowary

surfer's paradise on the gold coast

waterfall under a natural bridge in springbrook national park

overlook, zoomed out

overlook, zoomed in - you can see surfer's paradise

stalking

twin falls, springbrook, from behind

from in front - you can see the path behind it

friendly birds in lamington

we went on a jungle canopy walk, which is a boardwalk above the rainforest ground. at one point there was a set of ladders that went to two different overlooks – one was an additional 25 m above surface and the other 30 meters. i only went up the first ladder as the second one was a straight 90 degree climb up the side of a tree. 

this was just the first ladder

and this is the boardwalk