Perth, Margaret River, and Cowaramup (Australia)

We flew from Singapore at 8 o'clock in the evening and arrived at Sydney airport at around 6 am local time with sleepy heads on us. Luckily, there was a shuttle buses that took us straight from the airport to right outside the door of our hostel, where we landed at around 9 o'clock. We spent most of our first day in Sydney walking around the main city area and sitting in a park (I can't remember the name) overlooking Farm Cove with the harbour and the opera house in the background. The next morning we headed on a free walking tour of the city that took us all around the main sights including the Sydney Harbour, the opera house, and the Rocks. In the middle of the tour, we stopped for a break in Australia Square and happened to bump into the one and only Alf Stewart (yea, I know that's not his real name)! It's not lost on us that the chances of meeting such a famous Australian face on our first day in the country are probably fairly slim. We also met another familiar face in Sydney in the form of Charlie Robinson, an old friend of ours from our days in UCD. For the next couple of days, we stayed with some relatives of mine who live in the suburbs, and had a big family barbeque on the first night there, where we got to meet some distant cousins who really made us feel part of the Australian Purcell family! After another day of exploring the city (including a walk around Darling Harbour), and another Purcell family dinner, we flew to Perth. We stayed in a house in the Perth suburbs (we booked it on AirBnB) for three days. On our first day there, we drove our rented car to Caversham Wildlife Park, located around half an hour outside Perth city centre, where we got to meet-and-greet kangaroos, koala bears, and lots of other Aussie animals. After a few hours at the park, we headed to Freemantle for some fish and chips (the 'best in WA' apparently) and sat on he beach to watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean (cue vomiting). The next day we headed back to Freemantle for a tour of the former prison there, which was the home of thousands of convicts sent to Australia from the UK and Ireland. The tours we went on in the prison brought us into all the main areas, like the exercise yard, cells, kitchen, death row, and the gallows. After a walk around the famous Freemantle market, we headed back to Perth for a walk around Kings Park where we got an impressive night-view of the city and the Swan River. After our few days in Perth were finished, we headed south for a two-day trip to Margaret River. The drive from Perth took around 4 hours, and the road brought us right through the heart of wine-making country, with acres of vineyards on either side of us as we drove into the town. After arriving in Margaret River, we took a walk through a wood near our hostel to the river itself, and went for fish and chips in a local pub afterwards. The next morning we hit the road to Lake Cave (located just off Cave Road, of course), one of many caves in the area but supposedly the best (and the highest-rated attraction in Margaret River on TripAdvisor). The cave didn't disappoint. After walking the steep steps down to the cave, we were met with spectacular views as the stalagmites and other formations in the cave reflected off the water of the lake inside. After coming back up to daylight after the hour-long tour, we pretended to be cultured and headed to a free wine-tasting in one of the wineries in the area (there are over 120 of them, and the ones with 'cellar doors' signs offer free wine tastings).
On our way back to our hostel, we stopped at an olive farm and a chocolate factory, and paid a visit to a small town called Cowaramup, which is an atypical town with an interesting history. Situated in the heart of Margaret River's wine region, Cowaramup was initially formed as a 'group settlement scheme' to promote dairy production and to populate the high-rainfall area of the south-west in the mid-1920s. Families that moved to the area were given grants of around 160 acres to farm. Eventually someone copped on to the fact that it might be a good place to grow grapes and make wine, and thus the first commercial winery in the area was opened in 1967, after which the area eventually developed into the prime wine-making spot it is today. At a quick glance driving through Cowaramup, the town looks normal enough, but with a second look the slightly strange and definitely unique trait of this town is obvious. Scattered around the town, on the pavements of the main street and on the green areas of the small park in the town ('Pioneer Park'), are 42 fibreglass, life-size cow sculptures. To make this cow-related story even weirder, the fake cows were unveiled to the general public on July 15th, 2012, which so-happened to be International Cow Appreciation Day (yes, that does exist). In addition to the cow sculptures, the town also holds the record for the most people dressed as cows (1,352 to be specific). As a result of this apparent obsession with cows in Cowaramup (or the difficulty in pronouncing it's name), Cowaramup is affectionately referred to by the locals as Cowtown. Even more weirdly, the name Cowaramup actually has nothing to do with cows, but is supposedly based on the Aboriginal word 'cowara', which means 'purple-crowned lorikeet' (a bird). There is also a large gold-coloured cow sculpture called 'free as a cow' in Pioneer Park in the town, but I won't go into that.
Anyway, on our last day on Oz's west coast, we made the drive back up to Perth for our 'overnight' (4-hour) flight to Cairns.

Aisling with a couple of her marsupial friends

A koala bear tries to sleep while we annoy it

The inside grounds of Freemantle Prison

The gallows. 40 hangings were carried out at Freemantle Prison, which was the only lawful place of execution in Western Australia between 1888 and 1984. 

 

The view of the prison from one of the watchtowers

The front entrance to the prison

Freemantle Market

 

The blurry view of Perth city from King's Park

Next stop - Africa. One of the beaches that we stopped at on our way south to Margaret River from Perth.

Margaret River

Walking down to Lake Cave. The scene in the background shows trees above ground level with a steep drop into a large crater-like hole, where some ground collapsed above a part of the cave. This probably happened at least 500 years ago as indicated by the ages of some the trees in the collapsed area.

The gap to reach the cave is narrow and we were told to duck our heads to avoid hitting two rocks nicknamed 'headache rock' and 'splitting headache rock' 



 

The walkway through cave (on the extreme left) runs alongside the lake (just left of centre)

The walkway in the centre of the photo with the lake on either side

Stalagmites inside the cave 

The vines in one of the wineries in Margaret River.

With some of the cows in Cowaramup

In the green areas

In front of shops on the main street



Everywhere!

 

An old-style wooden church in Cowaramup

'Free as a cow'

 

Sydney (Australia)

We flew from Singapore at 8 o'clock in the evening and arrived at Sydney airport at around 6 am local time with sleepy heads on us. Luckily, there was a shuttle buses that took us straight from the airport to right outside the door of our hostel, where we landed at around 9 o'clock. We spent most of our first day in Sydney walking around the main city area and sitting in a park on Mrs. Macquarie's Point overlooking Farm Cove with the harbour and the opera house in the background. The next morning we headed on a free walking tour of the city that took us all around the main sights including the Sydney Harbour, the opera house, and the Rocks. In the middle of the tour, we stopped for a break in Australia Square and happened to bump into the one and only Alf Stewart (yea, I know that's not his real name)! It's not lost on us that the chances of meeting such a famous Australian face on our first day in the country are probably fairly slim. We also met another familiar face in Sydney in the form of Charlie Robinson, an old friend of ours from our days in UCD. For the next couple of days, we stayed with some relatives of mine who live in a lovely spot in the suburbs (Kirrawee, near Cronulla Beach) just south of the city. On our first night, we were welcomed with a top-class family barbeque, where we got to meet some of my distant cousins who really made us feel part of the Australian Purcell family! After another day of exploring the city (including a walk around Darling Harbour), and another Purcell family dinner, we said our goodbyes and flew to Perth.

 

The views of Harbour Bridge and Sydney Opera House from Mrs. Macquarie's Point 

With the man himself

Harbour Bridge again

 

And the Opera House again

The city from the Opera House

This statue of Queen Victoria sat outside Leinster House (Irish parliament building) until 1947 but was given as a gift to the Australian government once Ireland became a republic

Bali

We took the two-and-a-half-hour flight to the Indonesian island of Bali from Kota Kinabalu in the Malaysian part of Borneo. As soon as we left the departures area of the airport, a wave of taxi drivers hit us, each of them asking us where we were going before giving us a range of different prices for the trip. Unfortunately, the taxi drivers at the airport wouldn't turn on their metres, so bartering and agreeing the price before getting a car is essential if you don't want to be ripped-off. We spent three days in a beach-side town called Legian, just north of Kuta on the west coast of the island. Legian is a bit of a surfer's paradise, with no shortage of big waves and surfing schools or sports bars and nightclubs (as well as a fair bit of drugs judging by the amount of times I was offered them walking along the main street at night). We spent most of the three days there on the beach, and rented surfboards on the last day (they cost all of €3 a day to rent). I wiped-out (surfer talk for falling over, I think) about fifty times but eventually managed to stand up on the board a few times (for a couple of seconds each time), so it was worth it! After our three days in Legian, we headed north by shuttle bus to the town of Ubud. Ubud is much less about the bars and nightclubs than is Kuta, and much more about Balinese culture and art, with some of the streets there lined with stonemasons and sculptors selling carvings and statues of Buddha and Hindi and local gods, and others streets populated with art dealers selling their oil paintings of the Bali landscape and people. After staying in hostels in nearly all of the places we had visited, we decided to change it up in Bali by booking into a homestay with a local Balinese family. Our stay in our homestay was a brilliant experience, down to both the kindness of the family we were staying with and the location of the house, which was in the country but still only 2 minutes from the town on a scooter. On our first night in the homestay, we went to the local temple, about a kilometre further out the road from Ubud town, where there was an apparently important 3-day festival beginning. To get into the temple, we had to dress in the local attire, which consisted of a type of head-scarf and a sarong for men (both of which had Balinese names that I've forgotten). The temple itself was crawling with people when we arrived, with women sitting in one area (where each of the religious statues and figurines were surrounded with offerings in the form of layered towers of fruit that the local women constructed and carried to the temple on their heads throughout the day), and the men sitting in another area. There was a large stage in the men's area, where a man dressed in ornate local dress with gold trimmings and a colourful mask with a distorted face and bulging eyes did a body-popping-like dance, to which music played on a multitude of instruments by local men got louder and quieter as the body movements of the man quickened and slowed. Once the dancer-composer finished his routine, he exited the stage through decorated double-doors at the back. In the temple, we sat down beside a soft-spoken Balinese man with near-perfect English who explained a lot of the happenings to us, and brought us up the women's area where everyone had now gathered to pray, where a chick was sacrificed to the gods by cutting its throat after which its blood was mixed with spices (yea, we found it strange too). The man we spoke to told us that the religion itself was based on a mixture of Hindi and local animist beliefs. The following day, we rented a scooter and visited Goa Gajah temple, otherwise known as Elephant Cave due to the elephant carvings around the cave at the site. Just in front of the cave are old bathing pools now filled with fish, with three large stone figurines pouring water from stone jugs into each pool. Ubud is not short on things to see, and we also took a trip to see the impressive rice terraces outside the town as well as taking a tour of the Ubud coffee plantations, where we given a guided explanation and demonstration of how coffee is grown, harvested, and ground. We were then treated to a free tasting of several different types of coffees all the while looking out over the vast area of coffee plantations below us. On our second last night in Ubud, we woke at half past one in the morning to be collected at two o' clock for a sunrise trek of Mount Batur, an active volcano in the north-east of Bali. Unfortunately, there was no sign of our minivan at quarter to three, and we nearly gave up hope, but luckily it arrived just before we headed back to our beds, and we were on the way at three o'clock a little later than planned. After around 45 minutes in the van, ourselves and the four other people in our group (two French and two German) arrived at a village near the mountain for banana crepes and Balinese coffee, and after another ten minutes in the van we arrived at the start of the trek. We made the trek to the top of the mountain in pitch black by the lights of the torches on our phones. The terrain was flat at the start but suddenly got steep and rocky at the base of the mountain. Fortunately, there were dozens of people from other groups going up with us at that stage, and everyone was in good form when we reached the top and got to see the sunrise over the surrounding mountains. After the sun had fully raised its head, our guide made us a breakfast of banana sandwiches and boiled eggs, and after warming up in the volcanic steam coming off the mountain (and taking a few pictures of the macaques that inhabit Mount Batur), we headed back down and took the coach back to our homestay for around ten o'clock that morning. We spent most of the rest of our day planning for Australia, where we were headed to next.

The fruit-towers offered at the temple on our first night

 

The view of the sun coming up from Mount Batur

 

The macaques on Mount Batur



The view from around half-way up



Our mountain guide's house. We stopped for a pit-stop on the way down

One of the temples on Ubud

 



Agung looked after us very well in our homestay

Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan (Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia)

Myself, Aisling, and Tara made the short flight from Johor Bahru (on the Malaysian mainland) to Kota Kinabalu, which is the capital of Sabah, which itself is one of the two Malaysian provinces (the other being Sarawak) on the northern part of the island of Borneo. After arriving, we visited the local night market, where hawkers tried to flog all sorts of clothes, food, and other bits and pieces. Unsurprisingly, since the market is situated along a pier lined with fishing boats, there was a huge amount of stalls selling fresh fish (and gutting them on demand) and other seafood (a lot of which was still alive in the stall). Having only two days in Kota Kinabalu, we wanted to make the most of our short stay so, on our second day, we did a one-day tour around Kinabalu Park, home of the impressive Mount Kinabalu. Unfortunately, the normal two-day trek to the mountain's summit was closed when we were there (it reopened on the 1st of September, I think), but we did get the chance to do a short walk through the jungle around the mountain, which included a canopy walk along a series of rope bridges that were connected to some of the taller trees. This gave us a great view of the jungle underneath us. We also visited Kipungit waterfall (also in the park) for a quick dip and, on our way back from the waterfall, we stopped at the Poring hot springs for a naturally-heated bath (which smelled like rotten eggs because of the sulphur in the water). After a traditional Malaysian meal in a local restaurant, our tour guide Lolo invited us back to his family home to give us a view of traditional life in the country in Sabah. What was intended as a short stay for a few minutes ended up as one of the best nights of our trip so far. After chatting with our guide's family for a couple of hours (and trying their home-made rice and coconut wines and a few puffs of shisha), they invited the three of us to a large family-reunion party that was happening in the village. At the party, our generous hosts offered us beer and more rice and coconut wine, and also fed us some of the local food on offer. We attracted a fair amount of interest at the party, and ended up posing for pictures with some of the local villagers, who showed us on how to perform some of the local dances (this involved slowly flapping our arms like wings). After a few more hours (and a Westlife song on karaoke by Aisling and Tara featuring a couple of the locals), we said goodbye to our hosts and headed back to Kota Kinabalu city with some great memories of our night. The next day we said goodbye to Tara and spent some of the day exploring the town (which didn't take long since Kota Kinabalu isn't really a tourist hotspot). The following morning, myself and Aisling took a five-hour bus journey to Sandakan, a city on the east side of Sabah. The bus journey was well worth doing because it was a great way of seeing the landscape, especially as the diverse jungles give way to the palm tree plantations for palm oil production, which dominate the landscape outside Sandakan, spreading as far as the eye can see at times. The next morning, we took the public bus to Sepilok (a few miles outside Sandakan) to visit the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, and made it just in time for the 10 am feeding. After the feeding we headed for the nursery to see some young Orangutans, and then went on a walk through the rainforest for a couple of hours in the Rainforest Discovery Centre just beside the Orangutan centre. Both places were cheap to enter and well worth the visit. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit the nearby Bornean Sun Bears Conservation Centre before our bus left to drop us back to Sandakan. The morning after, we headed on public bus to Sandakan Memorial Park, a memorial site based at the former World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Sandakan, where about 2,500 (mostly Australian) prisoners were imprisoned by the Japanese during the war. We flew to Bali the next day...



Arriving in Kota Kinabalu



Another food market!

 





Some locals cooking street food



Fresh fish caught during the day



More seafood



Sunset with fishing boats



Myself and Aisling ruining an otherwise lovely photo, with Mount Kinabalu in the background



Stalls selling tropical fruit are plentiful in Sabah



Snakefruit, dragonfruit, and mangosteens (l to r) at the back - all really nice 



I had to post this only for Aisling's perseverance in getting the picture alone (and our guide's patience) 



The three of us -awh!



Shisha



Us with the local family that we met, one of which took a shine to Tara



In their house



Catch of the day in Kota Kinabalu. I think the money in their mouths is how much they'll get for the fish



A place selling burgers at the side of the road in Sandakan - they were going for €0.75



A walkway through Memorial Park in Sandakan