Archive for Australia
After 5 weeks I’m back in Stockholm again. It feels good to be back but I already miss Australia. 
The trip home was very, very long. It took 46 hours to get from Cairns Airport to my apartment not counting time zones, only effective traveling and waiting. You can imagine I was tired when I come home at 10 pm last night.Right now I have four days to go before I have to get back to work. Haven’t really figured out what to do yet. Today I’ll start preparing the party on saturday and tomorrow is laundry day. None of these activities can cover a full day so I’ll guess I’ll just wander around the apartment trying to adjust to the fact that there’s no sun, it’s cold and I can’t drink beer at 9 am without feeling bad about it.
2008/01/24 9:27 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | No Comments »
We went sea kayaking yesterday. It was a great experience.
We took a ferry to Fitzroy Island and met up with our guides. At around 10 am we got in the kayaks and started making our way around Fitzroy. I don’t know how far it is must I’d estimate to about 3-4 km of paddeling.
Fitzroy Island is beatuiful. We made our way near the shore line and could see corals on the ocean floor, turtles coming up for water just a couple of meters away and the amazing nature on the island. There aren’t many beaches around Fitzroy, instead there are beautifully shaped rocks, smooth from the harsh weather coming in from sea, and they almost seem to grow out of the water and up towards the sky. They aren’t very tall, only 20 meters or so. Behind the rocks a forest climbs up the island which is basically a large hill in the middle of the ocean. Depneding on which side of Fitzroy you are the forest is either made up of large palm trees and other exotic plants or it’s just short bushes. On the wild side of the island, the side that faces the open water, is where you’ll find the bushes. The trees can’t grow there because of the rougher weather coming in.
We stayed on a small island rright next to Fitzroy, Little Fitzroy, for lunch. As it turns out the small island is protected by diffrent laws and the kayaking tour is one of only two tours that have permission to land on that island. We snorkled around the island and saw a whole lot of cool fish and coral. I acctually saw no less than two “muränor”! 
Today is our last day. Tomorrow at 10 am we will grab a cab to the airport and from there we can look forward to a very, very long flight back home. We are flying down to Melbourne and then back up again to Bangkok where we will stay for refueling and then make our way to London and finally fly the last bit to Stockholm. At 8 pm wednesday swedish time I’ll hopefully (or unfortunately?) be on swedish soil again freezing my ass of since I don’t have a jacket with me
We’ve had a great last day here in Cairns. It’s 37c in the shade and there’s almost no clouds at all. Ofcourse we have spent a lot of time down by the lagoon to catch some final sun and cool of in the water. That’s all for now, I have to get back outside and enjoy the sun while I still can. See you soon!
2008/01/21 5:13 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 1 Comment »
After having spent a couple of weeks on this continent I have noticed a few things that has stuck to my mind, tiny things that differs from what I’m used to back home.
First of all the traffic is a lot diffrent here. You have the obvious left traffic phenomenon but that’s just the way it is. More intresting is that pedestrians here have to give way to cars instead of the other way around as it is back home. We even saw a sign in Airlie Beach where this was pointed out at a crossing. There is also no law that says that the front lights of the car has to be switched on even during the day. This makes it very hard to know if a car is moving towards me or if it’s just double parked. And it makes it even harder to estimate the distance between me and a car coming towards me. I’m glad we have this law back home.
Secondly, everywhere you go you see the influences from England. You have the Breakfast at cafes, or brekkies as they call it, consiting of scrambels eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and toast. Ofcourse there is almost always the option to have a Big Brekkie which is pretty much the same thing as the small one just twice the size in most places.
You also have all the bristish pubs and restaurants. They are all over the place serving typical english food and beer.
Water prices is a funny thing aswell. You can often find a small bottle of water, 0.5l, for about $2.5 just to look at another shelf and find a 1.5l bottle of the same brand for $2. It doesn’t make sense but I’m not the one to complain.
There’s a lot more on the list but this is what I can think of from the top of my head so I’ll leave it at this for now
2008/01/21 4:56 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 1 Comment »
Finnaly I can remove “Diving at the Great Barrier Reef” from my things-to-do-before-I-die-list
After three days on the reef I’m quite happy. We lived on a boat with about 35 other divers and instructors. This may seem like much and you might think the water was croded but it wasn’t. For the first half of the trip more than half of the divers were engaged in courses (Open Water and Advanced) so there was less than 15 f us diving on our own.
The boat was great with private cabins, a saloon and a large sun deck. For three days on this boat we have been working on our tans and, of course, our under water capabilities such as swimming, going down, going up, floating, breathing, sign language etc.
As most of you probably know I took my OW certificate in Sweden where it’s cold and dark in the water. This was something completly diffrent, as expected. From time to time the visibility was longer than we were going to swim, which isn’t always a good thing I experienced when I found my self at 22m below. It turned out that the visibility downwards is just as good and your depth perception goes bananas on you ;) (side note: OW divers are only allowed to go down to 18m).
The reef is full of life and color. It’s just amazing how something can live and grow that large under water. Add all the fish to this and you have something really special. So what did we see except for coral? Well, except for the tens or maybe even hundreds of fish I don’t know the name of we saw a couple you might recognize: Clown fish, turtles (big ones), sea cucumbers (I know that’s not their real name but it’s funny beacause it’s true). We saw sharks but unfortunotly we missed them when we were diving so we only saw them from the boat.
There’s too much to tell about this dive trip so I think I’ll leave it at this for now. We are going kayaking tomorrow around Fitzroy Island in the middle of the ocean. It’s seems like fun and somewhat relaxing
2008/01/19 9:24 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 3 Comments »
Back from the wilderness of the rain forest again. We had a great stay in Cape Trib. It started out early in the morning when we were picked up outside the hostel. We then went for a short drive to Port Douglas where everyone except for us went to a Zoo (we didn’t purchase that addon thinking that we have already seen it all when we were at the Sydney Zoo). Instead we spent about 1 hour in Port Douglas walking around, drinking coffee and finding a couple of nice views.
After Port Douglas we left for Mossman Gorge where we stopped for a swin in the creek. It was absolutely beautiful there and the water was clear with a healthy stream. The guide was very careful that we stayed on the right side of a couple of rocks to reduce the risk of being sucked away by the stream.
We had lunch on the beach and after that we were dropped off at our resort. Now, as we have gotten used to, things didn’t turn out the way we planned it. When we booked the trip we added an extra $20 (roughly 120 SEK) to get a nicer accomodation instead of a dorm room. When we came to the place we were supposed to stay they said that we had been upgraded due to refurnishing. So we were move to their sister resort 3 km down the road. This turned out to be the best thing that could’ve happened. The sister resort, Coconut, was a four star accomodation which was very, very nice, especially now that we have gotten used to staying in hostels.
The room was very nicely decorated and had a fresh smell of orange to it. In the bathroom one of the walls was a glass wall facing the forest and it had a tub! I had my first real bath in a bathtub for several weeks and they even supplied us with bath gel
We didn’t do much for the rest of the day. We hang at the pool, went for a walk to the nearest store (rougly 2.5km away) and just relaxed until dinner. The dinner was great and equally expensive but it was worth it, one night in luxury.
The next day we were picked up again and went for a guided walk in the forest before we left for a boat ride on the Daintree River to go croc spotting. We acctually saw a couple of crocks although they were very much covered by all the trees and bushes. A small croc, about 1 m long, did have the courtesy to acctually be tanning in plain sight so I’ve got a few pics of it.
We got back yesterday, checked in to the new accomodation we had arranged and went out for dinner. After that we had a beer or two and went to bed.
We’re going out diving tomorrow. 3 days/2 nights, so once again I won’t be able to blog for a couple of days. I hope you have a good time in sweden and that you save up on some of that nice weather for me, just a week to go. Btw, did I mention that we have about 30 C and partly cloudy down here? Perfect for a day on the beach
2008/01/16 4:38 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 1 Comment »
We finally reached Cairns yesterday. This is our final destination and from here we are going to do a lot of trips. We have already booked a 3day/2 night dive tour with 11 dives and a 2day/1 night trip to cape tribulation (rain forest). We will peobably go sea kayaking later aswell and then we’ll see if we have time to do something more before we leave for home again :)
We met the girls again last night, first time since new years. We went out here in Cairns for a few drinks and had a good time. Other than that we haven’t done much yet. We have walked around Cairns a bit and that’s pretty much it. I won’t blog for a couple of days now since I’m going out to the rain forest tomorrow but I’ll tell you all about it when I come back
2008/01/13 3:29 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 3 Comments »
Here we are in Mission Beach. We’re staying at a really nice hostel in the middle of nowhere. We thought Mission Beach was similar to Airle Beach in size but it turned we were wrong. Our hostel is situated about a 15 minute walk from the bus station. The town (we haven’t been there so I’m not sure it qualifies as a town) is about a 15 minute walk in the opposite direction.Fortunatly this doesn’t bother us too much. The hostel is nice enough to hang at and there are a lot of fun people here.
Yesterday was my birthday, thanks everybody for the texts, and you might think we partied all night long. Thing is that prior to my birthday we’ve had four nights of almost no sleep at all with the saili ng and travelling and on top of that we have engaged in a lot of physical activities. This all added up to one tired Calle so I went to bed around midnight after a BBQ dinner and a couple of beers. It never felt like my birthday at all really. There were to many things that I’m used to on my birthday that simply wasn’t here; my family, birthday cake, presents, darkness, cold, snow etc.
We’ve had some really nice weather here apart from a short shower today but it was around noon when we really shouldn’t be out in the sun anyway It very humid up here so we’re spending most of the time in or next to the pool to avoid fainting from the heat. Sure beats minus degrees and snow mud
So, what’s up with the Bus Ride from Hell?
To come here to Mission Beach we took a greyhound from Airlie Beach. The bus left Airlie at 8pm and it was an eight hour drive.
This may not sound so bad but trust me, it was. As I mentioned earlier I hadn’t had much sleep the past couple of days so I was really tired. To that you can add an upset stomach, not as bad as Eriks if you’re reading his blog but still enough make me feel a bit uncomfortable. I slept for about one hour and spent the rest of the time trying to find a position that wouldn’t kill my back (that didn’t go too well, my back wasn’t happy yesterday). When we finally arrived to Mission beach at 4am we made our way to the hostel, that 15 minute walk I mentioned, only to find that they didn’t open until 7:30am. On top of this it started to rain as we got to the hostel. Luckily there’s a bar next to the hostel. It was closed but had a roof above the outdoor serving area so we took our bags and slept there on the stone floor for about 2 hours. When the hostel finally opened we got a room straight away, thank god, and slept for about 5 hours.I think I’m back on track again after sleeping for about 9 hours tonight and with my stomach feeling better and better (and my back not killing me anymore).
We’re leaving Mission tomorrow and heading up to Cairns, our final destination. We’re meeting up with the girls we met in Surfers tomorrow and will probably go out for drinks, tell you more about it later. After that it’s time for the higlight of the trip: scuba diving! Woho!
2008/01/11 5:49 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 2 Comments »
Hi guys, sorry I haven’t blogged in a couple of days but for some reason our vessel didn’t have an Internet cafe 
We just got back from a wonderful time on a maxi sail vessel called Broomstick. We’ve been cruising around the Whitsundays for 2 days on it. Of course there’s a lot to tell you about the past few days so I’ll start from the beginning.
We spent on day here in Airlie Beach with perfect weather conditions. We mostly relaxed in the lagoon just by the ocean relaxing in the sun. We went out in the evening, managed to get some free shots with dinner (by mistake, they didn’t put it on the tab) and the we bar hopped for a few hours having a couple of jugs and a some laughs.
The next morning we got up bright and early to check out from the hostel we were staying at. That reminds me, the hostel was awesome, like a tiny jungle village in the middle of Airlie, I’ll make sure I get some nice photos for you to see later Anyway, we checked out and made our way to a health cafe where we had brekkie and then it was off to the marina to find our boat.
Broomstick is a maxi sail boat like I mentiond. It’s 80 feet long and has one main sail. It holds 26 persons plus crew. There were three people in the crew; the captain and two more guys. They were all really noice and helpful and made the trip very enjoyable for us.
Enough about the boat and on the what we did. As you can imagene we have been sailing First time for me and a great experience. We had some nice winds from time to time and maxed at about 12 knots.
We stayed at Whitehaven Bech for a couple of hours yesterday.It was nice and we managed to spot a shark and a sting ray but I was really expecting more from the beach it self, probably because everyone’s been talking so much about it. We saw sea turtles while we had breakfast outside Whitehaven Beach as they came up out of the water. They float on the surface for a couple of seconds and then go back down again.
We snorkled twice during the sail. It wasn’t the Great Barrier Reef but it the small island reefs are not to be underestimated. The coral was pretty much of any color you can imagene and so where the fish. The fish weren’t scared either, I acctually had one swin into my googles
What more can I say about the sail… Food was good, the crew prepared on the ship and was way over my expectations. The general mood amongst the guests was good so we had a lot of fun throughout the trip. I must say that if you ever go to eastern Australia, don’t miss out on the Whits.
I managed to hurt my foot a couple of times during the sail, the one I hurt one new years eve. It’s still not broken and I can walk on it but it hurts from time to time. Really should let the foot rest a bit but there’s really no time for that. It’ll have to wait another two weeks
Time for yet another day by the Airlie lagoon before we get on the Greyhound to Mission Beach where we are staying for 2 nights.
2008/01/09 3:11 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 5 Comments »
We arrived at Rockhampton around 11 pm and made our way to the hostel. we got there at midnight and there was supposed to be a key waiting for us. There wasn’t. We called the manager and she got there about 15 minutes later anmd got us a room for the night *phew*
When we oke up in the morning we had nothing to do. We had already booked the trip to Airlie beach at midnight so we had one day in rockhampton hich isn’t really a city full of attractions. Then this great thing happened. The manager of the hostel told us that a one day trip to the outback as departing in about one hour and they had spots left! Of course e didn’t have to think long before we signed up for the tour.
This tour turned out to be one of the best days of the entire trip so far. We pretty much drove straight out into the wild from Rockhampton, about 45 minutes or so. Then we just stopped every now and then to get out of the van and see things. We found spiders, snakes, kangaroos, wallabys (kind of like small kangaroos), turtles, scorpions and a lot of cattle. Speaking of snakes, the guide took us to find a couple of spiders which he knew where to find but the coolest of them all was one we found by accident while searching for scorpions; a Red Back, the second most poisionus spider in the world
The guide, Dave, as a real bushman. He walked around barefoot, grabbing snakes and spriders like he’s done nothing else (he’s been bit by a Red Back twice btw) and his driveing, albeit good but not very careful out in the wild where the roads aren’t roads
We also swam in a creek and had a mud bath while we where at it. This day as just great. we came back to town around 8 pm and after a shower and some grooming we had dinner. I had a 300 gm sirloin steak on a hot stone. You get the meat raw on a stone that is about 400 c and then you cook the meat the way you want it. Good stuff!
We have just arrived to Airlie Beach now and booked a 2 nighter to Whitsundays tomorrow so we’ll just relax here tonight. It’s hot here, and humid, but I’m not complaining. We haven’t seen much of the town yet but my guess is that as soon as we have checked in we are going to the lagoon
2008/01/05 23:40 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 4 Comments »
Sun! Finally! It’s been really hot here in Rainbow Beach today. The sun har found it’s way out and is shining bright on us again.
Wewent for a walk down to the beach and it was pretty much gone. The waves from the storms has reached the shores here and flushed the sand away. (As always, there are photos for you to see later )
We’re catching a bus to Rockhampton in one hour. Rockhampton is a small town about 4 miles from the ocean. We’restaying there for one night and will probably leave to Airlie Beach tomorrow where we are going to Whitsundays and might meet up with the girls we met in Surfers.
2008/01/04 2:34 | Australia - Globethrotting | Trackback | 4 Comments »
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