BloG a'bout me, MySelF and I

Here i am, sitting in my apartment and typing away. Gotta go to work tomorrow again and enjoy this beautiful weather we might have here. anyway, even if most people don't even know about this blog, i want to start writing again. kudos and cheers to my friends.

westcoast finally.

arrived here yesterday, just in time to participate in the parade for the Shinji Masutra . i hope i got that name right, the festical of the pearl. we have lots of asian influence here in broome and it looks like the abo's are a tad better integrated here but i guess that's just because of the tourism.

planning on heading down the south towards perth and take everything on the way we can with us.
so far we drove about 15k km in oz . don't know if that's much but i think we read in the beginning that the coast along australia is almost 15k km. and we just arrived here at the westcoast. although there wasn't much in the north, since we came up from Mt. Isa, 3 Ways, then towards Katherine and from there on Litchfield, which is freaking awesome and way better than Kakadu National Park, everything is closer together and you have lots of Waterfalls and Water Holes you can jump into.
Darwin which is nice, but in my humble opinion, it tries to be something bigger and fails in it. although, we had some decent nights there.

Kakadu National Park, i was looking forward to see something similiar to Daintree but it wasn't the same, of course, different climate zones and all that, nice informations about Aboriginal Art and History and some decent art sights which were more than thousands of years old.

back to Katherine and 1 Day of canoeing the Katherine Gorge. Beautiful and terrific. it remined me a bit of The Lord of the Rings when the group went down the river in their boats.

next morning headed of to the westcoast.
2 days of driving and about 1100 km later we arrived in broome with 1 night spend in the outback and it was so peaceful. no cars, no noise pollution, just us, our camper van and the birds .
splendid .







ps. i'm really sorry that i can't keep this site updated as often as i wish to.

cheers, chris

Aussie trip

28.06.2006

First day………….what a *bleep* cold morning…..the sun is shining outside and we have blue sky in Sydney. So why does it feel like a freaking fridge in here?!
My sister called, asked if everything is fine and how I slept. Good, the sleeping bag I bought from Anke is unbeatable , keeps me warm even if we have minus degrees in here.
“Jacques”, the French guy, whose name is Benjamin is moving in at 9am. So I still have 2 more hours to get ready till Garlef comes and gets me for the start of our trip.
Have to pack some more stuff and want to eat one of my favorite rolls again, which consists of libanese bread, avocado spread on in, salt and pepper and a fried egg on top .
I know that it sounds silly but its really easy and its fast to make, besides that my loved avocado is on it.
Ah well, packing now and listen to streaming music.
Ha, a question for you folks…..is streaming music live music?
Jacques came right at 9am and I helped him to carry his stuff upstairs. He was really excited to move in, since the first time he came to see the flat, he didn’t got it.

After that Garlef came finally and we could start towards Mossman, where my sisters boyfriend lived and she had a surprise for us.
Which consisted of a breakfast and it was awesome of her to invite us to have a huge big one for the next weeks/months.
You gotta love sisters , I do.
To top it off, my sister served us honey covered pancakes with yogurt and fruits.
With our stomachs full and aching we started gen north.
First stop took us to Palm Beach, were we chilled a bit on the beach and tried to figure out the route. I checked the oil and the other stuff that needed to be checked and off we went again. The fuel gauge was moving silly, after 120km we thought we are out of gas because of the gauge but it turned out that it was broken. We checked and filled the car up again and luckily the km/l usage was alright. We calculated that we can almost drive 550km with our 50l tank. But when we are at 400km we fill it up no matter what. Getting stuck out in the outback should be one of the least problems now *laughs*.

We took the pacific highway west of Palm Beach which led us north towards Newcastle. We decided to take some tourist routes to get a feeling for the country which meant that we couldn’t be in Newcastle in time. So we stopped in white wharf, a smaaaaaall community with nice buildings, at a nice lake and decided to stay there. The sun was already going down (5.00pm) and we had one huge problem………we weren’t tired at all. Garlef decided to drive around and explore the area a bit. This led us to a bowling-pub-bar-gambling thingy 22km away from the lake, freaky. Unfortunately the same establishment was closing at 8pm, so we ordered 2 beer after an I.D.check and gave a toast to our trip and car, finished the beer and left. We parked then at a beach which was near and just sat there in our car and listened to the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, talked here and there a bit and just relaxed and thought about what was laying in front of us. The wind was refreshing at the point were it was almost cold but it wasn’t.
We headed back then to White Wharf to get some rest and get ready for the next day.
We found a small parking lot near the lake and had our first night in the van and it wasn’t that bad at all .
By the way…..we gave our van the name “Sir William Brutus”, which imho suggests strength, endurance and not much complains from “him”.
I woke up about 8 times, but it was just because of the new environment I was spending the night.


2.Day

After we woke up and had some muesli, which is in fact our daily breakfast now, we headed further towards Newcastle and arrived 2hours later.
Newcastle is a small, quite town. In my opinion a little bit too quite but it was nice after the stressed out Sydney. We drove right to the beach and had a walk to the light house and actually saw some whales .
After that we had a quick dip in the ocean and spent some more quality time there at the beach. There were lots of surfer, experienced ones and noobs as well . Lots of body boarders too and I just figured out, at that point, that this was a sport I was motivated to try out besides I never noticed that sport before in Sydney at Bondi Beach or just gave it a quick glance without thinking of it further. But I thought that this might be easier to learn since I didn’t had the money for a good surf board and didn’t wanted to invest so much time either.

Later on I called a friend of mine, she just moved to Newcastle a few weeks ago, to meet up with her, but found out that she wasn’t there and on her way from Sydney to Newcastle.
So we went shopping in the centre, for some food, an inverter for our notebooks and cell phones and other stuff which we might forgot when we took off.
We ended up in a nice café where a cute girl worked behind the counter. We ate some croissants for lunch and before we left I told her how cute she looked, she blushed and was smiling all over her face.
It was nice to see and it’s always nice when you can make someone else smile. we left then on our search for an electronic retailer. No luck and we had to ask our way to the other end of town where a old guy finally could help us to find what we needed, he also taught me that the thing we were looking for is an inverter and not an converter as I thought off, also did we had a short nice talk bout the country and Germany. After that we shopped some more food in aldi, which is a famous low price food shop in Germany. And well, what can I say…..i was trying to get away from Germany and now I was buying food in there.

Lots of people were asking “where we coming from?” and “what we are doing out here?”. When the answer came, lots of em asked “what we are doing here?” and “why we aren’t back in Germany to see the world cup?” .blubb.
I also tried to sign up for the Australian Royal Air Force but had to find out that I needed a resident visa or citizenship for that. I was destroyed.

It was getting late I started to get nervous because Melissa still hadn’t called me to make up a place and time and I called her instead. It turned out that she couldn’t meet us in the next few hours because she was attending a dinner with her brother and his girlfriend but she might had some time after that. At that point I decided than that we head off right away and that we don’t wait any longer. Next stop was Hawks Nest, which was 40km further to the coast and a really nice spot and we would spend the night there as well.

So we drove off in the dark and left Newcastle. 1 hour later we found that nice little town and a great spot near the beach where we had cold showers and restrooms.
Lots of people were still coming to the beach, despite it of being dark, to check it out but luckily later on there were less and less and I could sleep and dream of cops who might dislike the idea of camping/sleeping in van near the beach.
We woke up to a beautiful morning and took a quick run on the beach; the distance was about 5km I think. Saw our first kangaroo, YEAH!!!!, unfortunately it was dead, NOOOOO!!!!, some jelly fish, lots of birds and a hawk or something similar.
Then cold showers and MUESLI……woot. More people turned up again.
Lots of em talked to us and asked “where we’re from?” and almost everyone was checking out the beach and waves to see if it was a good day to do some surfing after work. And there were a lot of people, some with family, some with there company cars and some surfers as well but the waves weren’t that good that day.
After some more chilling and enjoying we started our tour de Port Macquarie. On the way we saw a 400years old eucalyptus tree, named eucalyptus grande. We missed the turn to that and took another one instead which took us an extra 120km to get to that tree and when we were there and standing in front of it we …….. felt betrayed. The rain forest which the tree was in was awesome. Quite, green, beautiful and mysterious when you heard noise from something walking but couldn’t figure out where from or from what exactly that noise was. The tree is huge and the tallest in NSW. It was 12,2m broad on ground level and still 9m in 1.5m height. If I remember right it was 42m high? But I’m not really sure on that one.
After that we went back to the highway to go on with our plan to rule the world…..aehm ops, wrong blog .
And so we went on….the trip to Port Mcquarie was done in further 3hours. Shortly before we arrived we got some showers and the sky went black but right after we entered the boarders of Port the sky started to lift up, the sun came out and we could watch a sundown which stole my breath. The colors were vibrant and fresh. In the Lonely Planet, our guide through this deadly country, was something written about the light house and we thought of giving it a go, which turned out to be a very good decision since the thunderstorm was now 10km to the east of Port and out in the ocean. 1 lightning followed the other and it was quite a spectacle. The air was fresh and clean and everything was just beautiful and stunning. Those moments remind you that life is indeed beautiful and that in every day there is something new to discover, to see or to experience.
The sad thing is that we all develop “habits” which we can’t easily escape from, might it be work or other stuff which binds us to a place or location and therein a process which repeats itself almost every day without any change or movement in one direction.
Anyway, I’m just mumbling like a old dude .


To be continued………..


ps. gotta add more pics later on. not able todo so at the moment cause of the slow "neighbours" net. but i shouldn't complain as long as it's for free, so i won't .

What can I say … it’s the evening of the 26th of June at about 4.34pm.

The sun is going down while I’m writing this and Vlad and Claudia are putting their cloth and books in bags and huge card boxes. The stress, I had over the weekend, seems distant now and I can rest/chill a bit. ….. kind of makes me laugh, because there is no heater in this room and I’m really freezing at the moment…hence the chill. ah well, jokes which have to be explained aren’t funny.




.Today.

We had the brakes of the car fixed today, but wasted like 5h on waiting because of the spare parts. On the other hand, the mechanic, nice as ever, talked to us about our trip and what else we absolutely, in his humble opinion, have to see. He pointed things out which he saw with his fiancé while traveling and gave me some prints of national parks and sights. We still haven’t made up our mind about the route, we just agreeing with each other to start the trip and see what happens, meaning by arriving at a nice place, we just stay there and enjoy it, if a place hasn’t much to offer……well, we just move on .
Garlef did the rest of the paperwork (rego and insurance) this afternoon and I spend lunch time with Ashleigh and some brother-sister talk time with my sister back at the apartment. She is excited about my trip and I’m excited about her moving together with David, her boy friend.
And right now, I’m using the chance to write on my blog and some mails to friends and family, a chance which I probably won’t have for some time by the start of the trip, at least not from my laptop .

.Flashback.
When I look back the last weeks, I can only say, the time just light speeded past me……time is moving fast, but even faster when you have a good time. The 5weeks I spend in Hay already seem so far away.
I came back to Sydney almost 1 ½ weeks ago and the very next day I drove down to Tibeth, with Ashleigh, to relax and to do some snowboarding.
We booked the Trip before my departure to Hay and often the thought of this trip, snowboarding and spending some quality time with a good, dear friend, was one kind of motivation to help me getting through with that (fruit picking in Hay).

Just a side note…. I STILL CAN ….snowboarding of course…..i boarded the last time in the states, back in the early 2005 and if I count all the hours and days I spent in the snow it’s not very much, probably can count it on 3hands .



.fruit picking.

Sam (the Italian farmers’ son) picked me up at the gas station at about 8pm with his son, Vince, after a 11h trip from Sydney to Hay (half train, bus).
His expression was priceless, because he expected some asian people, he even talked to a older asian couple which were on vacation and didn’t understand any of his speech. There were just unlucky at that point, wandering around and probably stretching their muscles after that boring trip. I was lucky though and picked up his name while he introduced himself, just walked to the group and said “Hi! I’m Chris, you were supposed to meet me here!”. Well, as I said, his expression was priceless and I’ll never forget this moment.
From there on it went straight….got my own little hut, we had hot shower and a huge shed with tv, a small kitchen and a washing machine (almost everything was covered in dust and spider webs although I learned that there wasn’t a way to keep the dust outside). The working times were from 600am – 4pm in the afternoon with a smoko and lunch thrown in. later on we changed the times from 900am – 2pm cause we had frost in the morning often and the orders were smaller. I was the only backpacker there and the rest were locals. This often ended in me asking to repeat something because of the heavy accent.
I had a rough but great time, weeks in which I drove a quad, built little dams, picked olives, hauled tons of pumpkins, cut lettuce, stapled boxes, cut weed, hunted rabbits and birds, fished, cleaned out a workshop, cooked, fell in love with Rugby (State of Origin Red vs. Blue), watched the WM in Germany on TV at 3am in the morning, surfed the web on my phone, split up with my girlfriend in Germany, paid 400$ on Optus Pre Paid Phone cards, learned some Aussie slang and some italian curse words.



The farm was 5km away from Hay. I started to jog the distance and my times even got better despite all the in-pain-resulting hard work and the not very nutritious food.
Hay is a small community which was once famous for its massive numbers of sheep’s…..I have to admit though, that I think this applies to a lot of australian cities but I’m not sure on this one Sherlock….. this changed over the time and the sheep’s kind of vanished and got replaced by vegetables and fruits.
At the moment, Hay is a community which has won many prizes because of the looks, although the main street had its sights, everything else besides the main road was typically old school and not so shiny. As someone who grew up in a bigger city (Germany, Potsdam), it’s difficult for me to imagine a childhood in such a place. Beautiful and quite as it is, at the same time it’s boring and disturbing for me in such ways, that there isn’t much happening or very much to do. Of course did they had “their” monthly murderer or car accident but it’s still hard for me imagine young people growing up there.
Some people might say: “What do you know!” and I agree with that, it’s just my opinion and my thoughts I’m trying to express and writing down.



.Backwards.

The day I came back to Sydney was awkward because some things seemed changed, smaller or different than I had memory. Still, I was happy when I was back in my sisters flat and even smiling when I could access my emails. This, of course, over such a period of time grew to the amount of 412. Unfortunately most of it was about Penis Enlargement and other unimportant spam crap. The crux of modern age I guess.
Went to bed at 4am the next morning, after following the football game of Australia and got up at 9am and packed my stuff for the weekend in the snow . Ashleigh came over from work at 5pm and we headed to Central Station for our Coach. Took some time to find the station but we arrived in time and boarded the thing. First thing over the speaker was that “We’re heading for the next booze shop to buy some liquor!” for the mood, the next thing was “What we would like to have more…music or movies!” and then came the whole money collecting thing. Everyone was yelling for some music, shortly after we stopped at the liquor shop and everyone scrambled out to get some. I bought some double black X’s from Bacardi and off we went.
It took us about 6h to get there, with a stop at a 5 Star McDonalds and stops at certain restrooms because some people couldn’t handle that much alcohol.
We arrived at about 1am in the morning and everyone was sleepy and slow. And boy it was cold up there, but what do you expect, after all it is a winter resort which opened the week before.
Well, we arrived and started to get our equipment, boots, cloth and the board. I just noticed that we had lots of people who were trying skis, not exactly a favorite of mine but whatever makes you happy. Then we went to our apartments and I embraced the idea of a warm, nice, cozy bed .
The good thing, the rooms weren’t stuffed with people, 6 could fit in but mostly we had like 3-4 people per room. In my case, I was together with Ashleigh and 2 other girls which I haven’t met before. They worked, like Ashleigh, as agents in travel shops and at first I was delighted. At the second day though that turned into desperation because of all that nonsense talking and chitchatting about stuff which I wasn’t into at all. But we had lots of laughs and fun anyway and I could smile at the end . Besides everything was clean and the room was warm, this is a major factor in my opinion.




Next day, we were forced to wake up at 7am. Got our breakfast for free, which was ok but it could have been a bit more to choose from. Then taking the bus to the resort at 8ish am and unloading there half an hour later. Half the group went up and the other half stayed down to take some classes in boarding and skiing. I took the lift to the top with some brazilian guys from our group and we had a talk about the WM and other stuff. The question everyone was asking “Why are you here and not in Germany?”, my reply simple “I’m not into soccer!”. Well I am kind of sad that I miss the whole atmosphere in Germany but snowboarding is more important to me than soccer ever was.
The view on top was fantastic, I shot some pictures, did some videos during my trip down and at the same time I cursed myself because I just forgot to bring my headphones and my mp3 player.
One of the most beautiful things is to just put on your headphones with some classic music and go down the slopes smoothly, even better if there is new untouched overnight snow on it and no other human beings. Any better way to relax besides a spa maybe? Good on us that we were the first and most of the people were down in the valley to learn how to do it.

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To be continued…

there we go.even if i'm not rly in2 football de (soon starting) wm got ahold of me .i have 2 admit dat i'm a bit sad not able 2 see it live.setting my alarm 2 3am though so i can c de results from de 1st match .go germany go,even if i don't think dat germany is very good this year,i hope that they will rock.further can't wait 2 c the magic of brazilian/african football.they mastered the art