Bowes Updates

A short visit to Calgary in April. Visited grandma, saw some old friends, and hun out with the family.  More photos here.

Sydney is an awesome town.  Tons of parks, interesting archtecture, good eats, and fun things to do.

We spent our aniversary having a bit of a nocturnal wander before a celebratory champagne in front of the opera house.  Visits to Bondi Beach, Manly Beach (to recover from New Years Eve), the Rocks, and some old friends from London rounded out the trip.   Photos here

New Year’s in Sydney was awesome:

1) It wasn’t freezing
2) We were there with tons of good friends
3) What a fireworks display!
4) The whole town opens up to have a good time (we never did find out whose party we ended the night at)

We got down to the Blues Point Hotel pretty early to meet up with the gang. A few drinks, then up to the Commodore for dinner and some coin-flip drinking game that Richard definately got the worst of! Down to the waterline in time for the show…and what a show! The harbour is spectacular enough as it is, but that was truly awesome.  Photos here (some of them are from other people…I would credit more appropriately if I could figure out which came from who), and Richards video here

For some contrast after 2 nights in hostels on the way from Adelaide, we checked into the Westin for some luxury. 

Melbourne is a cool town (downright cold when we were there too: it never cracked 20), and has a vibe sort of like a cross between the best of both Toronto and Vancouver.  Good eats, too!  Too much of our time in Melbourne was spend watching the Ashes Boxing Day Test.  No amount of beer makes that exciting: Australia was facing a slaughter after being bowled out for 98 on the first day when we arrived at 10:30 on Day 2.  After a couple hours, we’d had enough, and went touring the town.  About 3:00 we came back to check up on the game, and one of the same English batters WAS STILL BATTING.  The pictures are here

One stunning vista after another!

We went for a lovely Christmas drive along the south coast of Australia between Adelaide and Melbourne.  Christmas dinner was BBQ’d, and spent with the Escobars (sort of those Escobars…a very distant relation to the infamous one) and the rest of the gang.

Aside from the scenery, we also walked through a temperate rain forest (the one on Vancouver Island is just as cool), saw some Koalas (cute, sure, but really boring to watch – they sleep 18 hours per day, and even when awake aren’t really all that active), and took the obligatory picture in front of the kangaroo crossing sign.  The photos are here

We needed to get from Adelaide to Melbourne.  There are plenty of flight, but the scenery is so spectacular, that we chose to take a 3-day bus tour.  There seemed to be two sorts of options: luxurious splendour with blue-rinsed travelling companions, or rough and tumble fun with the backpackers.  Easy choice – so we hopped on the Groovy Grape tour with a motley mix of miscellaneous tourists (including the Escobars from Columbia, who were very nice once you got to know them…).  First stop was the Grampians National Park…full of jagged sandstone ridges and pretty waterfalls. 

We stopped for lunch along the way, and stumbled across an “historic culvert”.  No sign detailed what it was (is, or will be), but we posed for a picture…which I’m sure is the ONLY reason it’s there. The pictures are here

Within an hour’s drive from Adelaide are three fantastic wine regions: the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, and the Adelaide Hills.  The wineries were all very friendly, and we tasted some incredible stuff.  Though some of the very best stuff has put Australian wine on the map, they drink mode of the good stuff at home. We tried some fantastic wines that, if exported at all (and often not), aren’t sold in Canada.  One exception was at Geoff Hardy, from where we’ve been buying wine for years through Opimian.  Luggage is a bigger issue than customs, though we still managed to bring home a couple bottles of shiraz-based port and a “black champagne”, also made of shiraz.  The photos are here

Adelaide was pretty relaxed.  It was unseasonably cool when we were there (low 20’s), but still beautiful weather.  The city itself is nice…really livable, but not all that exciting for tourists.  The highlights were mostly gastronomical: Vilis for a pie floater (take an Australian pie, turn it upside down in a bowl of split pea soup, enjoy!), a Coopers beer (roll the bottle to disperse the sediment at the bottom…enjoy!), and wine country (more on that later). The photos are here

Pictures can’t do it justice…but this was one of the most incredible things we’ve ever seen.  There was an endless parade of millions of brightly-coloured fish spinning around the vivid coral.  It was like an aquatic acid trip.

We took a bus from Cairns up to Port Douglas, from where we took the “Aristocat” out for a couple dives.  The suits we’re wearing aren’t for the water temp (it was like a warm bath) – these “stinger suits” are to protect against the Irukandji jellyfish, though nobody could recall any serious (much less deadly) stings since 2002. The photos are here and the videos are here

Cairns is well into the tropics in northeast Australia (Queensland), and man, it was HOT. The town itself (sorry, Cairns) is a bit of a dump, with a crocodile-infested muddy waterfront and not much of a city to see. However, it’s just a few miles from the Great Barrier Reef, a short train ride to Kuranda, and has the Ochre restaurant, where you can munch on Kangaroo, Wallaby, crocodile…

Kuranda is a bit tacky (it was a hippy retreat in the 60’s, now more of a souvenir-gathering retreat) but offered an interesting opportunity to walk through a tropical rainforest on the Atherton Tablelands. We took an old-timey train up there, and a gondola over the forest canopy home.

Other interesting notes from Cairns:
– The biggest beetle I’ve ever seen outside our hotel
– Swarms of “flying foxes” (a bat by anyother name) every evening
– XXXX Bitter (brewed in Brisbane) is much better than the name would lead you to believe…delicious, even!
– To make up for the gross (and dangerous) beach, they have a beautiful park with BBQ pits and a nice pool 
See the pictures here