I realised whilst staring blankly at this sign on my way to work that I had fallen through the looking glass and woken up in a parallel universe.

One of the most obvious oddities is that the seasons are backwards – winter is from June to August and the height of summer is from Christmas to the end of February.

There are also loads of streets and areas in Sydney with familiar names that have a completely different character to their UK name sakes. Canterbury is an inner west suburb filled with unemployed layabouts and there’s not a cathedral or fancy school in sight. There’s no train station in Paddington and the only bears there who like marmalade are the customers of one of it’s many gay clubs. New South Wales does not contain many sheep or coal mines and has recently experienced a 10 year drought. [Kings Cross is just like its London counterpart: soulless oversized boozers full of fake-tanned man peacock hybrids and aggro drunken whores – Bernie]

Sydney’s Hyde Park is definitely still a park, but it’s smaller and the pigeons are a bit scary looking.

They don’t have the Salvation Army but an enigmatic institution called The Salvos instead. You’ll also find this establishment around the place:

It is Burger King but I have no idea why it’s called Hungry Jacks here. In fact many of the things people say mean something different (see my earlier post for heaps more examples).

There are loads of things about life in Sydney that are familiar to a Brit but the city is patently not London no matter how much the original settlers (and some of the later ones) might have wanted it to be. It’s the same same but different, enough so that if you think about it for too long it starts to mess with your head. Personally I’ve grown to love the sense of unfamiliar familiarity and I now expect I’ll go through it in reverse when I get back to the UK.

But whilst I’m still in Australia I can at least console myself with a bag of sweets from Woolies.

We decided to take the opportunity to get some climbing in at one of the most stunning locations in the world: Railay beach on Thailand’s Andaman Coast. Railay has a tonne of climbing routes at different grades. They’re on limestone cliffs which either come right down to the sea or are surrounded by lush jungle. We had loads of fun over two days with our guide Kung.

We also spent a day deep water soloing – climbing without a rope on sea cliffs and diving (or falling) off when you’re done.

And we managed to fit in a spot of bouldering

[This particular bouldering session lasted about ten seconds because the rocks are covered in little razor-sharp flakes. That was in two sessions of five seconds each: the first when I climbed on, wailed like a girl and dropped off, and the second when Jude made me get back on again because she missed the photo – B]

And some posing

Before chilling out and watching the sunset

We also discovered that our climbing guide Kung actually has two awesome jobs. He’s an instructor by day and a fire juggler by night. How cool is that?

It’s been looming large in this stage of our trip for weeks now. We’ve been telling people that “We’re going to cross the Nullarbor” in hushed tones and fancying that they start looking at us with new found respect.

As well as being big the Nullarbor is flat and the road is straight. Very straight.

That’s a photo of our Sat Nav telling us that we’ve got another 675 kilometres to go until the next turning (and we only thought to take the picture when we were half way across). No wonder the only people that live here work in the service stations that keep travellers of questionable sanity well supplied with pies and trinkets.

The Nullarbor is the largest piece of continuous limestone in the world. It’s flat for hundreds of kilometres, then plunges abruptly into the sea.

It’s riddled with caves called “blowholes”. These are huge underground caves with small mouths, so that when the outside air pressure drops all the air in the cave rushes out through the entrance allowing you to do some amusing things with bloomers.

More people lived here back in the 19th century when the main mode of transport was camels and the journey across the plain took months [these days the 4.5 litre V8 diesel Toyota Landcruiser seems to be more in vogue – Bernie].

But the most shocking thing about the Nullarbor (from the latin Nullus – “bugger all in the way of” – and Arbor – “Trees”) is that the western half has trees on it. Lot’s of trees. So many trees in fact that it’s much easier to see the blue haze eucalypts are famous for here than it is back in the Blue Mountains near Sydney.

We squeezed our tent into the last spot on the site and settled down to enjoy civilisation with half of Australia. We soon got talking to two locals Judie and Rob who told us that everybody was there for the superlative fishing. Rob’s an expert fisherman and offered to take us out with him the next day so we could see for ourselves.

First up we needed to acquire some bait. These things are known as razor fish – they don’t look particularly like razors or fish but the King George Whiting are mad for what’s inside them, which is a bit like a scallop:

After some expert tuition from Rob we got cracking:

And it wasn’t long before we hooked a couple of whiting each:

After a while another boat motored slowly past, some 50 metres away. Rob said “Queenslanders, pah. They’ve got no fishing etiquette. Don’t let on that we’re catching anything or they’ll be over fishing in our spot.” No sweat I thought – I hadn’t caught anything for a while. 30 seconds later I felt an enormous tug on my rod and reeled in not one but two whiting at the same time. I admit that at this point I got a little over excited and turned round to show Rob and Bernie before I’d finished reeling the line in. The momentum sent my line circling round the boat twice as Rob and Bernie jumped and ducked to avoid a fishy slap. [There was an amount of whooping too – Bernie]  We were rumbled, oops!

After three hours or so on the water the fish stopped biting – partly because Bernie and I had fed them so much bait I think – so we headed back to camp to prepare supper:

Step one: scaling

Step two: filleting

Step three: feed the head and tail to the appreciative audience

Step four: cook (this is Rob, by the way)

Step four turns this:

Into this:

Nom, nom, nom.

It’s important not to let the whiting have all the fun. It turns out that humans find razor fish exceptionally tasty too:

They taste like a cross between crab and scallop, are found only on the Eyre Peninsula and can’t be sold in shops or restaurants:

Perfect.

In Streaky Bay we feasted like kings and queens, learnt some new skills and made some fab new friends. Thanks for giving us a perfect dose of civilisation Rob and Judie!

Phil and Sam both looking rather splendid at the Moeraki Boulders

But we couldn’t spend a week in the world’s adventure sports capital without doing something silly so we decided to test ourselves by going white water rafting down the Rangitata river’s grade 5 rapids.

It turned out that the white water was a piece of cake – neither of us fell out and we both managed to acquit ourselves adequately with a paddle. For proof of this please see the pictures below. Bernie’s at the front of the boat in a blue helmet and I’m on the second row in a green helmet. The lovely looking fellow in the gold helmet is our guide Duncan. When Bernie asked him if he could drink the water, he replied “Sure you can drink it. You’ll get savage fatal diarrhea, but you can drink it!”

But the ordeal wasn’t over – the most terrifying bit came at the end.  After watching everybody else do it there was no way I could chicken out of the 10m cliff jump at the end of the course!

You would be able to see the fear in my eyes, if my eyes were open…

* Even New Zealand isn’t that close – it’s as far away from Australia as Russia is from the UK.

Of course some Aussie lingo is internationally famous:

“No worries” is a two word embodiment of the Australian outlook on life; Male Australians do address everybody as “Mate”; And I knew I’d really arrived in Oz the first time a stranger said “G’day” to me in the lift.

And there’s some stereotypically aussie things that I have yet to hear anyone use:

Strewth, bonza, fair dinkum, flaming gallahs, tinnies, tucker and throwing shrimps on barbies must have all gone out of fashion.

But there are also some less well known words and phrases knocking about the lexicon:

• Across it –this is business jargon. Usage: “Are you across the TPS report?” Meaning: Are you aware of the contents of this totally pointless report?
• Capsicum – a pepper, might be a bell pepper, might be a chilli – to be honest, I’m not entirely sure
• Cockies – diminutive for cockroaches. We’ve been warned to expect a plague of giant cockies in summer ( joy! )
• Convos, regos, presos – short for conversations, registrations and presentations respectively
• Crazaroo – Crazy. Not actually a common phrase but too funny to leave out: a colleague recently told me he expected a conference to be Crazaroo.
• Cruisy – This one’s quite different to what the rest of the world might think. In Oz cruisy people are just easy going dudes. They are NOT (necessarily) out looking for gay sex…
• Degustation – Pronunciation: like devastation but with a g. Has the same meaning as dégustation but sounds hilarious when said in a broad aussie accent rather than an affected French one.
• Doona –duvet, see degustation for what would have happened if they’d used the same word as the UK
• Flick – Forward on an e-mail. Usage: “Let me flick this across to you”
• Footy – a deceptively tricky one this. If an aussie asks you to the footy they could be inviting you to watch 11 blokes kicking a round ball or 15 men chucking an egg shaped ball across the pitch, or even an unknown number of men doing something unspeakable known as “Aussie Rules”
• Lollies – Any kind of sweet, with or without a stick. This is particularly ironic when the sweet shop is called the British Lolly Shop like the one near our flat.
• Panadol – generic term for pain killer, not one specific brand
• Rugged up – a person who is wrapped up warm
• Schoolies – when high school graduates go on holiday with each other just after their final exams. The rest of the country is generally horrified by their behaviour. Sounds pretty similar to spring break in the US
• Screenies, stubbies and sunnies – screenshots, bottles of beer and sunglasses respectively
• ‘Strine – The language spoken by ‘Strines. Or “Australians” in a dialect that doesn’t omit so many consonants
• Swimmers – useful catch all term for bikinis, swimming costumes, shorts etc
• Thongs – flip flops. Not the skimpy pants favoured by Peter Stringfellow
• Toolies – people who are not high school graduates who hang around in areas where schoolies are behaving in a debauched fashion.
• Uey – a U-turn. Note: one doesn’t make or take a Uey, one hangs, chucks or throws one. For instance “hang a Uey by the dingo Bruce”
• Utes – short for a utility vehicle. They’re called pick ups in the US, bakkies in South Africa and they don’t have a special name in the UK. We are thinking of buying one to tour the country bogan style later in the year

We got kitted out in daft outfits and floated down the (really not stormy) river on inflatable rubber rings. As you can see the water was pretty shallow:

The water turned out to be loads warmer than the thick wetsuits had led us to believe it would be, phew! We splashed around like big kids for a couple of hours and had lots of fun.

Afterwards we went down to the river mouth. We found that it was a whole lot more elemental down there, but that was mainly down to the sea rather than the river. After chucking a couple of stones in the ocean…

… Bernie went off and took some rather splendid photos, and no, I’m not at all partisan!

We went out to Cape Point and discovered it was very windy:

Eden was less than impressed with this new worldly phenomena:

We also met up with Madeleine Spring, one of our fellow volunteers in Tanzania. She arrived in Cape Town just before we started our SA road trip:

I must have said something very funny just before I took that photo! [that, or I’m tickling Mads – Bernie]

On the first day we got up early

To take in an awesome view of Ngorogoro crater

Then we drove to the Serengeti national park and popped the top of the still largely intact jeep

We found out that the trees in the Serengeti aren’t like trees in other places

They have leopards hiding in them!

We stopped for lunch on high ground so lions couldn’t eat us

We spent the afternoon spotting more wildlife

After a good night’s sleep we got up early again to watch the sunrise

We drove back through the Serengeti to Ngorogoro crater and saw (very small) rhinos

We left Ngorogoro crater just before a storm came in and soaked all the other tourists

It was thanks to our awesome driver and guide Ben that we spotted all of this amazing wildlife

And the car didn’t really break that much – in four days there was a passenger door that wouldn’t stay closed, a flat tyre, loss of a lot of axle fluid and the shearing of one of the metal roof supports. Just a normal amount of broken stuff for Tanzania!

We’re living at Art in Tanzania’s volunteer house in Bahari Beach, outside Dar es Salaam. The staff call it “the hotel” but the locals know it as the “wazungu (white people’s) house”. We’re attempting to update artintanzania.org but we’re frequently interrupted by power cuts. This area relies on hydro electricity and the last rainy season was poor so now they can’t provide enough power. The power company has published a schedule of cuts but do they stick to it? Of course not! The locals say the only way to get 24 hour power is to live on the same block as a politician.

We’ve been getting to know the staff and other volunteers. Most people are European and most of the Europeans are Nordic but there are enough Brits for us not to feel unique. Bernie swapped south London-isms last week with Ian who was here with his fiancee Ingrid. They were here on a two week holiday from their London jobs – I’m seriously impressed that they chose to spend their precious holiday time volunteering with Art rather than on the usual Safari/Zanzibar tourist circuit.

Me writing this blog post during a power cut

In order to sleep in the 30 degree plus night time temperatures we're sleeping in the same bunk directly under the fan. Fortunately we're the only people in our room!

Nice arse!

A great use for all the wazungu's water bottles