Sydney Harbour

I’ve been having a really good time in Sydney and stayed there for nearly three weeks before I eventually decided to start my journey towards Europe. Sydney is a cool city nested in an impressive natural location with its famous harbour. It does really feel like a big city with its wide busy streets and tall skyscrapers but I have found people to be more relaxed than in most European cities, or at least they appear to be so! It is quite polluted though and at the end I was getting a little annoyed by all the cars everywhere. It very much ressembles american cities with huge streets and urban design that is totally optimised for cars and not at all for pedestrians.

Surfer in Byron Bay

So after three weeks I had seen most of the major attractions and it was certainly time to move on! My first stop on the East coast was Byron Bay, where I enjoyed the beach and the relaxed atmosphere in the town. The town used to be full of hippies in the 80s and a few are still around today.

Our 4x4 on the beach

The first real highlight of my trip was still ahead of me so I quickly moved on further north towards Fraser Island. This is the biggest sand island in the world. To explore it I signed up for a self drive safari with ten other people in a big Toyota 4×4. The other people turned out to be very cool and we had a good time camping for three days on the island.

A wild female dingo on Fraser Island

Fraser is home to a lot of dingos (Austalian wild dogs) too, and we saw a couple on the way. Dingos are said to have become overly agressive these last years towards tourists. Feeding them made their fear of humans vanish, causing them to attack when they are too hungry. Feeding them today is strictly prohibited. Interestingly the local aboriginals that I met there had a different opinion: it is because they can’t feed them that the dingos now sometimes attack. Their elders have always left food remains for the dingos in the past and it is because that food source dissapeared that they became aggressive. In any case the ones I saw didn’t look aggressive at all!

So far I’ve been having a great time traveling and have met loads of interesting and surprising people: a producer of the UK Big Brother show, French cancer researchers, the gardener of an English lord traveling the world, countless other people having left their jobs to travel for a while and many more improbable characters…

My next stop before returning to Brisbane to catch my cargo ship will be the Whitsunday Islands where I’m going for a three days eco sailing cruise. I can’t wait!