Great Eastern Journey, Sun, 17 Feb 2013 | written by Simon
Simon with Charlie at a City, Park, Sea in Australia, Australia & Oceania

A random airplane show on the beach

Today was a recovery day. I woke up still felling quite rough, so although the initial plan was to check out some museums, after the Farleys left I ended up just lying on the beach through most of the afternoon (the horror, right?). After that a little more walking around town and now I’m happy and comfy surfing a nice Dutch guy’s couch. There are two more people here who sort of put my journey in perspective: a Hungarian couple who are on the road for two years now, and who hitch hiked the entire way from Hungary through Asia staying in different places for months. How awesome is that?!

Anyway, since not much has happened today, I’ll just share some more general observations about Oz. For one, it’s really flat here. For someone living in Scotland it’s quite a shock – it looked very flat already from the plane, and walking the streets just seems so… one-dimensional!

Some shots of the city skyline to break the text a bit

Second: everything is horribly expensive. I thought UK wasn’t cheap but gods, here it’s almost double that! Simple (if boring) comparison – subway meal deal that costs £3 in the UK is 8$ here. Getting there and back from the breach to town on tram is 7$. Need to try hard not to go over my budget for the entire trip in a week…

Third: the people are so pretty here! I know I might have very low standards after UK, but damn I’m glad I have dark glasses and it’s not obvious that I’m starting… And it’s warm, so many are wearing very little, bikinis or shorts (oh my girls in shorts!), guys walking around with bare chests. In the UK I keep hearing complaints about clothing and how the sizes are never good and how they aren’t made for real people and whatnot. Apparently Australia is full of unreal people and those things look awesome on them.

Life is good

Finally: eggs. In everything. Every non-vegan breakfast meal you can order has eggs in it. They have pizza with eggs, salmon with eggs, burgers with eggs, I’m afraid to open the door in case eggs will jump at me! And it’s not fun if you are allergic, because as it turns out, everything that miraculously doesn’t have eggs is a friggin niche stuff here and cost even more (see point two). Joy.

OK, enough for now. Just one more thing: there will be pictures, but not just yet. Stupid me completely forgot that my awesome pad doesn’t have a USB socket, so I’ll need to wait with transferring pictures from the camera until I find a computer I can use. And now good night.