Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

That about sums up this post.

The Murray

Again, no pictures, but they'll show up sometime, I promise.

Alright, so where have I been? Well, after exploring Melbourne for a couple of days, Adam and I headed to the north end of Victoria where there's a wholoe lot of nothing. Once you get 2 hours north of Melbourne, you hit the flatlands around the Murray River Basin. And they are FLAT. I'm talking Saskatchewan, see-20-miles-away flat. This is the agricultural heartland of Australia, but after ten years of drought, it's in a sad state. Just check out the once-great Lake Boga, now completely dry. As you drive away there's a sign reading: 'Farewell, Lake Boga'. Irony? You know it is.

Anyway, it was right around here where the Littlest Hobo (that's the name of our car, for not on the up and up) starts squealing something fierce. That's not right. So we pull over, pop the hood and notice that our fan belt has nearly slipped right off. Not only that, the pulley that holds the fan belt on is shot. Just then, who should pull up beside us but Mick Sparkes. Mick Sparkes, the man who repairs old cars for a living, the man who'll drive you all around town to get the best price on the parts you need, the same man, in fact, who'll put you up for 2 nights and let you use his garage to fix your car. Needless to say, we bought him a case of beer. And the Pajero's running great. Turns out our harmonic balancer was shot, as well as a seal on our main drive shaft. Plus, we decided to change out the timing belt while we were deconstructing our car. For those who are not mechanically inclined, this basically means that we had to take apart the whole front end of our car, something that would have cost us several hundred dollars in a mechanics shop. But at Mick's, you can do all the work yourself. He told us what to do and gave us a hand when we needed it and we did the rest. Pretty fun in the end, and a great learning experience. We couldn't have broken down in a better place.

For the past week, we've been bumming around South Australia (they have very original names for their states down here). The Hills around Adelaide (that's the capital city) are very scenic and surprisingly undevelopped and tons of fun just to drive around. We're going to spend Christmas in Adelaide, which is a nice-sized city, much more laid-back and relaxing than Melbourne or Sydney. Staying at a cool hostel called 'My Place', which is small enough that you get to know people, and just pretty awesome all around.

And that's it for now, Merry Christmas all, and to all a goodnight.

Big Mel

Okay, no luck uploading pictures, so you're all just going to have to use your imagination coupled with my italicized descriptions to fill in the obvious lack of pictures in this post

Melbourne is Austrlia's New York: big, bold and hectic. Just check out the skyline:

Imagine a huge, New York-ish skyline stretching out before you. The photographer appears to be floating in the middle of a bay, and, in fact, he is, the picture having been taken while he was on the ferry to Tasmania.

This is Eureka Tower, my favourite of the highrises:

This a particularly impressive high-rise with weird, jutting angles and an unintuitive reverse-pyramid thing going on at the top. Also, the tower stretches diagonally across the picture.

And nestled within a shopping mall in downtown Melbourne, a cool old Shot Tower (this is where they used to make lead pellets for ammunition by dropping beads of molten lead from the top of the tower and allowing them to cool into little solid spheres as they fell).

What's this? A large stone tower stretching high above covered by a large steel and glass enclosure. Another slanty picture.

But enough of my slanty pictures, how about a cool pedestrian bridge?

A small bridge with 2 arches.

Now I'm sure you've all realized that Melbourne is rather large (I subtlely hinted at it's size in my post title), but how does one get around in such a large city? Well, you take the tram of course!

Hey, check out that old school tram. That shot must have required precision timing to capture the tram in full as it went whizzing by.

Melbourne has a fantastic, quasi-free tram service that goes all over the city. It's a fun ride, but don't expect to sit down, everyone who's anyone (and even people who aren't) drive around on the tram. Still, it beats trying to drive in this city, which is something you should never try.

Take Me Down Ol' Tassie Way

Alright, first significant blog post. So Tasmania is pretty awesome, it's kind of how I imagine New Zealand to be like: very hilly, lots of sheep and not a whole lot of people. Also, it rains. A lot. As in 'every single day we were there it rained'. But I loved it anyway, I've never really been to a place like Tassie, it's so serene and slow-moving, definitely got that Island Culture thing going on. If you don't mind the rain, definitely worth the visit.

Some highlights: Wineglass Bay, possibly the most famous beach in all of Tasmania, it poured the entire time we were there and we got soaked to the bone hiking out to the bay and back, but it was all worth it for this shot:

You can kind of just make me out to the left of that wave that's bursting.

Port Arthur is your quintessential convict colony. Basically, these guys quarried, logged and built hundreds(!) of boats until England stopped shipping folks across the world as free labour. Not much left but ruins, still fun to explore.

Tesselated Pavement. Believe it or not, this stuff is all natural (or so we're told).

Cape Raoul was also ridiculously nice.

Oh, and check out my bush hat, pretty sleek, no?

Hobart is the capital of Tasmania and it's a really nice city, reminds me of a miniature Halifax. I took this picture from the top of Mt Wellington which overlooks the city. You can just make out the whisps of a rainbow above the city.



While in Hobart, Adam and I paid a much needed visit to the Cascades Brewery (good beer) and the Cadbury Chocolate Factory (sorry, no pics), where we loaded up on tons of "defective" chocolates on the cheap.

Spent a day sea-kayaking.

If you've never tried sea-kayaking, you really should, there's nothing quite like it. It's a lot more peaceful than river kayaking, but if you feel the need, you can always paddle out into some of the bigger swells (like we did) and just have a blast crashing through the waves. Also, sea-kayaks have rudders, so steering them is easy as pie.

We finished our Tasman Adventure by coming back up the West Coast and visiting such places as:
Russell Falls

Montezuma Falls, you can see Adam down there braving the wet.

The Cool Suspension Bridge you can cross to get a fantastic view of the falls.

Cradle Mountain, Tasmania's pride and joy. Apparently it snowed up here the day before we arrived.

The Nut

And then it was back on the ferry and farewell Tasmania.

Adam may never return (too wet) but I will. I could easily have spent a month down at the end of the world, but alas, we had to take the ferry back to the mainland before the prices jump up for summer (winter?) holidays.

Take care all, I should get some Melbourne stuff up soon.

The Wildlife

So far, we've run across tons of wild animals (mostly dead in the middle of the road). But we've also run into our fair share of wildlife. Take for example, this kangaroo:

Or this brave little echidna:

And if you look closely, you may spot a koala in this tree:

"That's funny looking fruit tree," I thought when I first saw this tree. But upon further inspection, I realized: "That's Bats!"

And finally, every morning I have to remind myself to:

The Essentials

Finally, some pictures. So, to summarize my trip so far, we started off in Sydney



where we visited the Opera House



and walked across the sydney Harbour Bridge.



Then we went south through Australia's capital city Canberra, and checked out the Australian Parliament Building.



Then it was further south to the Great Ocean Road



and Melbourne, where we caugth a ferry to Tasmania (pictures to come).