Sydney stop

I was lucky enough to get to spend a weekend in Sydney being very well taken care of by dear family friends/pseudo-parents, M & P. Here they are at Darling Harbor, with morning coffees in hand.

We made several drives over to Balmain, enjoying the views of the city from the park at the bottom of Birchgrove neighborhood...

...and I started trying to let my pasty white, Antarctica-winter skin get slowly used to the sun again. It's going to take me awhile to catch up with these people who have seen the sun this year.

My favorite sign that I saw over the weekend....though I did not in fact have to protect my brunch from aggressive seagulls:

We took a lovely stroll through Sydney's botanical gardens, which I hadn't been to before. The sun! The trees! The heat! The green! It feels like another planet than the one I was on a month ago at this time.

The gardens also had a carnivorous plant display going on, which was VERY cool to see.

And we ended up our walk at a spot that left no doubt of where we were.

Beautiful day, beautiful company, beautiful stop on the thawing-out tour of 2018.

Day in Sydney

Thanks to flight schedules/long layover options, on my way from New Zealand to Hawaii, I got to spend a full day in Sydney with great family friends who live there. And what a day it was: absolutely gorgeous weather and lovely company. After a delicious brunch, we got on the public ferry through Sydney Harbor to Manly, a city adventure that has been on my Sydney hit-list but I hadn't gotten in to in a couple of previous (too-short) visits.

The view of downtown Sydney as the ferry pulls away can't be beat.

And Manly was a sweet beach town to walk around for a few hours as we chatted nonstop and enjoyed some pretty amazing ice cream.

Some clouds were rolling in by the time we ferried back downtown, but that only made the view more dramatic.

Add to all this bliss an afternoon nap and a yummy Thai dinner, and by the time we headed back to the airport for my onward flight that night, I was pretty much drowning in contentment. (Thank you, M & P! xoxo)

Trip end and trip map

Okay. It's time. The last post of the trip. The journey ends where it began 3.5 months ago: in Sydney. (And actually, we even spent our last morning on Australian soil having breakfast with the same family friends at the same restaurant where we had breakfast the March morning we arrived with my mom. Could not ask to come full circle more literally!) 

 

Only now, it's the dead of winter here. Since that means lovely weather not nearly cold enough for snow, it's no hardship. But I did get to see snow in Australia!: at this little enclosure for kids where they manufacture it. For some reason that just struck me as hysterical, and a good final photo.

 

 

At the end of last year's mega North American road trip, I posted a map of my trip route, and a few of you seemed to particularly enjoy that visualization. Thought I'd do the same as the parting post for the Australia/Bali trip of 2014. Pardon the athletic tape covering my mistakes and cobbling together two pieces of paper, the poor lighting in the campervan, and all the other signs that this map was made by someone traveling around with only what a backpack can hold! Okay, with that enthusiastic recommendation....

 

 

Back on down the Queensland coast

Once we spent some time in the Daintree and on the Great Barrier Reef, it was time to head back south from whence we came. Luckily there is so much to see and do on the Queensland coast that we were able to do totally different things on the way back down than we had on the way up, and we still left multiple things undone. I really liked the town of Port Douglas, with its historical church...

...beautiful bay views...

...and its own stretch of those perfect beaches that Australia is just dripping in.

As we continued south through and out of the Wet Tropics, the sugar cane continued to keep us company, and this time we even saw the "cane train" in action, since it's harvest time.

We enjoyed a quick stop in Townsville, with its AMAZING view from the top of Castle Hill...

...and a lovely rainforest walk in Eungella National Park.

SR even got one more "big things" picture--very appropriately, after all that sugar cane we've driven past, with a cane toad.

The beach at Cape Hillsborough National Park was particularly beautiful, and though it's sad to see the wing of a blue tiger butterfly that has seen better days, they move so fast we couldn't get a picture of a live one, and I just love these colors.

We spent a couple nights in Agnes Waters / 1770, and got to see the beach where Captain Cook first landed on the Queensland coast back in...1770.

We also went on a sunset kayak trip from 1770.

One of our last nights with the camper van was spent at Norval Park, right on the beach at this incredibly peaceful spot. A pretty perfect way to start closing out the trip, with beautiful sunset colors and dolphins frolicking offshore.

Not quite done yet, but can you feel the bittersweet mood of a fantastic trip about to draw to a close? I sure can....

Plates

There will still be a couple more Australia posts, but the trip is (too quickly) drawing to a close, so I thought I'd bring out the plates! Now that we've been to every Australian state/territory, I have pictures of license plates from all of them. The ACT (Australian Capitol Territory) one is kind of a cheat; I hadn't started taking pictures of plates when we drove through Canberra, and that state being as tiny as it is, you don't see many ACT plates elsewhere. So I had to nab the last photo from one on the wall of the Daly Waters Pub in the outback. Anyhow, in no particular order...

 

 

 

Great Barrier Reef!

Huge splurge: taking an overnight sailing trip out to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns! And SO worth it. We visited three different reef sections: Flynn, Miln, and Moore, and went to several sites on each. There was spectacular snorkeling at all of them, and I made the splurge even bigger by doing three scuba dives as well. I rented an underwater camera for a day but somehow missed getting pictures of some of the most incredible things, like dolphins swimming alongside the boat, sighting a sea snake (from the safety of the boat, thank goodness), jellies and a small shark...all of it was so incredible. Here are some of the pictures I did get, which don't even begin to do it justice.

 

The Daintree

The end of the line (as far north as we're going on the east coast) for us was the Daintree Rainforest, which was probably one of my favorite areas we've been to on this trip. I loved the cable-ferry crossing of the Daintree River to reach the upper parts of the forest, and I just in general love the atmosphere of the jungle. The beautiful flowers...

 

...and fruit tree orchards with misty rainforested mountains as their backdrop...

...complete with these ENORMOUS bats (which I assume are fruit bats, since they were hanging out in fruit trees?).

Even more fun animal crossing signs up here, and though we didn't see any turtles traversing the road...

...we did see two southern cassowary crossing! This is so exciting, as this species is very endangered (only about 1000 animals remaining), and they're just plain awesome-looking. SR and I are both baffled how neither of us managed to get a clear, good picture of either of them when they walked leisurely past, directly in front of our vehicle, as if to invite us to photograph them. But this is the best I've got.

We spent a lot of time exploring the rainforest-lined beaches of the coast. I particularly love how the mangrove roots are fully exposed at low tide.

SR particularly loved the ropes we kept finding hung from high trees for people to swing on.

This pic, from the Alexandra viewpoint just north of the Daintree River, is special in that it shows the only place in the world where two World Heritage-listed areas abut each other: the Wet Tropics of the Daintree cascading down into the Great Barrier Reef shore. Pretty much my idea of heaven.

And by the time we crossed back south of the Daintree, the weather was FINALLY starting to lift, with some promising sun poking through the persistent clouds of the past week...