Travelling in the Land of Oz

Hello folks! Carine and I have decided to revive this blog, simply because this trip is so interesting and eventful that we buay tahan must let everyone know ah!!

Well to be honest, not everything on this trip went smoothly, but it was still an experience to savour. Our furthest trip ever (7 hours ah!!), first trip to an angmoh country, first trip where our income was slightly more flexible.... Oh and it was also Carine's first time in Australia, and although i had been there before, it was a cool 14 years ago, so my memory of the place was limited to the topless babe i saw in Bali during our brief stopover on the way back to Singapore. This kind of thing very hard to forget one. And its not because i'm a hum sup lo hor.

Anyways, when we decided to plan for the trip, we did the usual Singaporean thing and plowed through the various travel fairs and roadshows for trips to australia. But in the end, we decided that free and easy was the way to go! Honestly, nothing beats going on a trip unencumbered by kiasu aunties, screaming kids, and the "oh you have twenty minutes here. Please be back on the bus by... if not everyone has to wait for you and then our itineray will be pushed back lei. So must be considerate ok?" And so your experience of that particular place would simply be limited to how much strength you have to squeeze past the above-mentioned aunties to squeeze yourself into the scenic spots for some random photo-taking. What is perhaps the best part of going free and easy is the fact that your time is your own, and you can choose to do whatever you want, whenever you want. And if u encounter bad weather, u can simply change your schedule around! (And we needed plenty of that in our time in australia....)

Thus was born the idea of planning for our most ambitious trip ever! It was a labour of love that took many months, only because our schedules were so hectically crazy that we hardly found time to plan together lar. Booking the flights and hotels was easy peasy, just go online and surf the numerous travel websites or forums and you will be able to get a good idea of where to stay for any budget.

Planning the itinerary was the rather more difficult task. Cos hor, Sydney and Gold Coast (oh yes, thats where we wanted to go!) are quite huge places, so deciding which spots to visit involved a lot of reading and checking with friends to obtain their unbiased views of certain 'recommended' spots (as recommended by Lonely Planet and the likes). You shouldn't belive everything Lonely Planet says, like for instance they recommended that we visit this house, and we did. And it was really a house. Thats all. A very old and small house.

But i must confess, Carine did most of the planning of the itinerary lar. She's much better at doing this kind of thing. I provided the very helpful input of things like "i want to see the beach", or "i want to go movieworld." Yup.

In my defence however, I did provide the brute strength in lifting our combined luggages, and always being the first-to-go-into-hotel-room-to-see-whether-got-ghost person.

Anyhoo, read on to the next post for the good stuff! Hopefully i can finish writing before the brutal reality of work descends upon me.