Immer eis meh :-)

(das nächste mal wieder mit besserem Ton :-), but I’m not a perfectionist 🙂 )

It’s hard to believe that the second week has already past. To travel makes the day shorter, and the life rhythm becomes different. I couldn’t imagine this effect before. At the begin of the second week, we’ve traveled a lot. On Monday for example, we drove another 400 kilometer – but to see the beautiful landscape makes the long distances extremely comfortable. Besides the impressive countryside, the streets are straight and mostly easily to drive. Furthermore, there are only a few cars and trucks you’re passing. I like to drive the campervan on these routes – yes indeed! ( It’s hard to believe, but it’s true!)

–> Like always check our map here!

Route

Day 11: Chinchilla – Byron Bay (Hippy village)

Day 12: Stay in Byron Bay

Day 13: Stay in Byron Bay

Day 14: Byron Bay – Glen Innes

Day 15: Glen Innes – Armidale

Day 16: Armidale – Nambucca Heads

Day 17: Nambucca Heads – Foster

special recommendations

Listening podcasts

In Australia the distances between the cities are huge and we have to drive very long times. Therefore, listen to interesting podcasts is a great opportunity to make our journey more entertaining. Our favorites podcasts are BBC world news, Input (Maggies number one), Context and Ted Talks.

Breakfast in Byron Bay

Byron Bay is quite a nice hippy village with a lot of colours and alternative shops. It is a paradise for all the people who like handmade jewellery or vegetarian food. It almost every restaurant you can find a great variaty of meals without fish and meat. We ate twice breakfast in a very lovely restaurant with the best coffee and bread we’ve ever tasted in our stay in Australia.

–> Fresh Byron

New England

New England is a region in New South Vales. It’s a high plateau (between 800 and 1500 MSL (meters abobe sea level) and looks like the countryside of England. I’m not very familiar with the region in England, but belong the films from this region, New England looks very similar to these showed countrysides. Anyhow, the landscape is just breathtaking, open grasslands, little rivers, and rainforests on the top of the hills (here they call them mountains). One of the main plus points is the cooler temperature. After tree nights in the tropic Byron Bay, sleeping with a nice, fresh wind was extremely refreshing.

Fossicking in Glen Innes

Maggi had an awesome day with fossicking in Glen Innes. We found a few very colourful and beautiful stones. It was also a great pleasant to me to meet Steve, the owner of the farm. He was telling us a few stories of his life. The best we remember is “you need to live your life and have fun, you don’t know if you die tomorrow and no one came back from the other side telling the life is better over there”. If you are in Australia, this is a place to go!

Schwiizerdütschi Zämefassig

Wunderbarschti Landschafte, wunderbari Mönsche – Australie isch super!

So, after two videos, it is high time for the first blog post about our journey.

Although we only travel, the time for writing the blog posts is limited. Therefore, I cut down the number of blog posts. My goal is to publish one blog post and two videos (Schweizerdeutsche Zusammenfassung & General Impressions) per week.

The blog post contains the current travel route (via Google maps with a lot of help from Maggi), some hot tips and some travel insights and last but not least a short summary in Schwitzerdütsch from Maggi.

–> For the travel route click on the link.

Route

Day 1: Brisbane – Maroochydore

Day 2: Stay in Maroochydore

Day 3: Maroochydore – Tinana

Day 4: Stay in Tinana (visit Harvey Bay)

Day 5: Tinana – Seventeen Seventy

Day 6: Stay in Seventeen Seventy (Maggis Birthday, LARC excursion)

Day 7: Seventeen Seventy – Emu Park

Day 8: Stay in Emu Park (Crocodile park, singing ship)

Day 9: Stay in Emu Park (trip to Keppel island including snorkeling)

Day 10: Emu Park – Chinchilla

special recommendations

use TripAdvisor

This tool is very useful if you are not familiar with a place and you want to carry out which restaurant is the best or which places you have to visit. Of course, your taste could be different, but the crowd intelligence is mostly right 🙂

Breakfast in Maroochydore (Envy Café)

This café is quite awesome. You can choose between various breakfasts like salmon with a lemon sauce and toast or bruschetta or more common ones like bacon and eggs. Additionally, you can order delicious cafés (like in every place in Australia) or tasty smoothies.

Fraser Coast Wildlife Sanctuary

This little zoo is a volunteer project and very affordable in compare with the Kuala Sanctuary in Brisbane or the Sealife in Mooloolaba. The kangaroos are very trusting and lovely. You can them feed very easily; sometimes the kangaroos are fighting with each other for getting the food first. Furthermore, you can see assorted birds, reptiles, turtles and a huntsman spider (it is big but harmless).

Camping Seventeen Seventy

This camping ground is located at the little town with the number name. James Cook discovered the state Queensland in 1770 at this point. Besides the camping, there are only a few cafés and holiday residences. Different to the most other places at the east coast, on this camping you can see the sunset over the water. For Maggi and me a great opportunity because the sunset is mostly too early for us (at the moment about 4.45 am).

LARC-Tour

As you can see on the picture, this pink vehicle is quite big and can move in the water as well as on land. The tour guide was very friendly and explained us the history and the wildlife of this region in about 1 hour. He also had to entrain some children with some stories about penguins (some birds with black and white plumes) and funny surfings with the vehicle. It was a very pleasure trip.

A crocodile farm in Coowonga

This place was very impressive. The guide explained us in about 1.5 hours the farming of crocodiles and showed us a tour through the farm and the area and, of course, some examples of this very dangerous animals. One of the goals of maintaining this farm is to display the benefit of cultivating crocodiles: meat and skin = money = jobs. That’s the way it works.

Snorkeling

It’s just amazing. If you enter the region of the great barrier reef (or the southern part as we did), please take the time for a short or a longer snorkeling or diving trip. It was the first time for me, I would have regretted it if I haven’t done it! (Maggi too!)

Schwitzerdütschi Zämefassig

S Umereise fägt, mir hei schöni Ort entdeckt und gniesses.

After a three month stay in Brisbane, we are happy to embark on a new adventure. On the other hand, we are going to miss many lovely places and some daily routines which we have developed since the beginning of September.

I wrote a lot about typical things here in Brisbane and described some trips we made, but now it high time to say something about our homestay. At least, we spend more than 50% of our time at this amazing place.

Our homestay is located in the suburb Chelmer, which is around 10 kilometers from the citycenter. Dissimilar to the neighboring areas, Chelmer is quite flat and it’s easy to walk or to cycle in there. Although it isn’t so close the center, the railway takes only 15 minutes to the downtown. A magnificat river is flowing through the outskirts and makes them much more green and natural. And indeed, our homestay is build directly on the river. The house has a very charming and shady terrace on which you can easily relax or work.

We lived in quite comfortable room with a big king size bed, a large wardrobe, and desk and some shelfs for our staff. Furthermore, we had a separate bedroom with a restroom and a shower. We were also be allowed to use the kitchen and, of course, the terrace. As an impression, I added the following pictures.

Besides the marvelous location, we had a very lovely housemother. She is a piano teacher and pianist and plays very impressive. The teaching lessons started often before seven, but it didn’t disturb us at all. Like a typical Australian, she is very open-minded and kind-hearted. It was a very pleasure to stay with here and had a profound insight in the Australien way of life.

Some of you asked what I was doing when Jonas was taking his language course. Well, there were many things:

As all of you know, I don’t like to get up early… So sleeping in was the first thing I did 😉 After that, there were a few things I did:

• Get ideas for the Sonnehuus Fest (Flyer, Guestbook, Information…)
• Create the Sonnehuus Fest flyer and send to the print company
• Write invitations to doctors, mayors and many other people
• Find all the addresses to send the letters
• Create the “Gönnerverein der Rudolf Steiner Schule Solothurn” flyer and sent to the print company
• Read a quite interesting book about beeing a Steiner School teacher
• Write some portfolios for my studies
• Type a paper for the AfaP-students to help them working with Microsoft Word (no, you don’t need to write the index manually… Word can do this!)
• Get the new AfaP forum ready and inform the students
• Finish the new http://www.sonnegold.ch website (have a look 😉 )
• Work on the Sonnehuus work schedule for next year
• Wash our laundry

Seven days ago we spent a long weekend on the famous Fraser Island. The island is made from sand and is indeed the biggest isle of this kind. We booked a guided tour with 34 other tourists from all over the world (one Swedish family, a talkative Italian guy, who is living in Australia for about two years, a couple from Mexico and one from South Korea, two independent travellers (UK man & Japanese woman) and two large groups from South Korea and China). The level of understanding was very differing, the UK man was able to understand any detail from the guide and mostly of the Asians didn’t catch a word – I guess. Anyhow, the tour was very exciting, and we discover all the main attractions of this beautiful part of the world. But, what is so spectacular on Fraser Island?

As I explained before, Fraser consists only of sand, no stones or something similar. Of course, there is some organic material that are being produced by the various and numerous trees. Besides the large forest, there are some lovely and clear water lakes and endless and quite superb beaches. These beaches are definitely not suitable to take a bath (to the dangerous causes of sharks, sharp stones and poisonous jellyfishes). They are more ideal replacement for the missing streets on the island. If you want to visit this sandy place, you will use a four wheels drive vehicle. Even then, you could bog down in the sand. But, which were the main appeals of this tour?

First at all we visited a very Maggi Place. The rainbow beach got his name from the different colours of the sand. The sand cliffs is made of yellow, red, white and brown kinds of sand. The name “Rainbow beach” is furthermore the name for a little village next to this beach and close to the ferry bridge to the Fraser Island. The transfer from the mainland to the isle is unexpected simple, a small ferry and two natural, sandy shores. That’s it.

After a four hours drive in the coach, we needed an active break. How about walking through a fairy-tale wood and taking a bath in a lovely lake? That was less a question than a fixed event in the guided tour. However, I enjoyed the barefoot stroll to the little pond in the middle of a moving sand dune. Without a doubt, sand dunes are shifting from one place to an other and during this walk they bury the forest without any hesitation. No matter what, we took pleasure in spending some time at this wonderful place.

The next day, after a very entertaining evening with our roommates (a swedish doctor and the independent UK traveller), we did some sightseeing on the island (visit an old shipwreck, take a bath in a Champaign baths and a very refreshing river) we were offered the opportunity to take an island flight. Ok, 75 $ / person is a bit pricy for 20 Minute flight. But, firstly we haven’t known the length and secondly the airplane was starting and landing at the beach. How awesome is that! Regrettably, we only were flying about 20 Minutes, but it was quite magnificent.

The sum up, like in an advanced writing, the whole trip was imposing.

After two weekends full of work (writing an essay and preparing the final presentation for my language course), we visited the rainforest mountains near Brisbane. The region with the name “Scenic Rim” has a very green and hilly landscape and includes a lot of breathtaking outlooks. We looked up four different locations: the skywalk, the Polish Place, the curtin falls and the botanic garden.

Our stations in the area of the Tamborine Mountains

The skywalk in the Tamborine Mountains is a well-prepared path trough the rainforest. The roundway is a combination of small trails on the ground and a stable stale constructive bridge trough the treetops. It was very impressive to walk in an Australian rainforest and discover the different local plants. The flora is quite dissimilar compare with the trees and grasses in a european forest. Especially the large and playful roots and the high-rise and tropical trees are just imposing.

A second attraction in this countryside was the Polish restaurant on the top of the hill with a breath-taking outlook. A second appeal was the high number of parrots, which has been fed in the restaurant. By the way, my food was delicious, but the assortment for Maggi was not that big.

We spend the afternoon in the national park. This green area is quite extensive and includes different places like a small waterfall or an attractive and lovely botanic garden. This botanic garden was more garden than botanic. Even then, you can easily study the diverse plants and insects. (–> the owners also created a fantastic and particular informative path for children which explains the fundamental knowledge about nature and the specific rainforest environment).

impressions from the Tamborine Mountain