guten rutsch!

...ich rutsch heuer nicht nur warm und ohne feuerwerk, sondern auch noch 8 stunden voraus. seltsamer gedanke.

damits gerecht bleibt

dzisiaj cos po polsku! vicky pakuje wlasnie walizke na podroz do niemiec (leci w poniedzialek popoludniu) i przy tej okazji chciala sie pozbyc pare ciuchow z ktorych "wyrosla" lub ktorych poprostu juz nie nosi. chciala je zaniesc do czerwonego krzyza lecz dala mi przed tym na przeglad... myslalam na poczadku ze to pewnie jakies szmaty ktorych bym nawet nie ubrala do sprzatania. tym czasem okazalo sie, ze ciuchy omal nowe, jak ze sklepu i w dodatku super jakosci warte pewnie dobrych kilkadziesiat dollarow. hihi. spodni niestety nie moglam zatrzymac bo byly za krotkie, ale za to mam kilka nowych bluzek i krotkich sexy kiecek :D ciekawe jak ja to wszystko przetransportuje do niemiec...

sorry, ein insider

haben fuer heut abend picknick geplant und zwar mit irenes norwegischem besuch. simone, ich muss dich mal auf den neuesten stand bringen...!

tot

so. fix und alle vom schreiben und hab erstmal die nase voll von meinem blog... bis auf simone weiss eh kein mensch wie viel zeit dahinter steckt. aber ich machs ja freiwillig :) in diesem sinne viel spass beim lesen. bildchen werden auch bald online gestellt, aber eigentlich hab ich die meisten sowieso schon hier drauf.

friday, december 22nd

it was time to go home again :( and since we had more than 800km to drive we left pretty early in the morning. driving was actually fun. didn’t have to rush and there was hardly anybody else on the road. in hyden we got to see the "wave rock" - a bizarrely shaped rock. australia has no shortage of rocks, mostly weird looking ones, and this one was no exception:) in fact it was bigger we thought.
arrived in perth in the late afternoon, were both pretty dead but were too exited to have a car to stay at home. so we did some major christmas shopping at coles first and then grabbed gavin and went to "little creatures" (a brewery-restaurant in freo) where i finally got to eat kangaroo!!! I hate to say that but it was delicious. honestly. tasted a bit like chicken, looked and felt like beef though.
on the way home we stopped at kingspark to take some perth pictures at night – also something i always wanted to do but never managed to. don’t even know what i like more, perth at night or during the day but it was definitely a wonderful way to finish our little 2700km-journey!

thursday, december 21st

yay, sun was out again! well, at least from time to time. spent the morning at cape grand national park east of esperance which, honestly, is a very beautiful place. the park has some fun walking & hiking tracks and some of the best beaches in australia. first we climbed to the top of frenchman’s peak, enjoyed the breathtaking views (and got burned) and then we went to see lucky bay which was announced to be australia’s whitest and most beautiful beach... i don’t really know if it's the most beautiful one – it’s impossible to compare (they’re all great:) ) – but it was in deed v e r y white. lucky bay is also the spot where you can meet kangaroos lying in the sun. we didn’t :( but still had great fun fooling around ("playing in the water" as kepo would say:) ) and swimming with santa clause hats!

back in esperance, we had to go on the great ocean drive again, went for a swim at west beach, climbed on some rocks and read stupid gossip magazines. fun! :)

wednesday, december 20th

wednesday was the only day the weather really started to annoy me! i didn't mind having no sun while walking in woods or being in albany, but gosh, esperance was supposed to be a beach experience!!!
we went on a boat trip to woody island and watched the amazing sea-life there (seals & sea lions) and in the afternoon we drove along the so called "great ocean drive", a 36km loop with stunning lookouts and great beaches. since it was (too) cold (to lie on the beach), windy and even drizzling from time to time we only stopped to have some pictures. amazingly, the beaches still looked beautiful, the water was turquoise and clear. couldn’t stop imagining how gorgeous it must be when the sun is out though...

as the great ocean drive didn’t take as long as we though it would, we had some extra time before dinner so i went for a run (while vicky had a nap). went out with vicky’s friend tegan and two of her friends (who happened to be in esperance at the same time), ate in a pub and had a nice girlie night at tegan’s camping ground playing cards, drinking wine & eating raisins (!?) :)

tuesday, december 19th

as we went out the night before we allowed ourselves to sleep in and have a lazy morning. went to a café to have breakfast and then did the so called "boardwalk" near middleton beach where hundreads and hundreads of lizards were crossing! funny animals.
our drive to esperance (almost 500km) was o.k. well, vicky was driving and i was sleeping so no big surprise i didn’t mind sitting in the car for 5 hours :)
arrived in esperance around 5pm I think. would have gone to the beach or done something more exiting but weather was shit again so we decided to wait, explored the town a bit and went to the movies ("007").

monday, december 18th

weather was still "horrible" (= cloudy). went to another beach called "ocean beach". (what a weird name!) and watched some people surf. ...apparently, they didn’t mind the conditions (= "rubbish":), zoom in blackboard on picture!) the highlight of the day was the next stop: an animal farm where we got to feed and pat koalas, kangaroos, alpacas, guinea pigs, rabbits, horses, donkeys, goats, and camel kinga!!! there were also heaps of other animals like emus ("em" and "mu"), dingos, chickens, bisons, ...so much fun!

back on the road we couldn’t miss out on a cheese factory and two wineries and get some more bottles of wine. in one of the wineries the owner went absolute nuts after i had told him where i was from. he didn’t know kulmbach, neither bayreuth (of course:) ) so i mentioned wuerzburg thinking he might have heard of it since it is a german wine region. then he started to tell us all about a fairytale-wedding he once attended in wuerzburg, how it was the best wedding he’s ever been to, how he had to kidnap the bride, how he didn’t keep in touch with the groom, wolfgang, but met him 20 years later. he liked his own story so much we didn’t want to interrupt him, kept tasting wines and let him daydream.

before it was time to say goodbye we had a little picnic at the river in denmark and headed towards albany. stopped at a beach called cosy corner which (due to the weather) wasn’t cosy at all, but never mind.
albany was wa’s first town (established in 1826). its population is something around 30000, I think, so quite big compared to everything else in the west. (there are 2 million people in wa, only 500 000 live outside of perth.) went for a little walk in town (which sort of reminded me of fremantle) and then to "the gap" and "natural bridge", quite spectacular rock formations at the coast. i felt like a little child, climbed basically on every single rock :) and enjoyed the gorgeous view. once again i was astonished by the powerful and a bit frightening way waves were breaking.
on the way back we (pretty much spontaneously) decided to step by michael's parents’. wanted to say hi, maybe chat for 5 min, have a look at their house (in the living room the wall facing the ocean is made out of glass. and since they live on a hill it makes you feel like flying above the ocean. wow!) and leave, but they wouldn’t let us go without having dinner. and so we ended up eating yummy fish michael’s dad had caught himself the day before and chatting for 2 hours. very nice people. oh yes, and they also had one of these talking parrots in their backyard. how cool is that?!
our backpackers was nice as well; a lot bigger than the ones so far with heaps of people walking around and always somebody to talk to. there was some kind of a "backpacking-feeling" in the air, which made me want to go travelling on the east coast!!! (...or at least stay in sydney for a week.)

sunday, december 17th

our first destination was the "big brook dam" near pemberton. it’s a local
hang-out with a small swimming beach and a quite nice 3.5km track surrounding the dam. vicky had a swim and we also did the little walk, where (boo!) we saw two snakes crawling out of the bush! scary... Well, actually not really. poor snakes were more afraid of us, hid right away and didn’t even want to have a proper picture! :(

after a shocking experience like that it was time to have lunch. went to the lavender & berry farm, had coffee, ice-cream & pancakes and enjoyed our last sunny day. obviously, we didn't know that at that time but enjoyed ourselves anyway :)
the next little stop was somewhere in the middle of nowhere on the way to walpole. i was sleeping the whole time in the car and had no clue where vicky had pulled over. there was a little track so we decided to give it a shot and do some bushwalking (= hiking). couldn’t do all of it though as the path got worse and worse: it was unpaved, couldn’t really see what we were stepping on and were too afraid to meet more of our friends (= snakes). yep, i do have some common sense from time to time and bushwalking in thongs was probably a stupid idea to begin with. walpole, home to the valley of the giants and the tree top walk, was a lot of fun again.
the tree top walk is a 600m long and 40m high steel bridge where you can walk among treetops and have a fun bird-eye view. really cool! pretty amazing to watch birds flying underneath you! nothing for people who are shy of height though 'cause it's very shaky and the whole construction sways with the wind. emi, you’d love it:)

no clue why, but going by car automatically puts me to sleep. on the way to denmark i couldn’t keep my eyes open again and poor vicky had to entertain herself singing christmas carols.
denmark was awesome! seriously, danish people don’t even know what they're missing out on living in the real thing! :) it is a truly wonderful spot: quiet, cute but still with a lot of stuff to do - the first town i could imagine to live in for a little while. matching the idyllic town, the hostel was fantastic. i didn’t know a backpackers could be that neat & clean. probably cleaner than my own house. hehe. plus, it was the cheapest hostel as well, the owner was the friendliest guy ever, there was free coffee, tea & milo for everybody, ...oh yes, and flint (= the dog)!

we wished we could have stayed more than one night but that would have messed up all our plans. after we had checked in it turned out that they accidentally double-booked our dorm and so we ended up having a twin room instead. (for no extra charge of course.) cooked a very yummy indian dish and went to see the "elephant rocks" & "green pool" (= rocky beaches nearby). simply fell in love with this place: huge rocks lying on white sand and not a single human being around. lovely! ...i think in some sense even a bit terrifying. can’t describe how much i liked it even though the weather started to get nasty. also saw two stringrays. (and guess what? i decided not to swim:) )

saturday, december 16th

we started the day with one of my absolute favourites: the margaret river chocolate factory (= paradise!). yum yum, i simply loved this place as you could stuff yourself with chocolate for free! :) they had h u g e containers of chocolate samples (dark, milk & white) waiting to be eaten and that’s exactly what we did! too bad, i never know when to stop when it comes to chocolate (especially since regular aussie chocolate tastes gross!) and kept stuffing more and more of it till i felt sick. even this didn’t stop us from having more. we actually b o u g h t some truffles as well and enjoyed them with coffee outside.
the rest of the afternoon was similar: went to the cheese factory (and again ate till we got sick of cheese & crackers), an olive oil factory and visited 7 or 8 wineries i think. we were switching driving every other day and since vicky was sitting behind the wheel the day before it was my turn to drive. i tried to be good, went a bit lower on the wine and only had as many samples as my guilty conscience allowed to. after all, visiting wineries is not just about drinking. ha ha. they are quite pretty and fun to look at as they range from cute tiny little family wineries (where we were chatting with the owners) to huge companies with heaps of tourists running around.
we left margaret river in the late afternoon and hit the road again to go to Pemberton. on the way, only half hour from margaret river, we missed out on having a look at the lighthouse in augusta which marks the spot where the indian and the great southern oceans meet. that’s simply because, unfortunately, we forgot we were in western australia – the "everything closes at 5pm"-state but oh well. nobody distinguishes between these two oceans anyway, so who cares.
our backpackers in pemberton was o.k. actually, pretty nice but there were some weird creatures running around. (why would somebody go backpacking at the age of 70?!) before dinner (= pasta & pesto, that tasted wonderful after 2 days living on rice crackers) we went to see the so called "gloucester tree", a 60m tall tree you can climb using a ladder. vicky didn’t want to go up, i did and didn’t regret it for a second 'cause the view was rewarding but hey... i was really scared at some point. there was nothing to secure you whatsoever: if i had sweaty hands, got dizzy or simply slipped accidentally... i’d be dead by now. i reckon, thongs (= flip-flops) and a skirt are not the best climbing equipment either but i’ve survived :) the only thing i didn’t quite get is how crazy parents can make their little kids (there was a eleven year old girl climbing as well) do it...

friday, december 15th

we were to leave on thursday to have an extra day but, unfortunately, had to change our plans due to my meeting on friday morning. to save some time, while i was still at school vicky got the car - an almost brand new nissan tiida, which had only done 350km so far. probably the newest car i’ve ever been driving...
perth was freaking hot, the weekend was supposed to be even hotter, so we thought we were smart & lucky to leave 40c behind. yeah, right:) i had no idea i was going to miss the sun in a couple of days.


we left nedlands around noon and more than doubled the mileage going all the way to margaret river with just one stop in between. busselton (230km from perth) is a pretty little town surrounded by white-sand beaches. its main attraction though is the 2km jetty where sabina had to have a little photo shoot of course.
our next destination was margaret river. keps and i have been there before on a day trip but, honestly, the margaret river we were shown few months ago was not the margaret river i saw this time. it’s located 10km inland along the river that gives the town its name. the name "margaret river" refers to the whole region though. (and not just to the town itself) it is one of vicky’s favourite places in wa. why? if you think one cannot live on cheese, chocolate and wine only (and maybe some surfing in between), you have to come here. Seriously... there are more than 20 different surfing spots, 50 wineries, a chocolate factory and a cheese factory on the top of it all, so all you have to do is zipping up and down a road of your choice and filling your tummy with yummy food. we arrived at 5pm – too late for most of the "attractions" as they usually close at 5. luckily, we still found two wineries that were open, tasted at least 10 different wines, bought 3 bottles, stopped at prevelly park (= beach) and checked in at our first hostel in town. wanted to go to a pub to relax after all that driving, but skipped that part of the day, ate at a chinese place instead and went to sleep pretty soon. the backpackers was very busy and not the cleanest one but even though we shared the room with 6 more people i had a great 9 hour sleep!