Reisverslag

Nederland

Kobus, 17 mei 2007
Nederland , Wijdenes

There and back again

Well, I’ve left the country of Blokes and Sheilas, but not without leaving a mark. At least, I tried to leave a mark just before I went on a trip to Melbourne, but the surface of Australia proved to be rather stubborn. After a great night out and with very nice things ahead, I somehow picked a fight with the Australian tar with my face as a weapon. Not a good idea I can tell you, not even if your bike has given you a lot of momentum. So there I was, on a plane bound for Melbourne with only 40 minutes of sleep desperately attempting to keep my eyelids from meeting each other. My formerly enticing smile reduced to a bike rack with bloodstained edges. Mothers, save your children from eternal mental trauma! I’m still surprised that I got through customs, because with the new face-do I also sported a brand new Mohawk hair-do that I’d picked up the weekend before, which made me look somewhat different from the guy in my passport. The first thing I visited after arriving in Melbourne was the hospital. There they picked the last bits of road out of me and later, after visiting a dentist for some emergency reconstruction, I was sort of back to normal. Enough about that, let’s move on to better things.

Melbourne was great! Better than Sydney or Canberra if you’d ask me. On my first day in, I met up with Zak who I’d met in Canberra and who had recently moved back to Melbourne. He introduced me to the widespread maze of houses, shops and above all cafes and restaurants that is Melbourne. We checked out the city centre with Federation Square and an exhibition at the Aussie Centre for the Moving Image. After that we went to the coast at St. Kilda with its pier, leathered Italians and penguins.
I stayed at Hotel Thornhill, where I was pampered to a pulp, which was good because my teeth weren’t up to chewing hard stuff yet. My hosts drove me around and Andrew showed me more of his beloved hometown and its surroundings. We visited Chinatown, the renowned Crown Casino and saw a comedy show, part of the yearly Melbourne Comedy Festival. We also went to Healesville Sanctuary, a wildlife park just outside Melbourne where I finally got to see the obligatory Australian animal species that had heretofore eluded me.
On Anzac day (a sort of remember-and-honour-all-Australian-soldiers day) we attended an Aussie rules football match. During that, I learnt quite a few interesting and new curses and abuses as well as how to head butt a guy in the groin whilst scoring a goal. A better and more revealing insight into Australian mentality and psyche can not be imagined. It was also interesting to note that even though ‘our’ team was leading by about 20 points with only 2 minutes to go, everyone still seemed convinced that the team was going to lose without a chance. Apparently Australians are capable of still feeling like the underdogs when their opponent has long since been reduced to a form- and lifeless, bloody smear. Anyway, we won and I happily joined in with the chanting of the club song all the way back home.
My last few days in Australia I spent finishing up on some loose ends in Canberra and generally just relaxing a bit. I really liked taking my time to meet up with people and saying goodbye in an easy fashion. I had a nice party at Andrew’s place to celebrate my departure and some time after that caught the buss to Sydney and left Australia.

* sigh *

My next stop on the way back to Europe was California where I went to visit my former housemate. I spent a lovely and relaxing two weeks at her and her hubby-to-be’s place. They went to work each day and I just lounged around, went to check out the sights in San Francisco or just did plain nothing at all. During the weekend we strapped some bikes to the car and set off for Yosemite National Park. There, a road known as Tioga Road, straight though the middle of the park from West to East. The fun bit is that it is closed off to any traffic for the colder months of the year, but only to cars in spring. The idea was to ride the 40 mile (>60 km) length of the road on day one and ride back on day two and spend the night in a log cabin that my host had visited before. Well, we did it, but it wasn’t the relaxed weekend stroll I had anticipated. We spent over five hours ploughing our way there; uphill most of the time, blazing headwind with occasional blasts of powder snow, freezing temperatures, but it was fantastic. Amazing views and no sound but the wind and sometimes birds. Nevertheless, the sight of the cabin was a very welcome one. After we had gotten water for tea from the river and had the wood fire blazing, life just couldn’t be better. Next day, the way back took us only half the time it took us to get to the cabin, which gave us a lot of time to leisurely check out all the sights in the valleys of Yosemite.

All fun and games are over now; I’m back on Dutch soil, finishing my report and hopefully soon moving into a house. Chances are I’ll move into a former refugee camp, located only about half a km from the Biological faculty. Nice…

It’ll be a while, but I’ll be going away again and that’s when I’ll be back, unless something seriously interesting happens here in the meantime.

Foto's bij reisverslag

Vorige

Volgende

during the footy

after the footy

view of San Francisco

the cold road

Tice getting H2O

sight for frozen eyes

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