Penny-Pinching in Oz

Fact: Australia is EXPENSIVE! We were seriously stressed by the finances for this part of our trip, as we realized about 48 hours after landing that we had not budgeted nearly enough.  Prices are close to ridiculous – a coffee from McDonald’s was about $4, a kilogram of green peppers was $8, a pint of beer at a pub was around $10, a six-pack at the liquor store was $16!!! Bananas were $10 per kilogram!!! I never thought I’d see Gully give up his banana-a-day habit, but all of a sudden bananas were luxury items. And the grimiest hostels still went for about $100 per room per night…

So we had to change our plan fast. We hadn’t really been planning on it, but we decided to buy a car and camp our way through Australia to save money, and it worked out really well!!  We saved a ton of money, and had a much better experience than if we had been stuck on public transportation.

The breakdown for 73 days in Australia:

Lodging: $2043

Thanks to all our friends who hosted us in Oz!! We spent 17 nights with friends and 56 nights in a tent.

Food and drinks: $2588

We made about 99% of our meals ourselves. 

Entertainment and Activities: $507

This is super low.  It’s pretty cheap to lie around on the beach all day.

Necessities (clothing, shampoo, internet, sending packages home etc): $1053

Car: $1673

The car plus insurance was $295, gas and road tolls and parking was $1101, and maintenance was $278.  WAY cheaper than our last Mitsubishi!!

Other transportation: $402

This includes a weekend car rental from before we bought the car, and public transportation in Sydney.

Total: $8266!

Now that we’re in Vietnam, the prices in Australia seem even crazier.  We pay less for a cozy hotel room here than we did to sleep in a cold wet field there.  Go figure.

-E

Our warm and cozy hotel (the big white building)

The pagoda across the street

Mr. and Miss Saigon

I want to take a moment to congratulate Elise and myself on our efforts and accomplishments so far here in Vietnam. Thanks to my Troglie buddy Tuzi and his Vietnamese GF Linh, we were able to experience what Tuzi affectionately calls the “real” Saigon. That is, the authentic Vietnamese lifestyle in which few foreigners ever dare partake. We all know that the stereotypical ethnic food you get back home is not a true representation of what locals actually eat abroad. (E.g. they don’t eat tacos in Mexico or spaghetti Bolognese in Italy like we do in Canada). That phenomenon has never been as salient for us as it is here in Vietnam. For the record, the locals do eat the classics like 'pho' (a noodle soup) and cold spring rolls in copious amounts, but it’s the lesser known dishes involving the lesser known parts of the animal that Elise and I have found ourselves enjoying (most unexpectedly). For example, I never knew how flavourful soup could be when it’s served with tendons and cartilage. I swear, a nice chunk of knee cartilage could pass for foie gras any day. Perhaps the most adventurous thing we ordered was duck stomach, blood and guts included. I personally never tried that one due to my policy of not eating uncooked food in developing countries (the blood was more of a dressing) but hats off to Elise for digging in like an insatiable vampire. There were a number of small birds that I rather enjoyed whole, however, like the barbecued sparrow and the fetal duck egg (6 weeks old I was told…it was bit gamey).

The other big accomplishment of ours in Saigon was remaining alive with all our limbs intact. I’m not exaggerating. (Disclaimer for my mom: read on at your own risk and please don’t admonish me later!). Driving a motorbike through the streets of Saigon was probably the single most dangerous thing I have ever done (sorry mom). Vietnam is the motorbike capital of the world (I think) and riding around is like being in a perpetual motocross race – except with the added challenge of dodging cars and transports at every turn. It was pretty much as crazy as driving around Istanbul was earlier this trip, except with motorbikes instead of cars and absolutely no rules except for this one: trucks yield to no one and motorbikes yield to everyone. I usually say ‘when in Rome’, but since we already had one mishap with a motorized vehicle this trip (recall Peru…), we decided we would quit while we’re ahead and splurge on taxis for the balance of our trip. Plus it wasn’t making Elise any more comfortable with the idea of me getting a crotch rocket sometime in the future.

-G

Tendons and cartilage. One woman's garbage is another woman's gold.

Tuzi and Linh.The other members of our biker gang.

Stomach parts in blood. Wow.

Organized confusion.

Aren't they just adorable??

Head first.

So Long, Mate

We’ve left Australia behind and begun the final chapter in our odyssey - Southeast Asia.  After an uneventful flight from Sydney to Saigon we were met at the airport by another of Gully’s globe-trotting friends and his Vietnamese girlfriend.  We were ecstatic about that because, once again, we had neglected to do even an ounce of planning before we arrived in a completely foreign place.  We didn’t even know how to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and we definitely had no clue where we were going once we arrived.  This is how you know you’re a seasoned traveller – you’re just too lazy to make any effort anymore.  But Tuzi got us all sorted out with getting cash and getting a taxi to his place, which is in the ‘real’ Saigon, not in the backpackers neighbourhood.  He had his spare bedroom all set up for us, and it was the first night we had not slept on an air mattress in over two months.

We’ve been here for less than 24 hours, but I’m already thinking that Vietnam is going to be an exciting adventure.  It was a little hard for me to leave english-speaking society behind, but it was much harder for Gully as it meant having to ditch the surfboard and get his land legs back.  The last week in Australia was a frantic race to get in as much surf time as possible.  Luckily, we spent the last few days staying at the place of yet another friend of his, who was as surf-minded as he was.  Mornings began at 5:30 am, in order to get in a good surf session before Dan had to head off to work.  From what I’ve heard, pre-dawn is also shark feeding time, so needless to say I consider myself lucky to have gotten out of Australia with all of my boyfriend’s limbs intact.

-E

One last walk to Manly Beach

Everyone should be very familiar with my airplane outfit by now....

Our first motorbike traffic jam

Gully says I look badass.....

And here's a little taste of our first full day in Saigon.  If you can’t tell, I’m on the back of Linh’s motorbike.  I love how she is confident enough to point out interesting things to me while calmly making her way through the craziness that is the streets of Saigon.

The End of an Era

I think Elise and I have become half bogan. The campsite we were assigned at the “Holiday Park” (that’s a euphemism for ‘trailer park’) in suburban Sydney was actually no more than a patch of grass in between the backyards of two permanent residences. There we were, living out of our car and tent surrounded on all sides by all sorts of well-to-do trailer troglodytes. Our neighbour to the right was an exterminator from Tasmania. Known professionally as “The Anteater”, he liked to feed his pet wasps with the standing water in his bird bath. Nice guy, but we decided we needed to move when his trailer got ransacked by various vermin that emerged from the surrounding forest come nightfall. I think wasps weren’t all he was feeding. Anyway, it got me thinking that maybe Elise and I have been staying at too many of these so-called Holiday Parks. Maybe the lifestyle has been rubbing off on us a bit. Maybe we started to develop that trailer park look and they had us pegged when we checked in. That’s why we got grouped in with the local lifers. Either way, it’s definitely time to move on from Oz and leave this camping lifestyle behind for a while. We loved the Canadian-style authentic bush camping here, but we’re really looking forward to Vietnam and the luxury suites there for $30 per night. 

But enough of that. The real purpose of this blog post is to illustrate the extent of our awesomeness. For our readers who’ve been on board throughout the Australia chapter of this trip, you know we had a pretty major capital expenditure back in January in the form of a car. Through some miracle the 1994 Mitsubishi wagon we bought three months ago and drove 8000 km required ZERO maintenance over the course of our ownership (except for the window that Mother Nature smashed the other week). And so we came to the end of the road in Sydney with the task of selling the car before we fly to Vietnam this Thursday. After going a few days with NO bites on our ad, we started getting a bit nervous. Last thing we wanted was to drive OURSELVES to the airport this Thursday and leave the keys in the ignition. Sow we went into town to get some quotes from dealers. We walked into a dealer where lo and behold a car identical to our own was being examined by a travelling couple looking to buy. (Later I would call the couple the Dutch “us”. It was kinda creepy how similar they were to us). “Pssst”, I said. “Wanna buy the exact same car as that for half the price?!” THAT sparked their interest. As fate would have it, they were camping down the road from us at the same campground. We talked business over dinner and wine and two days later we sold the car for $100 less than what we bought it for!! We decided it would be easiest to carpool to the transportation office to transfer the ownership. Elise and I took the front seat on the way there and Dutch us took it on the way back. Camping sans car was no fun after that, especially since we could still see it parked just down the road for the rest of the week. That's ok, though, because later we even sold our camping gear for a cool $80!!

-G

Us and us.

National park, not trailer park. Not bogan.

Getting Elise to cut my hair at the trailer park. Now THAT'S bogan.

No Harbour in the Storm

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I was fearful for my life in Yamba.  I was more afraid to walk around there alone than I was in South America – so I was thrilled to move on to our next destination.  Coffs Harbour was truly a family vacation destination, and during the five days we spent there we didn’t get harassed by drunken bogans even once.  There was a pool at the caravan park we stayed at that had 3 water slides, a pirate ship, built-in water guns, and a seahorse shooting water out of its nose.  It was awesome. 

But an action-packed kiddie pool can only entertain an almost-30-year-old for so long.  Soon we were starting to feel a little bored…I have to say that I’m actually starting to get tired of beautiful beaches, nice boardwalks, and sunny weather.  We had just decided to pack up and head to the Hunter Valley to do some wine tasting (yum!) when it hit…. the ten-minute storm (not to be confused with the Fifty-Year Storm a la movie Point Break, this storm was actually ten minutes in length, not a storm that happens every ten minutes). I was alone at the campsite while Gully was surfing when out of nowhere this wind picked up that blew our stuff halfway across the campground before I even knew what had happened.  I spent the next ten minutes sitting in the tent and holding it up from the inside so that it wouldn’t blow away, praying that the tree branches I heard falling all around me wouldn’t fall on my head.  Finally Gully arrived to save me, but he also had his own problems as the wind had actually blown out a window in our car.  We thought we had somehow stumbled into the path of a hurricane.  Then, just as fast as it came, it left, and left us confused… how can a ten minute storm blow out your car window and flatten your campsite and then just disappear like nothing had ever happened?  Australia is a crazy place.  

-E

Double Rainbow! (it's very faint but it's there)

Gully is the surfer dude on the far right

Our smashed window and Gully busy skyping with window repairers

Free camping in a national park - awesome (except if you want to pee or take a shower)

The messy business of winemaking (is it weird that I want to lick that guy's leg?)