Australia

Bye bye Asia, hello Oceania! We're finally going to be able to avoid eating rice everyday, yeehaa!!! :)

Between Sydney & Melbourne

We flew out of Shanghai during the night to arrive in Sydney in the morning. We are lucky to go through the customs without any formal check thanks to all the Chinese people who brought loads of food with them. That is actually really lucky because we have a little too much cigarets in our bags!

Anyway, we get out the arrival hall to meet our friend Jean-Olivier (Jojo) who's been waiting for us. We're happy to see him! We have so much to tell each other... Jojo is joining us for two weeks for a trip in a campervan together!

We take a quick shower at the airport and we head straight to the van renting company to get our new home. :)

After a few hours waiting, we finally get into our campervan and drive towards the Blue Mountains. It took us around an hour to find our way out of Sydney...

Kangaroos, here we come!!!

The Blue Moutains is a national park a 100kms away from Sydney with a lot of forest and beautiful landscapes. Have a look below:

Hiking with friends: you'll notice that Jojo is so strong,

he can hold the Blue Mountains with his bare hands!

The waterfalls, the different view points and nature filled us with happiness!

Amaaaazing!

We then hit the road to the South to go along the coast to Melbourne. What is really awesome with the van is that you can stop anywhere! Well, not quite, you still need to find public toilets but it's fairly easy to find in Australia.

So we decided to stop by the seaside!

Everybody's hiding the beer belly! :)

...and to go swimming (but the water wasn't very hot at that time of the year)

You can do everything in a van!
For example, you can:

Have a drink...

Watch a movie

Act! Here, our campervan is now a hippy van with real hippies inside!

"A la francaise" with the pullover over the shoulders!

We went hiking quite a few times since Australia has a lot of national parks. We were especially looking for live kangaroos (we're precising because we could see a lot of them dead on the side of the road, but not that many alive...), koalas, etc...

It looks like Ireland sometimes, doesn't it?

One of the many beautiful landscapes we saw while walking.

It wasn't very hot for the first two weeks...

Surfing is really popular here and is not exclusive to young people.

Life is a beach.

Since we couldn't find any live kangaroos, we decided to taste some! It's excellent on a BBQ! It tastes like (chicken) beef.

Yum Yum

♫ On allumait une cigarette et tout s'allumait et c'etait la fete le 14 juillet, il n'y avait jamais un copain de trop dans l'equipe a Jojo! ♫

Melbourne

After one week on the road, hiking, drinking, etc... we finally arrive in Melbourne to visit Richard, Aurore's cousin. They haven't seen each others in 15 years!

Richard welcomes us like kings and explains us his life here, and even takes some time to show us the city. Thanks again mate for everything (hot showers, comfortable bed, drinks, constant good mood, etc...). See you in 15 years! ;)

We enjoyed Melbourne, it's a nice city, with a European style, young and dynamique. We could see ourselves living there for some time...

Nice graffitis in Melbourne

Melbourne city center and its old electric tramway

An old (but still functioning) local theme park: Luna Park

Melbourne harbour

Little funny story about Melbourne: we decided to go for a night out with Richard but we were not allowed to get into the bar! We guess it's now time that we buy new clothes after 8 months wearing them, we look too much like hobos! :)
 

The Great Ocean Road

After spending a few days in Melbourne, we took the road again. This mobil home gives us wings! It seems to give a new meaning to the word freedom. :) We even start talking about buying a minivan to travel through Europe!

However, there was also some times where we did not enjoy it to the fullest because travelling is tiring after so many months... We know, we shouldn't complain, but hey, it's our blog! :)

Sometimes, we're just dreaming of having a house... a sofa to lay on... a cold beer in one hand, just watching TV without having to talk to the random guy who asks you where you've been and so on... However, it usually goes away quickly and we're ready again the next day to go discover something new, in a good mood, and to meet people from different places in the world!

Well, all this to tell you that after over 7 months travelling, we feel tired of travelling at times...

On the Great Ocean Road we finally found what we were looking for: the local fauna!

M. Wombat, M. Lizard, M. Cacatoes, M. and  Mrs. Kangaroo

and their kids, and finally Mr. and Ms. Parrot.

As we're very generous, we love to share unbelievable moments with you readers: a running wombat!

From left to right: ET hypnotising a parrot, Jojo named

"Jojo-the-cute" for the occasion, and Horror transformed in a toilet seat for parrots...

Do you remember Skippy? Well look at that!

We loved the signs!

Etienne is really turning into a hippy

On the road, it wasn't only about looking at the sea but also to look on the other side! Look at that beautiful landscape:

Like good Christians, we couldn't do without stopping at the Twelve Apostles:

The good "Christians"

No joke, it was really called the 12 Apostles. :)

Between the Great Ocean Road & Sydney

First stop at Melbourne airport to drop Jojo off. It's already time to say good bye and for him to go back to the country of Guinness, leprechauns and rain... Snif, snif... Thank you Jojo to have joined us and to have made us laugh. We really had a good time! See you soon

We hit the road again, speeding towards the North of Sydney.

We found a little piece of paradise in Pearl Beach.

With a 5 star view from the van (sorry, it's in French):

Pearl Beach is the favorite holiday location for Australian stars.

A lovely house in the village of Pearl Beach

We were keeping ourselves "busy" by walking for a few hours in the morning and laying on the beach in the afternoon...

Aurore dressed as Lara Croft :)

We're not getting tired of this kind of views!

When doing our morning walks, we made some very special encounters.

Pelicans!

Etienne even had tears coming up at the surprise of seeing

a whale and its baby playing in the sea!

Before giving back our home, we did a few pictures.

You can notice the two Chinese teletubbies given by our Couchsurfing hosts Bell and San. :) For the record, they did the whole trip hanging on the rear window and surprised quite a few drivers :D

No comment...

Sydney

The famous opera

We spent 4 days in Sydney and to be honest, we were quite disappointed...

At the start, we were supposed to stay to a couchsurfer's place but we had to shorten it to 24h as we did not get along... That's the game! It can't always work as you want. :)

We had to find a hostel and join the 20 years old people with their working holiday visa. They were not the nicest people to live with (dirty dishes, smelly dormitories due to dirty clothes...) but they were funny. Especially the young French man who was calling his parents to explain them he had been fired because he was going out too much and wasn't able to wake up in the morning. He was going on like this: "But mum, it's normal here. Everybody does the same. But don't worry, it's so easy to find a job here and the wages are so high. You can easily get 3500 euros in two weeks!"

It smells like bullshit to us! :D In French, we say "he's playing the pipo", like that (we know it's the 2nd time we put this video but it's so funny :D) :

To be honest, the city was fairly nice. It just couldn't compete with what we saw in the bush! ;)

We'll certinly be back to Australia, there's so much we haven't seen! And why not come back with a working holiday visa too?!?... ;P