I'm off...

I was planning to be off on a jet plane, or at least a Tiger Airways plane to Sydney in order to meet my friend and start working our way up the coast. Thanks to a mixture of fog and volcano ash it was cancelled and I spent a rather strange 12 hours on a coach in a "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" type scramble for a ticket. Now, I know people like and even love Sydney, but personally it's always been Melbourne for me. I just prefer the atmosphere there, particularly after finding myself in Sydney at 7am on a bank holiday morning in dire need for a coffee and warmth. Avoiding the man being arrested by police I found my way into the train station, sat down and prepared to wait for my friend and the world to wake up.
We decided to make our first leg up the coast to Newcastle. The Country Link XPT train is not only cheaper than a Greyhound coach, but far comfier and quieter, all good things in my book! Our hostel in Newcastle was a standard YHA that was apparently an old Gentlemen's Club and as a result was full of leather chairs, fireplaces and rugs. Pretty swanky for a hostel and a nice way to start our journey. We walked along the coast and pier, where I got swept over by a rogue wave that soaked me and ruined my boots. For a first day it was filled with both success and damp laughter.

Newcastle Beach- choppy!

Deciding to move onto Coffs Harbour after a day in Newcastle, we had high hopes for horse riding, white water rafting and kayaking. However, thanks to a huge amount of rain everything was flooded and once we got to Coffs we could not get out. The town itself is small and divided into two, one small part down by the coast and the other inland with the majority of shops and restaurants. We did manage to go canoeing one day which resulted in a lot of splashing, near capsizing and getting rained on as well as watching the second State of Origin match which NSW won, annoyingly. After three days we did get to move on, by which time we had both run out of things to do in Coffs when everything was closed.

Coffs Harbour on a rare unrainy day.

Byron Bay was next on our hit list. Getting the train up we reached the bay early evening and prepared to hit the town. Within minutes of entering the first club there was a man proudly naked and that spelled the tone for the rest of the night. Byron Bay was a strange mix of beauty, hippies, drunks and older residents. Oddly it seems to work well with the majority of the town revolving around the beach which is truly amazing. The rainforest goes right down to the sand and the water is beautiful. We had the chance to go kayaking where we were lucky to see dolphins and manta rays coming to the surface to feed. Byron Bay is also the most easterly point of Australia and one morning we made the painfully early start to watch the sunrise which was worth it in the end, particularly after a mid morning snooze on the beach.

Moving on from Byron to Surfers Paradise was a shock neither of us was expecting. Knowing Surfers was going to be built up we didn't expect what we found. Huge high rises and shopping malls, coming from lots of smaller towns with quirky buildings Surfers was not particularly nice and it only took us an hour to go back to the office and book our coach out of there the next day. However, we had reached Queensland which needed a little celebration so we treated ourselves to an early night! Greyhound coaches leave a lot to be desired, luckily we were only on it for a few hours. One thing this trip has proved to me is that I can fall asleep on pretty much any kind of transport now.
Having heard about the floods in Brisbane I didn't know what to expect, but there were hardly any signs in the city that it had happened. We went about an hour north to Noosa and Eumundi for the day and there were some signs up there of flooding. The markets at Eumundi are beautiful and huge; the food is varied and smells amazing. It's very hard not to want to buy everything, although there are lots of free samples! Another day, just for Amanda, we headed to Steve Irwin's zoo. It was a strange experience. The entire zoo is almost a shrine to Irwin while they are desperately trying to move the empire over to the daughter. It's a very bizarre experience when you can have pictures with his cardboard cut out or transfer his face onto the background of your photograph. The zoo itself was not as big as I was expecting, we saw the croc show and other bits. One thing they do well is having the animals out amongst the crowds, wombats on leads, koalas clinging to trainers and even tigers, all ready for petting and snapshots. Brisbane itself is a good city and there's a lot around it to keep you going. Sadly we'd run out of time and had to get our flight over to Perth to start the road trip.

Noosa- beautiful.