Belum

I was now in the southeast of Australia, a part of the country I had already visited before, and I was alone. So what was I going to do? The answer was simple: party! Well, not quite. Over my years travelling and living in London (which is the 12th largest Australian city by population) I've accumulated a fair number of Australian friends whom I rarely get to see due to the obvious insurmountable distances. My little sojourn in the southeast would hopefully redress that, as the urban strip stretching from Newcastle to Melbourne is home to around two thirds of the country's population so pure probabilities meant that I would be able to see most of them.

A cliched photo of the Sydney opera house and CBD taken from the iconic harbour bridge.

Old And New, And Maybe True Blue

With my brother gone my father and I could revert to sleeping in the back of the car. We had a week to get down to Sydney for my father's departure and so we decided to forgo the well-worn coastal route through the beach resorts of Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast, and instead we headed inland over to the dividing range before heading south into a part of New south Wales known as New England. The gently rolling green hills, quaint, tidy towns, and burbling streams, so uncharacteristic of the archetypal image of the vast Australian outback, dry, inhospitable, and probably out to get you.

The vast, untamed expanse of the Great Dividing Range at Gibraltar national park.

Coasting For A While

From the outback we had to quickly reach the coast as my entourage was about to expand substantially once again. My brother had also decided to come out and join us and we were to meet at the northern coastal town of Townsville (an odd, tautological name if you think about it). About 100km before reaching our destination we picked up a hitchhiker and since the roles are usually reversed I took the rare opportunity to do a good deed and help out another traveller. He turned out to be from Romania (although he initially said Transylvania as more people are familiar with that name thanks to Bram Stoker). As we progressed through our initial introductions it turned out that not only was he Romanian, but he had spent the past year in Indonesia studying Bahasa and was a good friend of Horia's. On top of that he actually knew who I was and had seen my blog before (and could even remember its ridiculous name). It seems that the world truly is getting smaller.

Iulius chilling with us at a national park. He's currently travelling throughout Oceania on his own little anthropological project to study indigenous and colonial cultures and their interactions (he had some great stories about his travels in Papua New Guinea). You can see his progress on his website, Southern Cross Badge.