So what am I actually doing?!

If you read this blog often* then you'll probably be wondering what the hell is going on? After a series of relatively coherent posts about hitchhiking in Australia, there have been entries on Honduras, England, Scotland, Italy and Portugal- not generally in any kind of logical order. 

I'm basically waiting and saving money until May 18th when Dan and I fly here...

(Zoom out for a better view)


...to work on a little farm in exchange for our food and accommodation- it's a sort of modern-day consensual slavery. ;)

This will be my first time using Workaway, so I'll let you know how that pans out.

We'll probably stay on Trinidad for a while (and hopefully see some Leatherback Turtles) before heading down into South America. I can't really tell you exactly what we'll be doing or how long we'll be away for, as it was a one-way flight and we want to see how long we can make our money last, but it's a big continent that's sure to be full of ridiculous adventures. 

I'm excited. 

Thanks for reading and watch this space.

*Thank you so much!

In the mean-time you might want to have a look back at some of my favourites...
Hitchhiking Sydney to Melbourne.
Eight amazing seaside spots on the Isle of Islay- advice from a local.
Beg, Borrow and Steal your way out of Athens during a riot.

The time a frog got stuck on my face...

Restrained to a small Scottish island for the time-being, I've been having a think back to some of my most ridiculous travel experiences. This is certainly one of them...

It was 2008- aged sixteen and out of Europe for the first time in my life, it was understandable that an expedition into the Honduran rainforest was pretty exciting for me. I'd been saving for over a year and couldn't sleep for weeks before we left, so by the time we had actually arrived in the jungle, I was practically uncontainable.

Look how excited I was by these creatures...

"Oh wow! So many bees! Fascinating! I'll just let them buzz all around me as I take this photo!"

Every new bug was photographed, long, sweaty treks were greeted with boundless enthusiasm and (to my regret) this frog was so interesting that I just had to have a closer look....

...and then it looked at me...

The next thing I knew, it was flying through the air and landing with a splat onto my cheek! I tried to prize it off but its little feet were clinging onto my skin- two of his toes were poking into my mouth. 

"Don't hurt it!" cried the sympathetic, but slightly hysterical researchers we were supposed to be 'assisting'.

I was stumbling around, bent in two with a combination of laughter and panic, until I eventually managed to wiggle my two fingers under the frog's slimy belly and un-stick him. Maybe I imagined the slurping sound as he reluctantly gave up his sticky grasp?

Anyway, that was the last time I looked an amphibian in the eyes.

Honduras is beautiful though- you should go!

Eight amazing seaside spots on the Isle of Islay- advice from a local.

Islay- the location of the majority of my childhood holidays and now home to my family, I've always known there were plenty of amazing places to see on Islay (even if it is a bit chilly at this time of year). I do realise however, that the majority of people will either have never heard of it or have just seen the name on expensive whiskey bottles, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite places... You can't beat the advice of a local!

Where is it? -Islay is one of the most Southery islands of the Inner Hebrides. You can zoom in and out on this map to see where it is and where my favorite spots are.



How many people live there? -Just over three thousand in the winter, but quite a few more in holiday season.

How can you get around? -If you don't have your own vehicle, Hitchhiking is remarkably easy, you can hire bikes, walk or maybe even kayak if you're into that.

What can I look foreward to? -empty beaches, exciting wildlife (seals, eagles, deer, otters etc), friendly people and weather that might not be quite as bad as you imagine.

Know before you go- It's pronounced 'I-la' not 'is-lay' and yes people will laugh at you if you say it wrong.

1. The Oa- that weird blob that sticks out from the South coast. The Oa has some awe-inspiring cliffs and many deserted beaches. It's also a likely place to spot one or two of the island's famous golden eagles. 

Thanks Chalky for the use of your camera! ...oh and your car :)

2. Saligo Bay- an incredible sandy beach with handy rocks to sit on around the edges. Islay is so remote that my family used to get genuinely annoyed when we had to share the beach with another family. 

3. Portnahaven- a little village on the South-West tip of the island. It's picturesque even when the weather is bad and the best place to spot seals. They're really tame here and often come within a few meters of the shore.

4. Machir Bay- over a mile of sand dunes and clean, empty beach. It can get pretty windy down there and watch out for the currents if you're brave enough to go swimming.

5. Sanaigmore- a beautiful sandy beach with the type of strange protruding rocks that Thailand is famous for (admittedly on a smaller scale). It also has an interesting little local art gallery called 'Outback Art' which doubles up as a coffee shop.

6. Killinallan- with these abandoned farmhouses and the endless beach, it's worth exploring the countryside around Killinallan, just give the bull a wide berth. We think he's harmless, but that bellow sounds a bit intimidating!

7. Kildalton Cross- OK, so it's not quite on the seaside, but erected over 1,200 years ago, Kildalton Cross is the only early Christian cross still standing in its original position. That's got to be worth a visit?

8. Proiag Bay- Pretty much as remote as you can get in a day. Firstly you drive to the end of the road, then to the end of that track to Ardtalla Farm. From Ardtalla there's an interesting (and sometimes very boggy) walk to the abandoned farm Proiag. This old farmhouse has been made into a bothy, with working fireplace an often dry firewood, so if you fancy camping out for the night, you don't even need to bring a tent.

Had enough of empty beaches? Maybe this guy will cheer you up...

Thanks for reading! Ever been to the Hebrides? Which island and what did you think?

How to beg, borrow and steal* your way around Australia when all you have in your pocket is a collection of receipts and an old toothpick...

*Just to clarify- I don’t condone pick-pocketing, it’s just a good phrase.

Watch out for these cheeky chappys...

1. Hitchhike- in case you hadn’t guessed I’m quite a fan… Tips for hitchhiking in Australia
2. Make use of free campsites- you could pay $30 to stay in a crowded caravan park with a load of screaming kids OR you could pitch up in a nice, quiet spot by the beach for free. Admittedly some of the places we camped weren’t exactly designated spots, but if you are organised you could locate the legitimate ones on the internet, by asking in tourist offices or download the app ‘wiki camps’.
3. So that’s your travel and accommodation sorted, what else do you need? I’m afraid I haven’t found a way of getting free food on the road yet (although you could probably get quite a bit of meat off that dead wombat we saw), but the cheapest food we found in Australia came from Aldi. $2.50 for a bottle of wine?! You can't go wrong.
4. Don’t buy water! Even small towns often have a tap somewhere or just ask in a café if you haven’t got that many bottles to fill up.      NOTE: If you can only find a stupid vertical drinking fountain it’s best to fill up a larger container/cup and decant, rather than go through the frustration we did trying to aim the jet towards a tiny bottle entrance without getting soaked.
5. Beach towns have showers- they are cold, but it's better than smelling like a tramp when you get in someone's car. If you can’t find an outside shower then it’s probably worth paying to use a swimming pool (maybe shower before you get in…).
6. There are free BBQs everywhere in public parks. If you don’t have your own stove, then these are a great way to get a hot meal.
7. Minimise your time in the big cities. It’s very hard to camp, get a lift and they generally gobble up your budget much faster than when you're out in the sticks.
   
8. Don’t pay to see koalas, kangarooos etc. It’s kind of cheating and if you spend enough time outside you’ll come across them naturally. NOTE: For guaranteed sightings-kangaroos and koala
9. Don’t smoke, or if you must then buy your cigarettes abroad. One packet costs around the same as a night in a hostel!
10. If you have an early flight, just sleep in the airport! ...unless you're leaving from Avignon as apparently they throw you out.  Check if it's possible to sleep in your airport here -http://www.sleepinginairports.net/

Sorry, I just couldn't resist another koala photo.

AND some other things you could try if you had a little more time than we did...

1. Couch surfing
2. Working- possibly picking fruit. We heard it pays quite well.
3. Volunteering- have a look on the website 'workaway' for opportunities with free food and lodging. 

You might also like... 

Beg, Borrow and Steal your way out of Athens during a riot.

or...

Hitchhiking Sydney to Melbourne.

or maybe even...

Hitchhiking in Australia- some Feathery tips.

Sydney and its surroundings... a medley

Over the last week, I've helped prepare for and attended a wedding* in the Sutton Forest, spent a couple of days discovering the area around Jervis Bay, enjoyed a family Christmas in Sydney, explored the city a little, visited the Blue Mountains and even tried my best to surf at Manly Beach.

So yes, it's been a bit manic, but we've found some fantastic places, all of which are fairly easily accessible from Sydney...

Fitzroy Falls-

On our way from the wedding venue to Jervis Bay, we stopped for a little walk along to Fitzroy Falls. The water itself wasn't doing much, but look at the view!

Jervis Bay and around-

Doing the tourist thing on the golf course.

Jervis Bay is around 200km down the coast from Sydney. You could hitch, we just bypassed it on our way down to Melbourne as we knew we were coming back.

Dan's parents, Rod and Janet, were kind enough to take us to stay in a house near Jervis Bay just after the wedding. This gave us a little time to explore Booderee National Park and even spot our first kangaroos.

Everybody keeps telling me that kangaroos are everywhere in Australia, but despite looking quite desperately, we hadn't yet managed to spot any. As with the koalas however, I was a little embarrassed by my initial excitement as we came across more and more over the next couple of days. If you're in the area and haven't had any luck yet, a sure place to find them is on the golf course at Sanctuary Point.

Being driven around in a hire car, it was pretty easy for us to find some of the nicest beaches, but if you don't
have that luxury, there are enough people around that it shouldn't be too hard to get a lift.

My personal favorite was Cave Beach. Being a little walk away from the carpark seems too weed out many of the area's less intrepid tourists, leaving us of the more robust variety to relax in peace, swim in the surf and on this occasion ponder the meaning of these aboriginal objects (any ideas?) standing in the sand.

Cave Beach

Green Patch

Boo!

Other uncrowded beaches include Green Patch and Murray Beach, which are both similar in their pale sand, clear water and lining of forest. From Murray Beach, you can walk to Governors Head and look across to Bowen Island  to spot the little penguins. One of our hitchhiking drivers told us that if you go here in the evening you'll see them fishing. We debated swimming across to get a better view, but I decided that if we were going to be stupid enough to face the possibility
 of having to have the coastguards called out, then I'd rather Dan's parents weren't there to witness it.

Hyams Beach, recommended to us by Carmel, was a little less quiet than the others we found, but (according to the locals) it has the whitest sand on Earth. In fact, on an overcast day when the sky and sea are just as light as the sand, the whole effect is very surreal and you feel as if you are wandering around in some sort of blindingly bright dream.

Hyams Beach- I had to shut out a lot of the light as my camera was also blinded!

My main advise for visiting Hyams beach, other than trying not to go in holiday season, is to wear sunglasses as I'm pretty sure I've gained a wrinkle from the squinting.

Hyams Beach

A family Christmas in Sydney-

Being  in Sydney for Christmas was strange as I've never been away from my family/England for these festivities, but Bridget's family made us really welcome and it was interesting to see how it's done on the other side of the globe. Comfortingly, excluding the temperature, the day was a similar whirlwind of the present exchanging, game playing and glutenous eating that I'm used to back home. The all-important dinner, lovingly prepared by a couple of hardworking ladies, was a little different than what we would traditionally have in Britain, but very tasty and it's pretty obvious why salad is more popular than roast potatoes in this heat. It was hard enough to move afterwards even without the pigs in blankets!

There were also a couple of nice traditions that I hadn't encountered before... firstly, and most excitingly for a poverty stricken vagabond like myself, was the distribution of scratchcards to everyone at the table. The rules are that if you win over $500 (I think) then you share it with the table, but anything less than that you keep. I WON $10!!! So yes, that was very exciting indeed. The other tradition, was to hide a set of fortune coins in everyone's Christmas pudding. Now, I've come across people who hide one coin before, but this set, with different pieces for things like 'marriage', 'wealth' and 'peace' make everyone at the table feel like they are the lucky one (Dan and I were happy to avoid the marriage coin- there have been enough comments since Ben and Bridget's wedding as it was!). They didn't set the pudding on fire, but then Australians aren't known for wasting their alcohol.

Exploring the city on Boxing Day- so much blue sky!

The Blue Mountains-

The view from the Three Sisters lookout platform.

 A shiny bug! :)

The endangered Blue Mountains Tree Gnome.

Katoomba is a two hour ($12 return) train journey from Sydney Central.

Dan and I had one spare day before we had to fly out, so we set out 'early'**. A day isn't long enough to do the Blue Mountains justice, but we had a good (if a bit sweaty) time walking from the Three Sisters, down the Giant Steps (there's  more than 800 of them), through the rainforest below and then up more steps the other side. The Three Sisters lookout platform was absolutely rammed with tourists (it is holiday season after all), but as usual, the further we walked, the less people we found,so that seems to be the way to escape.

I'd imagine you'd have a much more peaceful time elsewhere in the Blue Mountains if you had longer to explore. It would also be a great place to hike and camp as there are plenty of trails and alternative places to explore.

The end of our time in Oz (for now)...

Back in Sydney, Ben and Bridget brightened our end of holiday blues by taking us for an early morning surf on Manly Beach. The waves were pretty small, but as the only person there who really had no clue about what they were doing, I was secretly glad... Manly seems like a pretty cool area of town to live in (I can imagine commuting to work on the ferry across Sydney Harbour would be a difficult thing to get tired of) so I hope Ben and Bridget move there eventually and we can visit again!

An accidental but (I thought) rather artistic shot of the surf at Manly Beach. I'm sorry but my battery died soon after!

Now, going a little stir crazy in Sydney airport (which has free wi-fi by the way), I'm tentatively considering how feasible hitchhiking around the whole of Australia would be. Next time I'm in the area...


*Dan's brother Ben was getting married to the lovely Bridget (hence the actual important reason behind our trip). Congratulations guys, your wedding was beautiful and I'm so happy I was able to be a part of it.
**Ok, I think it might have been more like 10.30am...

Do you have any other suggestions for escaping the city? Leave a comment below. :)

Why you should never pay to see the Great Ocean Road...

There are a variety of options if you want to see the Great Ocean Road. Obviously the ideal choice would be to drive, but for those of us on the really frayed shoe-string budget, byeing or renting a car is pretty much out of the question. Hitchhiking on the other hand, is affordable (obviously) and unbelievably easy in this area- we barely had to wait more than ten minutes for a ride.

Accommodation in Australia is always pretty expensive and being so popular, the Great Ocean Road is especially bad. Even a non-powered tent pitch in a crappy caravan park can be $40. Thankfully we actually found some legitimate free campsites in the national parks along here, so that wasn’t a problem either. To find these, you might want to download an app called wikicamp, as we've been told  this is really helpful.

River by Allenvale Mile campsite.

With accommodation and travel available for free, there is really no need to bust your budget ticking off this famous road-trip from your bucket list. It was so easy that we were almost a bit bored in comparison to our adventure between Sydney and Melbourne… but we did get to meet some lovely people, spot a lot of exciting wildlife and see this coastline for nothing more than the price of our food. 

By Allenvale.

We began our excursion with a seven dollar train ride to Geelong (good luck to you if you fancy hitching out of Melbourne’s city centre) and, as we were running pretty late already decided to catch a bus from there to Torquay and the beginning of the Great Ocean Road. To our delight, the bus’s swipe-in system was broken and we got a free ride, but the driver wasn’t too optimistic about our chances of hitching to our first free campsite that night and recommended we get another bus. I guess he was just doing his job as we only had to wait ten minutes before our first lift. The lady who picked us up was exactly the last sort of person I would expect to stop; well-dressed, alone and driving a pretty nice car, but to our surprise she knew of a free campsite in Lorne. Allenvale Mile, buried deep in the forest, was where we spotted our first koala. Now we’ve seen so many that our excitement at that one is a bit embarrassing, but it was a nice way to start the journey. 

Allenvale Mile Campsite- I was a bit in love with these ducks...

We stopped for lunch in Apollo Bay.

From here, we never had a problem finding lifts out of the campsites every morning. That night, we met some people who were driving West, so our morning was sorted (this is what I mean about it being easy) and after we left them, our second ride took us all the way to Cape Otway. These international students from Melbourne university drove past us, turned around to come back and pick us up and then had to turn round again ten minutes up the road when we realised that we’d left Dan’s camera bag (containing the obvious camera, but also all his money and a microphone with all of his sound files saved on it). It was a tense journey back, but the inhabitants of Wye River are obviously a trustworthy bunch and it was still sitting there on the bench. 

If you want to see a koala, the road down to Cape Otway is the place to do it. Unfortunately, this information is freely given out from tourist information centres and half of Victoria’s visitors that day had beaten us there. People were driving five kilometers an hour in zig-zags, straining their necks to look up in the trees, parking up willy-nilly and running across the road regardless of irritated local drivers. The koalas seemed exhausted, but I’m pretty sure that’s normal anyway.

   

From Cape Otway, Australia’s most southerly point and home of ‘Australia’s most significant lighthouse’ which we didn’t pay to have the privilege of seeing, Dan and I began the somewhat exhausting trek to Blanket Bay. If you’re hitching, it would be best to get dropped off at the entrance of Blanket Bay Road and either wait (what could be a rather long time) for a lift down there or brave the five kilometre trek on foot. This campsite is free apart from in holiday season, has allocated fire pits and is situated pretty much right on the beach, so there’s no need to pay to stay down at the Cape Otway.

Blanket Bay

At Blanket Bay, we were befriended by a German man named Ralph* who was again driving West the next morning. With Ralph, we stopped by Johanna Beach (to check out our campsite for that evening), the misleadingly named Prince‘town’ (and all four buildings it consisted of), the Twelve Apostles and finally Port Campbell. I was a bit disappointed by this stretch of the road. If half of Vicoria’s tourists are checking out the koalas, the other half were certainly crammed along the viewing platform at the Twelve Apostles. Pretty much anywhere with a viewing platform is bad news. The cliffs are incredible, but there are better places to look at the than here. Try and find a less publicised track down to one of the beaches and you might get to experience them in a little bit of peace. Failing that, I’d go early in the morning if you can find a lift with somebody going to work or something.

A few apostles, carefully cutting out everyone else's extended camera arms.

With Port Campbell being little to write home about either (just a typical touristy beach town), we were happy to head back to the wilder Johanna for the evening. This beach was my favourite since we stayed at Longswamp a week ago and we were actually allowed to camp here for free.

Johanna Beach is beautiful.

After a lazy morning and a short attempt at swimming (the waves are crazy down there), we decided to try out a little bit of the Great Ocean Walk** to Castle Cove. Unfortunately, this section wasn’t quite as short as we thought and we actually struggled to get back before dark. Over-excitable as ever, I would have done the whole thing twice for a chance to see the porcupine and wallabies that surprised us along the way… 

'This is me in a forest' ...There were some very strange plants along the path.

Castle Cove

Johanna Beach

Noisy kookaburras at Allenvale Mile. 

Our lucky streak with the lifts continued for the next couple of days as we wove our way back to Lorne and finally Melbourne thanks to the kindness of people we met along the way. Sophie and Freeman, our final drivers and friends for an evening around the fire and morning in the sea, were kind enough to drive us strait back to Melbourne’s central station, so it really couldn’t have been easier.***

*Hi there Ralph if you’re reading this.

**The Great Ocean Walk goes from Apollo Bay to the Twelve Apostles, but you have to pay for a camping permit which seems pretty stupid as some of the campsites are just right next to the free ones anyway. 

***Thanks guys! Sophie has a pretty awesome tumblr- homesickpipe.tumblr.com