Our Big Explore: Sydney - The first few weeks Down Under

Wednesday 11th June

Arriving in Sydney was a dream coming true. I have been dreaming about travelling in Australia for as many years as I remember, so I felt like the luckiest girl in the world, to finally put my feet on the land down-under, and I was even so lucky that I got my better half to join me on this adventure. By the way he was just as excited as me.

It was a big relief for both of us to leave Asia, we enjoyed it while we were there, but after 9 months we honestly had enough. In Sydney there's so many things we can relate to, one of the main things at the moment is the cold and chilly weather. It actually feels really cold to us, mainly because we're not use to it, but also the fact that we don't have a lot of warm clothes to wear. So we look like retards (especially Erik) when we dress up in all our layers.

We stayed at a shit hole of a hostel the first 4 nights, will not recommend Chili Blue to anyone, but Zing, just next door is a better option, a bit more costly but much more comfortable. Kings Cross as we're living in now, is referred to as Sydney's red light district. We haven't really been out yet, so we haven't experienced any of all this, but the area is much more quiet than I would have thought.

Well, our first days in Sydney we have been looking for cars, we need to find one before Ib and all his girls are coming.

Erik have decided that we're going for a 4 wheel drive, and I have decided to leave it up to him. We went to Parramatta road, where there's loads of second hand car dealers. Spend most of an afternoon out there. Erik was in contact with a lot of different guys, both our there and on the phone. He was a busy man - since I don't know anything about cars. In the late afternoon some of the car dealers invited us in for wine. It was quite fun cause they were big masculine car dealers, and decided to serve us some strawberry bobbles - which was so gay. Anyway, they were so generous and helpful, and Erik got great advices from them. He might look for a job there, when we get back to Sydney - those guys were really friendly.

An old guy with a car for sale kept ringing Erik. He had a really cheap car for sale, but unfortunately it was out in the Blue Mountains, like 100 km west from Sydney. The Australians dosen’t concider that as a long distance. Everything is so far apart here, so 100 km for them, is like 10 km for us.
One of the car dealers at the office we were in, lives out there, so we got a free ride with him, he dropped us of in Springwood, and the guy with the cheap car (Bjorn) picked us up and brought us to his house in Bullaburra, and his car - which by the way couldn't start and hadn't been used for around a year.
We stayed at his place for the night. Next morning Erik tried to get the engine running… The battery was totally flat, but after finding another battery, he finally got it running, we went for a small spin in it, and Erik made a small list it, with all the pros and cons with the car.

We took the train back to Sydney - we weren't totally sure if we should try to fix that car or look for something else. During the weekend Erik and Bjorn kept in contact, and monday we ended up taking the train to Bullaburra to fix the car and hopefully get it rolling again.

Australian white ibis, or we call them 'leather face', due to their black beak

The most messy dormitry we have been in so far.. Too many young people!!

Bjorns house

Having a tea break while Erik is dealing with Bjorn

Maybe our future car

Wild kakadu's

Saturday 21st June

We stayed in Bjorns house from monday to thursday. We were ment to leave wednesday, but the car didn't get through the test on wednesday (the test that he mentioned in the advertisement, that he would pay for), so we were forced to stay for another night.

Bjorn was wasting our time everyday, either with driving us around to a lot of unimportant stores or just working against us. He thought he helped, but he was just in our way. He seemed really lonely, and kept talking about his partner, that we never got to see. Perhaps an imaginary one!! Shortly he was a big talker. He promised us so many things, that we never got to see even the shadow of.

When the car didn't pass the test he became rude to us, and told us to f... off - we spend so much time on the car already, so we were not going anywhere! This guy was really getting on our nerves at last - at some point he was friendly and hospitable, I mean we stayed there for 4 nights for free, but on the other hand he was the strangest person we've ever met.

In total the car came to 2450 dollars including blue slip, insurance and registration for a year. It was such a big relief to finally say goodbye to this guy. It had been some long days at his house, but we got a good and cheap car out of it. We drove to Katoomba, and stayed at a hostel for the night.

Our next plan was to build it into a backpacker car, with beds etc. A helpful guy (Paul) at a cabinet workshop, who we met a few days earlier, offered to help us with the frame to our bed. We spend most of the day at his shop, he helped us with the frame, and in return we payed his lunch, his friday beers and picked up some stuff for his shop in a nearby town.

Erik & Paul at the cabinet workshop

Getting the bedframes read

Our two bedframes

Paul is making the handle for our boxes

One step further towards the goal

Weekend celebrations.. Notice the sign in the back, it's an old sign for the Opera house!

Friday 27th June

So many things happend the last week. We stayed in Katoomba for the Magic Winter Festival. I ended up working in a danish owned foodstall (The Gourmet Viking), selling traditional danish hot dogs. Erik was getting supplies for us, such as beers and hotdog rolls.

It was a coincidence that we stopped by this stall, and Ulrik the owner hadn’t been able to find enough staff for the day, so he was more than happy to get some help. Ulrik is retired and he's been living in Oz over 30 years. We quickly got along pretty good, and we arranged to meet up with him the following day, in Sydney. He offered us jobs in his food stall during a festival (Spendour in the grass) in the end of July in Byron bay, plus that he let us use his address to register our car in. We were feeling so lucky, cause then we would never have to deal with Bjorn again.
Ulrik had told his danish friend Malene, about us, so when we met up on sunday he had arranged to visit Malene, who by the way had a cheap room that we could stay in just as much as we wanted. Imagine how lucky we felt. Malene cooked us a 2 course dinner and even though they were both strangers to us, we felt so comfortable in their company.
Malene's house was very nice and homely as well, so it was hard not to feel completely spoiled... Although her house is a bit colder than we're use to. Most houses here isn't isolated and dosen't have a built-in heating source, so they tend to be quite cold during the winter. Covering up inside kept us warm most of the time. We stayed at Malene's place for two days and enjoyed every minute of it. She's got a 10 year old son, living at home and a 21 year old daughter, who's travelling in Spain and Denmark at the moment, and a 24 year old boy, also living in Sydney. While staying with her we sorted out more with the car and all the equipment we needed for our big road trip.
Status is: We have now spend 6 nights in Sydney, and yet we haven't seen any tourists attractions at all. Haven't seen either the opera house or harbour bridge... But we have seen a lot of camping stores and a lot of second hand stores.

Parade at the Magic Winter Festival in Katoomba

Dinosaur puppy

Ginger bread

Concidering we were out on the country, the parade was pretty big and lasted for almost an hour

Me and Ulrik in The Gourmet Viking

Lunch and shopping in Penrith

At Malene's house..

Green curry at Thai'licious in Kings Cross

A little while ago we decided that we wanted to check out how the snowboarding is here. It dosen't have the best reputation, but we were dying to do some snowboading again. The Snowy mountains is located just 6 hours drive from Sydney, so we took a 3 days trip down there. The night before we left it was reported that the mountains got the biggest amount of snow in a decade. It was all over the news. So off course we got very excited. We had found the cheapest solution which included 3 nights accommodation in a dormitry, 3x breakfast, 3 days liftpass to Thredbo and boardhire for 364 AUD per nose.
The first day of snowboarding was excellent, with loads of powder and plenty of space on the runs. None of us had goggles (didn't want to pay extra to rent them), which was quite annoying in the beginning, but then we got use to it. We didn't want to pay for renting gloves either. The once we had wasn't waterproof, so after a few hours falling into the powder frequently our hands got quite cold. We had brought some socks, that we could wear as mittens.
Erik got this brilliant idea about using plastic bags on top of the socks. He looked fabulous, but couldn't do anything with that stuff covering both of his hands. In every chair lift ride I had to help him organize his "australian gloves", so he didn't get snow in. Let me put it this way, I'm happy that we didn't know anyone there! Anyway, that was definitely the best day out of the three days.
Unfortunately the big amount of snow was melting almost as fast as it got there. The bottom was horrible, with melting snow and big puddles.
Riding and having fun with the guys from our dormitry (Tim & Paddy) the two other days was great as well, but the powder fun was over. We had some fun in the park during the other days, and looking back, we were extremely happy that we went snowboading on the best day in a decade.
Paddy baptized our car 'Migaloo'.. Which is a white humpback whale and in aboriginal language it means 'white fella'.
We left the mountains friday afternoon and drove towards the coast, more precisely Batemans Bay. Our GPS (Iphone) suggested three possible routes to take. We decided to take the adventurous one through no-mans-land. Around 50 km of dirt road and all of a sudden no mobile signal anymore... Exciting!
There wasn't any turns, where we doubted which way to take, it just took us longer than expected to drive through the remote area. We saw our first alive kangaroos. It was amazing when they started jumping along the field, while we were driving. It dosen't get more Australian than that!!
Until this time we had only seen injuried or dead kangaroos in the side of the roads, which is by the way the most common sight of them, unfortunately!
It got dark early, like around 6-7 pm, at this time it was pitch black out on the country side. After driving an hour more than first assumed we finally arrived in Batemans Bay, found a hostel, cooked some can food and went to bed. The following day we drove along the coast line back to Sydney. We deviated from the tour a couple of times, to get a glimpse of the villages and the Australian nature.
The same night when we were back in "our home" in Sydney, we met up with Malene and her friend Rupert for beers at their favorite english pub (fortune of war) in “The Rocks” in Sydney. We were enjoying ourselves and all of a sudden one of the bouncers asked us to finish our beers and leave. We didn’t have a qlue about what happened, it was really strange, cause we didn’t do anything wrong.
Malene & Rupert told us that it’s common to get kicked out if you’re having too much fun or are too drunk (or acting too drunk). We were definitely not too drunk, but here you can get fines and get sued for everything, just like in the U.S. So if you’re having fun they assume you’re drunk and out of control, and if you, after visiting their pub, stumble around on the street and fall over you can actually sue the bar for serving you to much alcohol to you, so that’s perhaps why we got kicked out. According to Malene they're so afraid of getting sued, or getting fines from the police, so these situations are normal, and apparently it happens to everybody at some point. So bottom line is you’re not allowed to get drunk and have fun, in a place where the main item they sell is alcoholic drinks. Good on ya’ oz!!
This experience ruined our good mood, but fortunately Malene & Rupert were taking it easy, so we just left the bar and found another one, closer to ‘home’.
We used the next couple of days to get the car totally ready and good to go. We felt so comfortable in Malene’s company, and she must have felt the same since she invited us to come back to her, when we're getting back to Sydney.
We were a bit divided about going to the festival Spendour in the grass (that Ulrik invited us to), cause that would mean we had to drive back down to Byron Bay, after saying ‘bye’ to Ib & Charlotte in Cairns. A couple of days after leaving Sydney with Ib & Co. we decided to book a flight to Byron bay and participate in the festival, we will then leave the car in Cairns and fly back and continue our journey after the festival.
But first we had 3 weeks of holiday together with friends from home..!