News from Sydney, 08/11/06 (at least) by Ludo

Hello everybody

Hope everything is okay for you. Here are a few news from my trip in Australia.

I am currently in Sydney. I’ve been here for only 2 days. Looks nice. This is my last week down under as I will leave next Wednesday. After almost 11 months I’m coming back home. I feel a bit sad but very glad to meet my family and my friends again. The weather shock will be quite strong but as we say here “Shit happens”!

I’ve stayed in Cairns (north of Queensland, east coast) for 3 months. I was cooking in a restaurant there; nice job, good pay, beautiful waitresses. We can compare it to Preston (with much more tourists): small city, heaps of young backpackers (instead of students) from all over the world and quite a few nightclubs with cheap drinks. I haven’t found sthg better than the Tokyo jo’s or Squires with pints for 1£ but it was good though. I went diving on the world famous Great Barrier Reef. It was not the best thing I’ve done in Australia but that was a great experience. Imagine being close to a yellow fish or a turtle… We can’t do that in Europe, that’s for sure.

I travelled down the east coast by bus (really boring and exhausting sometimes) coz’ I wanted to stop, even for a few hours, everywhere. I’ve seen many beaches, a few bitches, stayed in Brisbane for a few days. That was a good trip.

Before Cairns, I was on the West Coast, in Broome (North). I was working in a restaurant there as well. It is a small town (around 15000 inhabitants) but very busy in summer and crowded by tourists attracted by the staircase to the moon (wonderful sunset once a month where you can distinguish a staircase starting on the beach and reaching the moon).

We (with my mate Tom who came back to France 1 month ago) travelled from Perth (our first city in Oz, Western Australia) to Broome and then to Cairns (by Darwin) with an old (from 83, older than me) campervan, Katsumi. We’ve managed to drive during more than 15000 kms with just a few problems (radiator fixing → $700) but we did it.

I don’t know if I told you but I lost my driving licence in Broome for … drink driving. It cost me $600 plus 4 months without driving (but you know that French don’t really care about ban and law so I drove!). I will get it back in a few days, just before leaving Australia. Useless.

We bought the car for $2300 and sold it for $2800 (thanks to my business studies in Preston of course). What a bargain! The (happy?) new owners are from England.

That is pretty much all I can tell you at the moment.

These long holidays were awesome and really interesting. I met new people (you know how it works when you travel), found maybe a new job (learnt that cooking was great even if I’m far from being perfect).

About Australia, it is (obviously) a very big country (for the distance between east and west you would visit more than 10 countries in Europe and meet hundred of millions people) with not many citizens. That is perhaps a reason why they are so friendly and welcoming. It is an island too and a bit isolated from the rest of the world (and especially from the problems of war close to Europe, poverty in Africa…) so everybody seems to be a bit unconscious and happier or less stressful. And of course there is the sun and the ocean everywhere.

Please gimme some news when you’ve got a minute

Keep travelling and discover new things when you are still young. It will be too late in a few years. That is what I will do I think.

All the best.

Ludo.