Newcastle, AUS

Day 1. It’s amazing how quickly things can change on you in one day. We woke up Tuesday morning to pouring rain in Katoomba. The only photo of the Three Sisters that we could scrounge up was while waiting for at the train station. But two train rides (and 5 hours later) we found ourselves baking in hot & humid weather in sunny Newcastle. This is our favorite spot in Australia thus far.

The beach is just a couple of blocks away and what’s even better, is that they have OUTLET STORES! We are finally caving in on the shopping, but at reasonable prices. I bought myself two new tops for a whooping total of $5.50AUD, which was cheaper than the coconut lime mint smoothie I had ordered earlier that day.

After our shopping spree we returned to the hostel, where we met with a group of folks going to The Grand Hotel for some bingo and free sausage. The hostel participates (along with the other YHA hostel in town) in “activities” nearly every evening, and tonight was bingo night.  The hotel bar had a large section of tables reserved for our group of about 25 people.

Our table didn’t win anything, but it was still fun to play, and free dinner was a nice bonus. At our table we met a few people from our hostel, a Dutch guy and a couple of girls from Florida, who all had a travel profile very similar to our own, in that they had spent some time in New Zealand, and were now travelling around Australia.

There was also a jazz night in the lower level of the bar that we were invited to attend to, but the $10 cover charge convinced us otherwise. Instead, we got a nice ‘front row seat’ just outside the bar, where the music travelled up clearly through a street grate. In fact, we were able to see the drummer through the grate. It was amusing enough that we decided to capture the moment where Florida wanted to take a picture of the drummer through the grate.

Day 2. We left the hostel at the early time of NOON. We went back to the Hunter Street outlet stores and bought Dan a new shirt for $10AUD. We also wandered to the Newcastle YHA to inquire about the surfboard hire, which looks to be $5/hour, which is a good price, considering the waves look like it could kick your butt in about an hours time. One thing that I did ask while we were there, was to see their private rooms. The girl at the front desk gave me a key to one of the rooms, so we snooped in there and the room was much bigger and cleaner than our current stay. Perhaps we’ll try and book with the YHA if we find ourselves back at Newcastle on our way back down to Sydney.

Last night, we met another pair of friends, Armando and Aurora who are travelling together from Barcelona. There was music trivia and free pasta – just our kind of price. We’re trying to take advantage of any kind of free food where available and luckily this hostel seems to be very good in setting up a free dinner each night with surrounding restaurants/bars. It’s not fancy, but it fills our bellies. The music trivia game was a ton of fun, and the four of us did pretty well (we had the 3rd highest score). We also tried to post on our blog on this day, but ran into technical difficulties, hopefully providing an explanation for this mini novella.

Day 3. Yesterday, we decided to go on a wine tour with Armando & Aurora. The bus was scheduled for nine o’clock, which meant an early start for us, but once we picked up everyone and completed the one-hour drive out to wine country it was half past eleven. “Wine country” for this part of Australia is Hunter Valley, reported to be one of the oldest wine growing regions in the country. It looks alot like the Okanagan, and the vineyards look very at home amongst the arid hills and small lakes.

The first winery we visited was staffed by a very enthusiastic woman, who actually burst out in song at one point, and who explained the many virtues of screw-top caps versus unreliable and potentially bacteria filled cork. The wine was middling quality at best, and our hostess enjoyed talking much more than pouring, but did cover the material well. Our second stop was at Iron Gate Estates. The gentleman there was no less enthusiastic, and spoke at length about how the ability cork has for “breathing” allows the wine to properly mature, and that only the cheapest factory-grade wines would be bottled with a screw-top cap.

This wine was far superior to our first experience, with each sample pleasing almost everyone, and a sufficiently long list of them to forget which one exactly had been the favorite. We tried a couple of different grapes, like Samillon, and Verdelho, which expanded our palettes a little, with new wine flavours. We then stopped for lunch at the Golden Grape, where we ate from the $10 menu – nothing spectacular, but it did give us time to sober up before heading on to the next tasting room, which happened to be right next door to the cafe. This was (by the group’s consensus) actually the worst experience we had of all the wineries today. The guy blew by 4-5 different liqueors without much explanation or even giving us the time to at least try to enjoy the mediocre mixes. At one point, one of the girls asked him what flavour he was pouring at the time, in which he responded, “I’ve already said so. You should have listened the first time.” Anyways, with that behind us, we were then carted off to our 4th vineyard, which was purely organic. The wines were good, but our 2nd winery of the day still shone through as the favorite. With our stomachs full of wine, we were then driven to a cheese tasting, where Armando and I took FULL advantage of the bread and truffle flavoured olive oil. We probably went through most of the bottle. There were also various feta cheese, mascarpone cheese, blue cheese that we all had a small tasting of as well as some spicy olives. By this time, it seemed like most of the group was spent, but John, our driver, took us to two more places, which were more geared towards the tourist shopper – and therefore, we didn’t spend much time (or money) in either of the last locations.

We arrived back just after 6:15pm and our entire tour group headed over to the Brewery for this evening’s free meal: BBQ & salad. Unlike the small portions of pasta last night, this meal was a really good spread of sausages, pasta salad, ouzo/rice salad and green salad. We were entertained by playing a trivia game and our group won by a landslide, though we were the ones probably least interested in the prize – 2 free jugs of beer – having come from an entire day of drinking. So, we made some friends and awarded our volunteer photographers a pint or two.

The evening ended with Dan & I saying our good-byes to Armando and Aurora, with the hope of perhaps getting together again once we are done our work term.

Day 4. We are leaving Newcastle this afternoon, where we are due to embark on a LOOOONG bus, then train, then bus again, trip to Mullumbimby, where our host family will pick us up at the CountryLink station and then drive another hour outside of town to their farm. We are due to arrive in Mullumbimby on Saturday morning at 6:15am.   ADDENDUM:  We are not going to Mullumbimby (good thing we checked with our host family), but Murwillumbah.  After a last minute call to CountryLink (3 hours before departure), we managed to get our itinerary changed to take us to the correct town.  We’re feeling quite sheepish right now. 😛

This will be our first experience working for accomodation so I’m curious as to what I’ll be asked to do. The other Florida (brunette, who reminds me a lot of Dawn-Marie) had shared some of her experiences WWOOFing in Australia. She had said that on her first day, she was told that she was responsible for clearing out the spider webs and was given a broom to do so. Now, that wouldn’t be a problem if it were in Canada, but we’re in AUSTRALIA, where most of the deadliest creatures live. I’m already worrying myself into a frenzy. On gardening – ‘Will i run into those huge ground spiders? Or snakes?”. On livestock help – “What if in the field I get attacked by a dingo?”. On house cleaning – “This family has 6 boys, who probably like to collect critters of all sorts, will I be discovering these collections?”. Of course, I’m building up all these scenarios that probably won’t come into play, but I am my father’s daughter. 😉

At any rate, the huge benefit in doing this is that we’ll be able to gain experience working on an Australian farm, we’ll be saving ourselves a lot of money in food and accomodation alone and we’ll also get the opportunity to stay with a family and actually take the time to get to know them, unlike the whirlwind, one day friendships we’ve made in the hostels.