Calling Sydney

Sorry for the silence, I was on a road trip and got sick immediately before that, which didn’t allow me to post anything before taking a break from the online world.

A uni friend from Austria was visiting and I met him in Melbourne from where we started our road trip back to Sydney, passing the Great Ocean road, two national parks (one of them being one of Austrlia’s few skiing resorts), Bendigo, Canberra and the east coast.

The trip was super-efficient, I don’t remember seeing so many different places in such a short time (5 days) since my Interrail times. The highlight of efficiency was Bendigo – a city that emerged during the gold rush – we arrived 10pm, checked in at a hotel built in gone-with-the-wind style, had dinner, a beer in a pub, starting the next day with breakfast in a local café, followed by a visit at the Central Deborah Goldmine, and leaving town again before 11am.

The gold mine was also one of the highlights on our trip. Another almost scary highlight was our trip through a national park after sunset, with lots of kangaroos on the streets, one of them was as big as a man and obviously not afraid of our car.

The Google map shows the places where we had breakfast, lunch and dinner, starting the day we left Melbourne. The highlight of meal diversity is best demonstrated by our third day: breakfast in the gold rush town Bendigo, lunch at a Winery, dinner in the dozy ski resort town Jindabyne and breakfast in the modern capital of Australia, Canberra.

After three days in Sydney (mainly because I had to work), we took a flight to Uluru, spending two days in the center of Australia, to experience the taste of desert and the aboriginal culture, which coins the whole area. Although it’s a very touristic place nowadays. As a side note: the Uluru national park area was only handed back to the Aborigines in 1985.

You can find more pictures from both trips on Flickr.