G'day all !!!

Sorry for not giving news of our whereabouts any sooner, but as you will have guessed it from seeing the pictures : yes we finally managed to get out of Queenstown ! We eventually worked our way through some snowy passes to reach the West Coast and we fortunately had enough time left to climb the beautiful Franz Josef glacier and walk around the Abel tasman park. A great way to finish New Zeland.

It's now time for a long overdue blog update !! We just spent the last 3 weeks in sunny Australia. We first landed in Melbourne where we quite simply invaded our friends Hannah & Sam's flat and parasited them for a full 9 days :)) We can't tell you how much we appreciated the luxury of staying in a cosy home and being looked after !!!
Not to mention that seing them going to work every morning while we lazily lounged around reminded us of how lucky we were to be on a 10 months long holiday ...all the more enjoyable :)

Melbourne was ace. Plenty to do & see but a nice human size. 9 days were perfect to visit everything at a leisurely pace (while allowing us to enjoy a full day of essential catch up on the latest educational day time TV programmes of course :).
Hannah & Sam live in a great location, South Melbourne, 10mn from the centre in tram & 5mn only from the sea. This suburb is full of charming traditional townhouses well preserved, and trendy restaurants & bars.

Melbourne is also where we discovered the exciting Aussie rules footie, a national sport which kind of mixes Rugby and basket ball rules. Hannah & Sam took us to a match on the famous Melbourne Cricket ground, a beautiful open sky ground (which was our luck since it rained continuously during the whole match duration!!)
This sport is fast and furious ! It takes a little while to work out all the rules, but then the speed of it makes it a really exciting game to watch. The fact that the young players also wear very tight-fitting shorts really adds to the game, Hannah and I concluded after long deliberations. A point of view that was somewhat lost on Andy and Sam ... :)

Another highlight of our stay in Melbourne was our trip to Philip Island, a beautiful island 140km South of Melbourne. That's where we saw our first fluffy koala ! A species that sleeps 95% of the time and eats eucalyptus leaves the rest of it. Nice lifestyle !
Philip Island is also famous for its penguin parade. After spending our time in South America running after penguins who were set on migrating away from us, we couldn't miss the show !! And indeed we wouldn't have wanted to. Every night, along the Philip Island coast, hundreds of the tiniest penguins in the world (previously known as the "fairy penguins", only 30cm high!!) come out of the sea at dawn, wobbling along, all in a line, to find refuge in their burrows. A magical spectacle. We unfortunately couldn't take any pictures so as not to bother them, but believe us it was a beautiful spectacle to watch !

After Melbourne, we headed off to Sydney. Trying to get there wasn't all that easy !
Because of heavy fog in Melbourne the morning of our departure, our flight was delayed by 9h !!! That left us with all the necessary time in the departure lounge to read every single gossip and car magazines without buying them, peruse in detail every single souvenir shop to conclude that absolutely nothing is worth buying, get bored and complain about getting bored, enjoy a 4 stars meal at Mc Donald's with our $8 food voucher graciously provided by JetStar, and finally end up in the pub drinking beers and playing cards ! A fun day that was !!
The only advantage of this delay was that we arrived in Sydney at night time and caught our first glimpse of the beautiful Sydney opera from the air, all illuminated :)

Sydney also completely charmed us ! Harbour bridge and Sydney Opera were of course beautiful and we photographed them under every angle, but we just loved walking all around Sydney. So many things to discover at every street corner.
We loved the vibrant Darling Harbour, the luxurious Wooloomooloo Quay (what a name!), Bondi Beach and its surfer culture, the somptuous Botanical Gardens who fill up at lunch time with health-obsessed Australians runnning around (!!) and last but not least our own dingy King's Cross neighbourhood , where the streets are lined up with lapdancing bars & pink flashing neons, prostitutes and pubs, nothing but the best for us!

After the luxury of Hannah's home in Melbourne, it was also back to dorms for us, sharing our rooms this time with dead cockroachs we found under our mattresses....Home sweet home :) But one good thing about our hotel was that they gave us a booklet with free drinks vouchers in bars scattered around Sydney. And we decided to put them at good use by attempting a free drinks marathon one rainy afternoon !! Now I will say only one thing : thank god I am going out with an English boy. His higher alcohol resistance allowed us to make it back to the hotel in one piece. I unfortunately have no recollection of what happened after free drink no.5.....French girl drinking for you !

During this eventful Sydney trip, we also met some exotic personnalities : an 85yr old little nun helping to manage an aboriginal boomerang shop who upon learning Andy was English excitedly started explaining to us that Lady Diana was a missionary of God (as revealed by God itself 2 months ago to another nun) and left us with a letter explaining it all for us to give to the Royal family once back home ....OK then....will do !
Our own Crocodile dundee guide, a nature fanatic who took us on a memorable tour of the beautiful Blue Mountains, 2hrs outside Sydney (and where we got to see our first bouncing Skippy!!!:). A passionate Aboriginal Didjereedoo player who enchanted us during a free concert at the Outback Centre.... And the list goes on and on :)
In short, thumbs up for Sydney !

Our last stop in Australia was Cairns. We were incredibly looking forward to it as diving on the barrier reef was a childhood dream ! And it was great ! But it wasn't as easy as we thought it would be. For a start to reach the reef we opted for the charming sailing boat as opposed to the big white catamaran . And charming it was indeed, particularly when the passengers kicked off a vomit competition after only 30mn sailing on a pretty rough sea.
Andy, very white himself, spent most of the 4h return trip to the reef very silent and concentrated on the horizon line....!

The rough sea made the snorkelling pretty strenuous so we finally opted for the diving. A first for the 2 of us. The diving training was very rough n' ready to say the least. In 3 easy steps they put the bottles on our backs, threw us in the water without explanations apart from "here is the bit where you breathe from" and undertook to sink us.... At that point Andy just went with it but I panicked and started kicking furiously to resurface, insulting the guide about his training methods !!! 10mn of "equipment talk" later I was ready to rejoin the rest of the group under water :)
And god, was it beautiful ! Just imagine crystal blue waters and a myriad of colourful corals and fishes ! We were quite simply dazzled ! But we couldn't help but start growing uneasy when seeing how some people were not particularly careful and kept hitting the fragile corals with their flippers. It makes you think that this increasingly eroded natural wonder should unfortunately be protected from tourists ...

Our second big adventure in Cairns was doing a parachute jump. I wanted to celebrate in style the last day of my 30th and we fancied a bit of adrenaline rush. We got what we paid for !! We did it on Mission Beach. I can't think of a more beautiful place to do it. Mission Beach has all the attributes of the dream beach. White sand, line of palm trees, view of the barrier reef and blue waters. The view from up there was somptuous.
I loved every single of this parachute jump, even the moment just before the jump where you lean out of the plane and you're at 14,000 feet and suddenly you realise you're dead scared and you decide not to do it anymore but then you know that it is too late to change your mind because you're already starting to fall forwards so you just suck it up, think of your mum and how much you love her and go with the flow ! :)
My only mistake was to forget to decompress my ears on the way down, so I eventually made it to the beach completely ecstatic but with half of my hearing intact :)

Now Andy's experience was all together different (as the "shouting pictures" might already portray it!!). He hated every single minute of it : the going up, the going down and his bossy instructor. Just off the plane, he and his instructor made a few flips that scared the hell out of him. As a result , even once stabilised, Andy couldn't wait to get back safely on the beach.
As he says it himself : never again !

And that was it for our Ozzie adventure. We finished in style by celebrating my 31st birthday in a typical Australian restaurant, with emu, kangourou and crocodile meats in our plates ! Accompanied of course by a good bottle of Australian wine. Yummy yummy :))

Now Asia awaits us. It is exciting but it also means that we have passed the mid-point in our travels....:( Don't want yet to believe that every good thing has an end !!!

We'll try to give you news sooner next time, that will make for a shorter blog update !!
Lots of all to you all !!!
Andy and Soph