Happy Christmas from Wellington New Zealand, we haven’t been in one place long enough to up date out website for ages so this may get quite long. We are now staying with Jared Cardno and family in their farmhouse outside Wellington. Jared has just bought a house, a “doer upper,” so we are staying here a while to give him a hand.
Back in our last post we were with Naomi Skaki in Brisbane, which we thought was a great city as cities go. The city is full of Asian immigrants and feels a bit like Singapore being really clean with some great public parks. The best bits were the CityCat, a commuter boat that speeds up and down the river giving you a great view as you cruise into the city; on the south bank of the river, there is a free swimming pool made to look like a beach; the city offers free aquarobics lessons, and near the rainforest garden they have free aerobics lessons every week!
We left Brissie for our trip up the coast in a camper van that cost us a $1/day! (it was a relocation) and paid full price for an extra day since it was a 1760km drive! The extra day was very worth it.
Our first stop was Australia Zoo, Steve Erwin’s family zoo. Crikey, was it expensive! We saw the crock show in the “Crocoseum” and then got to pet kangaroos and koalas.
We then drove up to Bundaberg and went in the middle of the night to see the sea turtles come ashore and lay a load of eggs in the sand. They‘re like slimy, soft golf balls. Six to eight weeks later the baby turtles dig themselves out of their sandy nests and waddle back into the ocean by the hundreds.
We drove up to a really hot and humid rainforest area known for crocs, snakes and freaky bugs. We threw caution to the wind and went hiking through it all towards a deserted beach. The beach was just like the beaches you see in movies when people get stranded on remote islands. There were the most amazing butterflies, absolutely hundreds, Tamar took loads of photos and none of them came out any good at all.
As we were driving through the country we started seeing signs welcoming us home. We had arrived in Burdekin country. They’d named all sorts of things after us: a river, a bridge, a hotel, a library, a theatre, a bowling alley, car dealerships, clinics - we were positively famous! Of course we didn’t want to be hassled by the media on our holiday so we kept our identity a secret. On our way out of town we stopped on the side of the road and tried munching some sugar cane. Besides being very sweet it was really fibrous and hard so we threw it out the window and drove along to Paronella Park, a house and garden in the middle of the rainforest built by a Spanish immigrant in the 1920s who made his fortune in sugarcane and spent it building this amazing castle and garden by a waterfall. It has since been grown over by the rainforest so it looks enchanted (corny but true).
We dropped off our camper in Cairns and went out from there for an overnight trip out on the Great Barrier Reef with the fishies. Crickey, was it expensive! But we were staying on a boat that was like a small hotel and going out on dives. Tamar even saw a shark!
After we were done there we flew down to Sydney to go to Hillsong church! Yay! We got there for their Christmas production which was ok, but then we went to another meeting where they played the real deal Hillsong music. It was cool.
That’s all for now. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good year!