Blue is the Colour, Ironman is the Game
Trip Start
Nov 08, 2003
1
27
74
Trip End
Oct 22, 2004
Blue Mountains,
Australia
Friday, May 14, 2004
Largest island in the world.
Sixth largest country in the world.
Home to the largest living thing on Earth, the Great Barrier Reef.
Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are from Australia.
Five of its creatures, the funnel web spider, the box jellyfish, the blue-ringed octopus, the paralysis tick and the stonefish are the most lethal of their type in the world.
80% of all that lives there, plant or animal, exist nowhere else in the world.
80% of their spiders remain unknown to science.
. couldn't wait to get there.
2/04/04
We arrived at Changi airport three hours before departure on a mission to blag ('talk our way into' for those of you not from the street) a free upgrade of some kind, be it a fully reclining bed in business class or half an inch extra legroom. We ended up with a couple of seats next to an emergency exit with room to stretch out and do our anti-DVT leg exercises.
Boarding the Singapore Airlines jumbo at 8.15pm, we swung out our mini TV screens from our arm-rests and sat with eyes glued to the screen, a control pad in one sweaty hand and TV guide primed and ready in the other.
A steward then asked us to put the TV away and grow up.
400 God fearing passengers once again willed the jet into the night sky at 8.45 as the pilot swung left and began to head for the sun drenched land of the young and the free, Uzbekistan. Yep, in seven hours time we'd be touching down in Sydney.
The fasten seatbelt sign went out and within a nano-second we were channel-hopping like a couple of thirty-ahem year old saddos who have nothing better to do with their lives than watch Eastenders and Big Brother all day.
A big task lay ahead
Hang on a minute, we were a couple of thirty-ahem year old saddos who had nothing better to do with their lives than watch Eastenders and Big Brother all day . until we decided to give up that fortunate existence to go travelling to far flung lands to meet locals who hadn't even heard of Phil Mitchell.The brunette spent the night watching 'Something's Gotta Give', Trinny and Susannah and a Jonny Wilkinson documentary, while I watched 'The Office' over and over for the duration of the flight . well it was the comic relief episode with 'the' dance.
The good thing about it all, was the fact that you could watch whatever you liked, whenever you liked, with total control over the programmes as if you had your very own DVD player, using your personal control pad.
Singapore Airlines, there is no substitute.
3/4
We touched down for the first time in the southern hemisphere at 5.45am local time, skimming over Botany Bay, just as Captain Cook did a few hundred years before us*.
*(note to author/myself: get exact year of Cook's arrival in Sydney from website and make sure you delete this personal memo from the final version or it could be a major embarrassment to myself because of the fact that for a rarely viewed online travelogue, people would realise that I actually spend hours researching in dingy internet cafés, so I repeat, under no circumstances should this para be seen by the prying eyes of anyone but me).
We were greeted in the arrival hall by a posse of Australian customs officials and at six in the morning they were a sight to behold.
Big ol Cable Car
Fully grown men in shorts bordering on hotpants with knee length socks stood at ease, side by side with young Sheilas wearing Dr Martins and 'I don't take any crap from Poms' looks on their faces. A sniffer dog excitedly darted around our ankles with its handler requesting we put all hand luggage on the floor for the pooch to give the once over, but somehow we made it through with our three kilos of class-A chocolate.A taxi straight to Sydney you presume?
No, we had other plans.
Actually I had other plans. They were to drag my long suffering wife 350km north in a campervan to the Australian Ironman at Forster-Tuncurry, a double-barrel town in northern New South Wales to watch two thousand fitness freaks swim 2.3 miles, cycle 108 miles and run a marathon all without stopping for a nice pub lunch and a change of clothes.
First we'd have to wait an hour and a half for Britz campervan rentals to open, so we busied ourselves drinking coffee and staring at endless pages of outback in our 4,348 page map of Australia . the condensed version.
Come 7.45am we were being dropped off at Britz in the industrial estate capital of Sydney, Mascot, where a gaggle of other tourists were waiting to pickup or drop-off vans.
By 9.30am we were finally ready to head off into the unknown in a campervan made for two. Our home for the next few nights was a Toyota Hiace with all (semi) mod-cons, a fridge, a cooker and a sitting area that would magically convert into a bed.
We were in south Sydney about to head north along the coast of New South Wales so we were expecting a glimpse or two of a certain bridge and little white concert hall, but after eventually finding our way out of the suburbs we were sucked onto 'The Eastern Distributor' and into a tunnel that wormed its way under Sydney's sights and spat us out the other end somewhere in the northern suburbs with Sydney disappearing behind us as we got carried along in the Saturday morning traffic.
We were heading for the exotically named Pacific Highway, a two lane freeway that hugs the east coast for a thousand kilometres all the way to Brisbane.
Going underground at Jenolan
After an hour on the road, we were already in need of some refreshments after seven hours non-stop staring at a TV screen through the night. At Gosford we stopped at a service station and ordered meat pies (an Australian delicacy) and Red Bull a Gary delicacy) in a vain attempt to keep our eyes open, but it was no good, an hour later and we had stopped at a picnic area for a power nap. It was a good 75 degrees outside and ordinarily we'd have been reaching for the air-con, but in our hot, airless minivan it wasn't needed as we dropped off like logs for a full hours sleep.Partially refreshed we drove onwards past Wyong, Cooranbong, Raymond Terrace, Kurri Kurri, Buladelah and the even wackier named Newcastle, Australia's second-oldest city, and who'd live in a place called that? Anyway, get used to the names, this country is full of them, with beauties to match even our very own champion of funny town names, Pratt's Bottom.
By mid afternoon we'd arrived at Forster with it's twin brother of a town Tuncurry just up the road. These two towns like each other so much they call themselves Forster-Tuncurry, how sweet.
It was the night before the big race and we thought it'd be touch and go whether we'd find a campsite with a spare pitch. Well would you Adam and Eve it, the nearest campsite, Forster Waters Tourist Park had one more space left, so we booked it for a couple of nights at $30 (£12) a night with electricity.
Before settling down for the evening we popped into town to sample an Australian supermarket for the first time.
Guess where we are?
Well, get this, you know that low-lit, rarely visited shop in every town in the UK that you only go to at Christmas to buy sweets for kiddies stockings? That's what they call their supermarket, Woolworths. And you know how handy it is to buy beer and wine in your local store with your food shopping? Well here, the most important article on anyone's shopping list, red wine, has to be bought from a separate shop that's somewhere else altogether! Madness, I tell you, madness.Well, after traipsing from one end of a mall to another, we were stacked to the rafters with burgers, steaks, chicken, kebabs, prawns, sausages, beer, wine and a lettuce leaf, the perfect balanced diet.
Back at the campground it was still early evening, but after dinner and a bottle of Aussie red we solved the Krypton Factor, that was the assembly of the bed and passed out with 36 hours awake, 7 hours flying and 387km driving under our belts.
4/4
After a surprisingly good nights sleep and a shower in an equally surprisingly good amenities block we headed by foot up the road and onto the Ironman route where the last of the stragglers were heading out onto the bike stage after their early morning two and a half mile swim.
The race had begun at 6.15am and by 8am the leaders were already well into the cycle leg. We sat down in the grass near an aid station where volunteers cheerfully practised their manoeuvres and body positioning for handing out water bottles to cyclists speeding by at 40km/h.
Soon the leaders were coming through after the first cycle loop before going around a roundabout and returning for another fifty four mile loop.
Ironman sign with Jellyboy
Standing just beyond the aid station was a bad tactical move on our behalf as we ducked and weaved out of the way of low flying plastic bottles.After watching the cyclists go through we headed further into town to be in prime position to watch the final 26 miles covered on foot. As expected, the reigning champion, an Aussie named Mark MacCormack bounded past us first, fresh as a daisy. His nearest challenger from last year, the German, Lothar Leder was due to challenge him again this year, but tweaked a muscle on a training run the day before the race, tough luck after you've trained 6-8 months. Safe to say he was a touch disappointed.
After watching the runners suffer enough during the three-lap marathon we headed back for an early evening barbeque. Our first barbeque down under turned into an emotional event as Soph 'threw another shrimp on the barbie' and it all struck home. We were in Australia.
The rest of the evening turned into a blur as we downed three bottles of our all-time favourite south-east Australian Reds, made a very rough plan of attack for the next three months and managed to dye my blossoming tuft of lower lip hair a whiter shade of pale.
5/4
Not for the first time on our travels we woke with sore heads and equally sore livers. By 10am we were heading off towards the mountains under a dark sky.
By noon the rain started to fall so we headed straight for the nearest pie shop and ended up in Heathbrae's, a local institution, where we consumed pies of the fattening kind and coffees of the strong kind.
Nice view, the mountains aren't bad either
The rain then eased off and we were back out on the famous Aussie open road back south along the Pacific Highway towards Sydney.After an hour or so it was time to hang a sharp right at Newcastle and head inland on the New England Highway, before reaching Branxton and chucking a left onto the Golden Highway for 15km when our next turn-off, Highway 69, loomed and I'm not telling you the name they gave that road.
Why can't we have cool sounding road names in the UK? The M4 could be The Western Way, the M1 could be The Route to the Rain and the M25 could be The Gridlocked Gyratory. Just a thought . I'll get my coat.
Highway 'you-know-what' weaved a tipsy route through the Yengo and Wollemi National Parks towards the totally un-Australian sounding town of Windsor and as we swayed to the dulcet tones of Duran Duran and American Rock on local radio we came across our first yellow diamond kangaroo sign and more importantly our first kangaroo, albeit dead on the side of the road. Oh well, better than nothing, we still stopped and took more shots than a murder investigation team would have. Before you all write in and complain, we didn't really.
Through a very unroyal looking Windsor we sped and onto Penrith. It was getting all too confusing with all these British sounding towns but we continued on regardless and as we climbed into the Blue Mountains on the Great Western Highway the weather once again took a big turn for the worse as rain poured onto our little mobile home and a nice thick mountain mist settled on the road.
After 40km of driving with head pinned against windscreen we arrived at Katoomba, the main town in the Blue Mountains National Park, and a good base to stay for seeing the sights the following day if the weather cleared.
Soph and her Three Sisters
Well it would have been a good base if the only caravan site in the town hadn't been full. It was dark, wet and we were in the middle of nowhere, our final chance was a small town called Blackheath 10km up the road. Soph rang the site there and we were in luck, we were always destined to stay in Blackheath as it had been our first love-nest (don't laugh) back in London.We arrived at Blackheath Caravan Park at 7pm, plugged ourselves into the electricity supply and wolfed down sausages, beans and toast and a few Hahn's beers to the soothing sounds of raindrops on a van roof.
We'd driven 587km today and our planned changes of driver after every 200km was working well so far.
6/4
We were up nice and early today and after a night of all sorts of meteorological shenanigans the sky this morning was clear, perfect conditions for looking out onto breathtaking views, so that's exactly what we did.
Just down the road was Govett's Leap with a view for what must have been a good forty thousand miles. There we saw our first Antipodean bird of paradise, a Crimson Rosella, otherwise known to a commoner like me as a blooming great big bright red and blue parrot.
Along the road we drove with a view to view another amazing view, and we did just that at Evans Lookout.
Next on our shopping list of 'views you must see before you die' alongside Jennifer Aniston ungainly getting out of a taxi, is the Three Sisters at Echo Point, a pointy formation of, yep you guessed it, three rocks.
Soph at home
Initially we couldn't see the view for Japs but we fought our way past another oriental photo session and peered out across a grander canyon than the Grand Canyon itself. The Three Sisters are legendary and have a mythical tale attached to their creation that only a select number of people know about including our very own Soph who'd be glad to give you the long-winded gory details on her return to the Motherland.We then hiked down to the formations themselves descending some steps that were carved in rock and were proving to be a step too far for some of our sushi-filled friends who slipped one after the other on their trendy yet impractically plimsolled feet.
Once we'd photographically memorised and digitised every angle, we set off once more around the corner to Katoomba Falls for a ride on the world's steepest railway, and, wait for it, the world's steepest cable car, both in one little corner of the world.
At the railway we managed to grab the front two seats and soon after, the railway began to drop onto the valley floor at a gentle 45 degree angle before plummeting at 60 degrees for the final leg, at which point our legs were locked onto the metal plate below us.
Once at the bottom we walked along a boardwalk through a rainforest of poorly trees with little plaques in front of them describing their ailments, it was a veritable foliaged casualty department without the punch-ups and overworked junior doctors.
Feeling rather guilty about not bringing any grapes along with us, we made our way to the futuristically named Sceniscender for the steep trip back to Katoomba.
Supping Fosters on the plane to Sydney
We swayed back to the summit in a village hall sized cable car being shown the sights by an overly-exuberant guide considering this was probably her twenty-eighth trip of the day.Next stop on our mountain adventure was the quaint, olde worlde town of Leura with its pretty, tree-lined main street of elegant residences, fine art galleries, boutiques, cafes and sandwich shops including the Stock Market Deli where we bought a couple of arty, boutiquey doorstop sandwiches. We sat on a bench opposite reading the Aussie Daily Telegraph that gushed about the exploits of a certain local boy called Tim Cahill whose winning goal in the FA Cup semi-final had sent Millwall into the final and the equally unbelievable news that Becks had been playing away from home with a bevy of money grabbing scrag-ends.
After getting over the shocking headlines with a few stiff drinks of orange juice we headed off for another view with a tough name to live up to, Sublime Point. What can I say? As views into the distance go, it was sublime.
Overdosed with views we arrived back at Blackheath for a couple of pints in the Ivanhoe Hotel (for Hotel read Pub). The unatmospheric bar was more than made up for by the iciness of the lager. The pump was caked in what we thought was novelty plastic ice but turned out to be the real thing.
That evening we headed out for a fish and chip supper takeaway and back on the site we downed a bottle of Wolf Blass and once again attempted to plan our next three months which was turning into an impossibility when trying to tie in sights, sounds, transport and weather conditions.
7/4
An early start saw us heading up the Great Western Highway through the town of Mount Victoria to the Jenolan Caves.
The First Barbie
Not before stopping off in Blackheath for an egg, bacon and barbeque sauce roll that was the size of a family-sized sponge cake.The Jenolan caves number nine in all adding up to 300 subterranean limestone chambers and you'd need a day to visit all of them as tours headed off at differing times. We just made it for the 11am tour of the Imperial Cave, one of the shorter tours at one hour. We were led underground by another bubbly guide who was far too happy than was good for her health. For a cave, and I didn't have many others to compare it with, it was a triumph of damp, dark 300 million year old black holes brimming with stalagmites and stalactites and its very own river. It was stalag-rific.
Come midday and we were back above sea-level with a campervan that needed to be back in Sydney by 4.30pm. We had a four hour drive back to the smoke so it'd be tight. As we drove back though Katoomba we were hampered by a nice thick fog settling on the road and a sudden downpour, a common occurrence in these parts.
The Sydney traffic wasn't too bad and at 4pm we arrived at the Britz depot with half an hour to spare. Our first adventure in a campervan was over, but no doubt there'd be more to come.
Once they were happy we hadn't totally trashed the van, a taxi was called to take us into Sydney for a few days sightseeing.
All will be revealed in the next episode.
IronMan & IroningWoman
xx
