Coogee, Melbourne Sydney, Byron Bay

I forgot to mention in the last post that me and the Welsh guys I hung out with on NYE also went to Coogee (a suburb of Sydney) to visit a friend of theirs and have a barbeque at the beach + beer of course. Coogee is a damn nice place, nice beach, and a good atmosphere, when we arrived it looked like party central #1 though, so many people. So we buy the stuff needed for the barbeque and get cracking. The boys needed to get back to Sydney to catch a train, but when we got offered to crash on the couches in the hostel where the girl they knew worked, we weren't hard to convince. We headed  to the hostel and dropped out stuff off, and hung out there and had a few more beers. After this we headed out again, to the beach, but everything was closed down since it was a Sunday, so we weren't entirely sure what to do. Well that else is there to do then go skinny dipping, the girls idea, we just gladly followed their lead. Anyhow, we get back to the hostel and get the couches in the common room. Mine is like 10cm to be comfortable and we didn't have enough blankets either, but, we got a place to crash who are we to complain. Only annoying thing is that we got woken up at 0700 and pestered with questions like: Who are you? Do you live here? If not you have to pay! You are not allowed to sleep here! So yeah, we said our goodbyes and hightailed out of there for breakfast. Good times!

Melbourne

After the Coogee adventure I just returned to my hostel in Sydney in the morning checked out and headed for the airport. I still hadn't gotten my tickets from the agency though. So I as around waiting to until like 1.5 hours before liftoff, still no tickets. Tried to call them, send them emails, talk to them on facebook, no answer (until later, way later). So I have to buy a ticket on the airport, like 50 bucks more expensive, annoying to say the least. Anyhow, when aboard I get to sit down beside a fellow named Tony, and we started chatting, and suddenly he gets all ecstatic,  he leans in and whispers: "We got an Australian superstar on the plane" I look to the business class section and see an elderly gentleman sitting down. It was Barry Humphries famous for his woman character Dame Edna Everidge. Never heard of him/her, I guess I'm too young or he/her isn't that popular outside of Australia. Anyhow, safe and sound on the ground I head over to Laura's place where I was staying for my duration in Melbourne. Laura and her sister Christine are two awesome sisters me and Bendik met while inter-railing in Istanbul back in 2010. And so yeah, pretty awesome seeing them again!

 

Yeah, as you can see, I'm quite content at the moment. Beer and beautiful women, life is good :)

 

As good hosts they brought me to all these cool bars all around Melbourne. This one was down a small alley way.

We also went to a marked where they sold a sorts of stuff, food included, so I got myself a crocodile burger with a sausage of Emu on the side, surprisingly good! 

Other than that I just went around and explored the city, and the suburb St.Kilda where I stayed, below is some of the stuff I saw.

A tudor house in on of the many gardens in Melbourne.

Yeah, don't know what was happening here, also in one of the gardens.

This is the Shrine of Remembrance in the botanical gardens. It is a war memorial for fallen in WW1 and other conflicts as well, with a museum inside.

The interior.

View of Melbourne from the top of the memorial.

From the crypt, where you can also see all the banners from discontinued companies.

Another view of the memorial.

I found this kind of funny, from one of the bathrooms inside the memorial *snicker*.

In St.Kilda I walked around a bit as well and found a community garden with some cool stuff!

 

A scarecrow I'm assuming is trying to look like Ned Kelly (I'll get back to Ned a bit later on).

 

A pirate ship.

A dinosaur.

AN eagle or a hawk.

Another view.

Down town Melbourne.

We also headed off to the pier in St.Kilda one night to look at the penguins coming in! This was quite cool, but sadly it was to dark to get good footage of the penguins. 

View of Melbourne from St.Kilda pier.

The famous Luna park in St.Kilda, over a 100 years old amusement park, not that big, but fun for the kids. The roller coaster encircling the whole area was built in California and shipped over if my memory serves me right.

Oh, I had rain for like 10 minutes!

I also checked out the state library in Melbourne, had a few cool exhibits.

Old atlas

And its description, quite old.

Encyclopedia Britannica.

And its description

This is the study room at the library

And a view from above

Aight, here we go, below is pictures Ned Kelly's armor. He is an Australian folk hero, kinda like a modern day Robin Hood. He broke into banks and destroyed the papers for peoples mortgages etc. making them debt free. In the armor you can see dents after the bullets hitting him while in a firefight with the police.

While exploring Melbourne I also stumbled upon some really cool graffiti alleys.

An artist at work.

The finished piece.

Det er eeeeeeeeeeeeeeg som er Ugleeeeeeeeee!

There were many many more cool pieces and when I came back a few days later there were many new as well.

Pamela doesn't work as a lifeguard anymore apparently.

Saw this hostel in St.Kilda, great name!

Back in Sydney

Back in Sydney i hook up with the Welsh guys again and we go for a Asian dinner, wasabi glaced beef etc. Good stuff, anyhow, their bathroom had like three urinals in 1 square meter, I did not take a picture of this, but I did take a picture of the statue outside.

Yeah I don't know, weird shit.

Can't say I've seen this warning before.

We paid like 5 dollars to enter an Chinese garden, well spent money, quite serene and beautiful.

Good to know I guess.

Oh, just want to write a bit short about the hostels I stayed at.  It smelled like death incarnate when entering the premises, a moldy cellar smell in the elevator and all the way up the stairs. It was fine in the reception though. The Welsh dudes had warned me about the stench and the bit shady rooms, it did not prepare me for what is to come though.

Please read the rules before continuing on.

Yeah the room had two "permanents" living there, slobs.

Rob just chilling out, one of the Welsh dudes! Notice the woman's purse on the left hand side there.

Stuff to the left, one of the "permanents" stuff to the right, garbage. Notice the cup in the window sill, I think it actually contained alien life. When they finally came to clean, they vacuumed around all the garbage and didn't bother with that. When I later returned the only thing to disappear from the rooms where the cup and the purse. So I don't know if the cup sprouted legs and grew a sense of fashion, grabbed the purse and legged it. For the record we were only guys staying in the room.

For the last day in Sydney before taking the bus to Byron Bay, me and Jasper (one of the other Welsh dudes) went to the maritime museum when we stumbled upon the submarine HMAS Onslow (decommissioned in 1999). This we had to check out.

Entry, at the front, don't be claustrophobic.

Torpedo room, six firing tubes.

A torpedo, I think he said they could get 16 of those in there.

Bunk beds, might actually be better than some of the hostels I've been to.

Kithcen

Fire control for the torpedoes.

I don't even.

Engine room.

Breathing gear that connect to their survival suits. One room in the front and back each had these copper tubes providing air like this in case of emergencies.

A small leisure room, I also saw a copy of The Hunt for Red October lying around, gotta love it! :)

Here the was the actual helm, or where the person steered the sub sat. Tight.

Over to the destroyer HMAS Vampire

Yeah I really don't know.

Mess hall, they had their own cafeteria and everything.

Loading mechanism for the main cannon. That shell is huge by the way.

Skippers quaters.

And I guess it's not complete without a bar!

One of the main cannons.

Okies then.

So over to the command center in the ship

Enemy vessel spotted  on the horizon! Aye aye skipper, 5 degrees east, full ahead!

Byron Bay

After Sydney, I took an overnight bus to Byron Bay, quite a nice place I must say! Stayed at a cool hostels with a pool and everything, free surf boards etc. This was quite the chill place and I went for a long walk up to the Lighthouse and did two dives at Julian's Rock.

The lighhouse.

The lens of the lighthouse, if you can see chips in the glass, it is from lightning strikes. This whole lens floated on a small pool of mercury, encased in metal though.

Sounds like an awesome beer, from the museum in the lighthouse.

This as well!

Hello from the top of the top of the lighthouse.

Semi dead beetle, shoe for scale, top of lighthouse.

So from the way up to the lighthouse I was in the most eastern part of Australia.

 

Quite the nice view along the way.

Through a small rain forest on the way back down.

On the main beach during night, these guys showed up. Renting out wireless headphones where you could choose which color (channel) you wanted to listen too, and hence the DJs played different music.

The local lizards at our hostel Django and Larry, they are quite domestic and could be fed. They like bacon apparently!

I taped my whole dive, but at the very end I managed to get a picture of a turtle! :)

Also here's a small video of some of the stuff I saw! Yes, that are sharks.

Sydney and New Years Eve

 Hello from Sydney!

 

 With the mandatory shot of the Opera and Harbour Bridge

So yeah, what has happened since last update, well, arrived at my hostel,
which by the looks and the reviews I read online seems to be the shittiest one in
whole of Sydney, but at the same time the only one where you didn't need to
book for a total of two weeks because of NYE, had to book for five nights
which was okay. The reviews said that the hostel got bedbugs, clogged toilets,
no toilet paper, shitty kitchen etc. I can confirm all except the shitty kitchen
since I never made food there. But it had one great thing, a cafe/bar in the same
building where you could buy dirt cheap breakfast, beer, food etc. Great stuff!

 A "little" bedbug fella out for a walk.

So what else? I've basically just been walking around Sydney looking at stuff I remembered from last time and also looking at new stuff of course. Libraries, cathedrals, war memorials, parks, food courts etc.

 From the State library of New South Wales, quite nice.

 They also had a small library called the Shakespeare library, which was closed the day I was there but I managed to charm my way in. Quite a nice small library with some interesting stuff, one of them is the facsimile of the first complete collection of Shakespeare's work. They got the original in storage, and apparently it was worth quite a lot!

In the library laid in the floor they have the map Captain Cook make of Australia, as can be seen the east coast here is barely charted.

After sightseeing and spending all day outside it is good to chill out and have a few drinks/beers with friends, and for this we have the splendid local "brand" I'm going to introduce you to now. This is wine, well, rather, what is to bad to be wine mixed together and cheap. 4 liters for 10 dollars? Oh and the best part, it's just called Goon. I think it says on the cartoon it can contain traces of milk and egg, and if you buy two cartoons of these they might end up tasting differently, so we are talking quality wine here!

 The famous goon, if you ever encounter someone from Australia or that have spent sometime there, they are sure to have encountered this fabulous golden liquid!

 

So this is my best photography from new years eve, and it's taken after the fireworks, still quite nice though. So why no fireworks pictures? Well, we have to go back like 11 hours in time. Me and some friends I met at the hostel went to the Botanical Gardens in Sydney and wanted to watch the fireworks from there because you can see both the bridge and the opera house. The problem is though the garden closes at 1500 so you have to be there before that, we got there 1450, and with people camping out in the gardens from the day before and people arriving all day before us we got quite bad places in the park. So, we waited nine hours to basically see the trunks and foliage of exotic trees! So yeah, if you saw the fireworks on tv, you had a much better view. I'll upload a video a bit later with the little footage I got though!

Also had Kangaroo again, here on skewers, still good!

 War memorial in Hyde Park to commemorate the fallen soldiers from the first world war and other engagements.

 The main room contained this statue, and it was quite beautiful. From the website of the Anzac Memorial the following is said:

"The sculpture ‘Sacrifice’ is the central motif of the Memorial’s design. Symbolising the spirit of courage, endurance and sacrifice, it depicts a body of a young Anzac soldier lying over a shield and sword. He is supported by three female figures and an infant, representing ‘his best beloved’ – mother, sister, wife and child. The infant also represents future generations."

The dome is decorated with  120000 stars, representing each man and woman serving overseas in the first world war.

 

The memorial at night.

 Also encountered a posom, they are quite domesticated.

 

Found a cool Knights Templar fountain pen and letter opener set. The price however was not as cool, 4500$, ouch.

 Found this dude as well, apparently under the tutelage of St.Mary, but he needed some help with is Ipad, I stepped in and helped of course. At first look, it actually looked like a tablet of some sort, but alas, it was a chalk board.

Out eating at a Malaysian restaurant with the specialty Roti which is a sweet bread, kinda tasted a bit like pancakes, here with sweet red onions in them and hot curry sauce, fish sauce and some other unknown sauce for dip.

Some of the local birds, don't know their names, we just called them "Bendy beaks" xD

So Woolloomooloo is where we stayed in Sydney, and the reason I got it here is because the name cracks me up, because it makes me think of this:

Ps. you have to be a bit of a nerd to get this.

Anyhow, that is it for now, next update will be about my stay in Melbourne with some friends and I met while interrailing in 2010! Oh yeah, I'll try and get the video from NYE up and running, but the internet down here is sketchy at best.