Rest Of Australia

After Tim left us, we ditched the camper van and had to improvise for the remaining 1000 miles of our journey to Cairns. We stuck around in Brisbane for a week and met up with some friends we had made on our previous travels.

We spent Christmas in Thailand with an Australian couple called Sam & Shawn and it was great to see them again. They cooked us up an unreal meal of some sort of Kangaroo and Shawn even cracked out some wine made by his Dad. We also bumped into Dan & Laura, an English couple we had met on a boat in Vietnam, crazy!

Also while in Brisbane, we visited Hillsong (pretty much the most famous church on the planet) which was brilliant and also I got to go to Australia Zoo, which was home to this absolute legend.

Steve Irwin is probably one of my top five guys of all time, just such a hero. He started Australia Zoo years ago with all the crocs he rescued and it is where they filmed the Crocodile Hunter TV series. His wife Terri still runs the zoo today and when I got on the bus early in the morning, the driver put on an old episode of the show which almost brought me to tears!

When we got the zoo, I was able to to feed the kangaroos, play with some koalas and even got taught how to survive a crocodile attack, which should come in useful when I get back home!

Further on up the coast, we spent a memorable few days on Fraser Island, which the world's largest island made of sand. Although instead of paying a couple of hundred dollars for a tour, we decided to do things DIY, which didn't turn out so well. We ended up having to walk 60 km (through sand) carrying every single thing we owned, chalking up a $500 fine for lighting fires in the process AND almost got eaten by dingoes. But now I can look back and laugh, and don't worry, we never paid the fine!

Back on the mainland, our transport issues were solved by two Dutch legends we found on Gumtree. Remco Brands and Erik van Houtum were travellers like ourselves, heading to Cairns in a beat-up old station wagon. They welcomed us aboard and we spent our last week driving north, cooking up awesome food, narrowly missing extreme floods, swapping travel stories, eating pies, talking about life and stopping at every single McDonalds we passed for ice-cream. Some hilarious times thinking back, thank you guys, you are heroes!

By the time we got to Cairns it was time to leave Australia, so we didn't get to do any scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I was able to go snorkelling one day though, and got to swim around with some turtles which was awesome.

That whole day was brilliant actually, most of it was spent at one of the nicest beaches in the world, Whitehaven Beach. I made friends with some random travellers, one of which was an Inuit! Literally the most interesting person I met on my whole trip. She told me about how they just eat raw (or frozen) meat, how their bodies work completely different from ours to cope with the cold and how they don't actually live in Igloos any more! Crazy! We all played some cricket on the beach and then just chilled in the sun for hours.

Australia, although you are ridiculously expensive, you will be missed!

Surf City

They say it's easy to have fun when you have sand, surf and sun.

While we were in Sydney, the Australian Open of Surfing was happening and we managed to catch a little bit of the action. We pulled up to beach in our camper van and after seeing the amount of surfer chicks about, we headed straight for the shop and bought a board!

The next couple of weeks were just spent driving further up the coast, stopping a different beach every night and trying to catch some waves. We were rubbish, but hit all the big spots, Bondi Beach, Byron Bay, Manly, Snapper Rocks, Gold Coast and a load of others along the way.

Life on the road is a simple life but a good life. Roll out of the van when it gets just too warm to sleep any more, grab some breakfast and then hit the beach or hit the road. Some memorable moments include finding a giant sheep in the middle of nowhere, caravan site tennis games, McDonald's family boxes, free tea truck stops, eating a whole packet of raw bacon without even realizing and one of us falling alseep at the wheel on the highway.

Every night after the surfing was done we would just cook up some pasta and sauce, make a cup of tea and then star gaze for a while. FUN FACT: The stars on the Australia flag are know as the "Southern Cross" because they can only be seen in the southern hemisphere. See if you can spot them in the photo below.

Unfortunately when we eventually made it to the big city of Brisbane, old Tim had to catch a flight back home. He did take us out for some banging steaks on the final evening though, while we reminisced and talked about life and the future and all that good stuff. Great member of the team, sadly missed thereafter.

Ridin' the wave til the grave bros.....

Australia

Coming to Australia and being back in 'The West' was pretty strange at first. We landed at Melbourne airport and almost cried when we had to pay $17 for a 15 minute bus ride into the city.

Our grief was overcome when we saw the smiling face of Timothy Rocks waiting for us at the station. Jim is a friend of Josh and an all-round legend who flew out to join us for a couple of weeks on the road. We stayed one night in a hostel but after doing a few calculations realised it would be cheaper to rent a campervan so we could drive, cook and sleep all at the same time!

We rented this old campervan that even had some Belfast-style riot gear on the front to protect us from kangaroos and remind us of home. It was only equipped with a tape deck but we raided a few charity shops and got a bag of classic cassettes to help us through the long rides.

After hanging out in Melbourne for a couple of days, going to a music festival and checking out all the cool street art, we hit the road and headed towards Sydney. Me and Tim took shifts behind the wheel and ate up the miles; between the cities Australia really is just barren plains!

When we got to Sydney we parked the van in the suburbs and jumped on a boat that sailed us straight into Sydney Harbour, WHAT A VIEW!

We headed for the Opera House and poked our heads in to have a nosy. It turned out that middle-aged heartthrobs 'Il Divo' were in the house that night and the place was packed with people all dressed up in their Sunday best. We asked if there were any tickets left and some posh older ladies standing nearby overheard us, as they had one spare. They showed us the ticket and the price on it was $200! We just laughed but gave them some banter anyway and told them to enjoy their evening.

Just as we were leaving about ten minutes later we saw them again and Tim shouted over, "We'll give you $30 for it!" So as things worked out, we each chipped in ten bucks and got to spend a night at the opera in our flip-flops and swimming trunks, feeling like champs. Tim went in for the first four songs, I went for the next four and Josh for the last four!

So yes, the Opera House was unbelievable but Il Divo on the other hand are truly awful! 

Home Sweet Home

Crazy, four weeks later and it feels like I was never away.

It was totally worth sitting through four flights just to get home and see the family, have a good cup of tea and then sleep in my own bed. Being away and seeing different places all over the globe, I definitely realized that little Northern Ireland isn't such a bad place after all. It really is The Shire!

When I was away I was having far too much fun to keep the blog up to date, but don't worry because I still plan to finish it off. There are definitely still a few more stories to tell!

Chiang Mai

Before leaving Asia for good, we headed up the north of Thailand to check out the mountains and spend a few days in the city of Chiang Mai. The overnight bus we caught was so good it even had a hostess on-board who handed out free food! Despite this and also having a nice reclining chair, I just couldn't get to sleep so just watched the new Karate Kid movie (which is awesome) until the hostess came back around with breakfast.

Chiang Mai is a great city to visit, quite small and very chilled, which was a welcome change coming from Bangkok . There was a great little hostel that had a market stall opposite where you could get amazing fruit muesli every morning. There was also a giant street market which we raided nightly for tasty treats and bargains!

Our friends from Bangkok put us in contact with a couple who work with YWAM in Chiang Mai, Prin and Sarah. We met them one night for a pizza and it turned out that Sarah was from Belfast! Crazy small world, hopefully see them back home some day!

One day we hired some motorbikes and decided to ride to the top of Doi Inthanon, which is the highest mountain in Thailand and has a road all the way up to the top! We set off with no map and eventually realised that it was a few hundred miles away. A couple of hours later we started to climb, but as we did the temperature dropped like crazy!  When we reached the summit there were some Buddhist temples and the views from up there were breathtaking. We sat for as long as we could, but got so cold that we had to race back down to the mountain to reach the warmer air!

We also signed up to do an overnight jungle trek where you rode some elephants and then stayed with a tribe in the mountains. It cost us about £20 and was possbily the most fun you could ever have in two days!

We were in a group with eight girls from all over the world (alright!) and had a Thai guide called Puzaa who was an absolute hero. Riding the elephants was up first and was great as long as you had a steady stream of bananas at hand to keep the big boy moving! We then hit the jungle and trekked up to this little waterfall which turned out to be the best rock-slide ever! 

We got up to the village and Puzaa cooked up a storm while we met the locals and settled in. Later that night we hung out and watched the stars and one of the locals arrived with a guitar. He taught us some Thai reggae songs, including one classic about a guy who gets left by his woman and she even takes all his Bob Marley CDs, hilarious!

Riding back to town on top of a jeep. Awesome.

Bangkok with YWAM

After Vietnam we headed back to Thailand and spent two weeks in Bangkok, volunteering with a Christian organisation called Youth With A Mission (YWAM).

We lived in this big house with a team of Thai volunteers, none of whom spoke much English at the start, but were all so friendly and quickly adopted us as part of their crew. They taught us some Thai phrases and all about their culture (like don't touch anyone's head or show the soles of your feet) and cooked up some amazing food. Such awesome guys and girls. Then every day we would go to the the local universities, hang out and talk to students about Jesus.

A team from South Korea also came to stay in the house and run some programs at the universities. They were also a bunch of complete legends and ran a Korean camp where we learnt some Korean, tried on the traditional clothes and ate some Kimchi, which is the ultimate Korean food!

Josh and me were put to work on the campuses, inviting students to come along despite knowing no Thai or Korean. It caused quite a stir, two white guys walking about the cafeteria trying to speak Thai, and people thought it was so hilarious that they came along.

We also got to go away one weekend with about 40 students for the annual "Jam Camp". Me and Josh (the 'farangs') ended up doing some drama, performing a traditional Thai dance and even did some preaching with a translator. Because of Josh’s beard all the Asians reckoned he looked like “someone from Bible”, so when he dressed up as Jesus for a skit everyone went wild!

We had such an amazing time getting to know the guys in Bangkok and seeing the real Thailand, not just the bit for tourists. Definitely one of the highlights of the trip, although eating rice for every meal (even breakfast) did some terrible things to my stomach....

Miss you guys!