Adventure Tourism

The further travels of a neurotic_dog. From my journal of a year spent travelling back before the toddler was born.


4 December
Don't mention the cricket

We've spent the last four weeks touring around Western Australia, and as a good Pom I've been working hard on acquiring the obligatory patches of sunburn and perfecting my whinge. Although, of course, there hasn't been much to whinge about - apart from one spectacular thunderstorm we've had stunning weather, we haven't been bitten by anything poisonous, and we have cunningly avoided driving our car into a kangaroo. We've been camping for most of the time, and it has been a new experience to be woken up each morning by the sun heating the tent to suffocation levels instead of by the sound of our chattering teeth.

We've only had one camping disaster on this part of the trip - thanks to the recommendation of our trusty guidebook we paid for three nights in advance at an "altogether charming" campsite and set up our tent before checking the facilities. Anyone who has ever seen me in the company of just one wasp will be able to envisage my reaction when I went into the washroom and encountered what could only be described as a wasp-tornado. On further investigation (conducted, needless to say, by Mr Dog) most of the horrendous buzzing turned out to be caused by flies and somehow, by a virtue of relief and relativity, this seemed like good news. We then returned to find every inch of our tent engulfed in the advance guard of the ant invasion, until Mr Dog struck a decisive blow in the battle of the bugs by spraying three quarters of a can of insect poison into the tent. So absolutely nothing's gonna get us now (except perhaps silicosis).

We spent the first weeks driving along the coast, and visiting a host of tourist attractions including the most stunning limestone caves, beautiful beaches, lighthouses, bizarre rock formations, wineries, lavender farms and giant tees. We climbed to the top of a 60m high Karri tree using rungs hammered into the trunk - my legs didn't stop shaking for days afterwards, and I didn't even let poor Mr Dog look at the view from the top because I was so scared that if we stopped up there long enough to register how high it was I wouldn't be able to get back down.

We've seen a huge amount of wildlife - amazing birds, kangaroos, seals, dolphins, snakes, etc, etc. On one excursion we encountered some cute and harmless-looking animals called alpacas, which are similar to llamas. Mr Dog, taking a liking to the ungrateful beasties, bought some alpaca food and proceeded to feed them by hand. His grass-spattered expression of disgust and shock when one of them thoughtfully chewed the mix and then spat it straight into his face will forever be one of my favourite memories. I laughed so hard I gave myself a stomach ache watching him try to wipe off the alpaca-spit and get the bits of masticated grass out of his nose.

The most entertaining place we visited here was Kalgoorlie-Boulder, a gold-mining town on the edge of the desert which still feels like the wild west. Louis' spirits improved enormously - there wasn't an alpaca in sight, and most of the bars were staffed by "skimpies" - attractive female barstaff dressed only in their best underwear. The main purpose of Kal is an unbelievably huge open-cut gold mine called the "superpit", and one of our most unusual tourist experiences was watching an entire rock face in the pit being blasted away in a massive explosion. We also took a very enlightening and highly entertaining guided tour of a brothel, where all the rooms were "fantasy-themed". I'll leave this to your imagination (which is of course the point), but I can assure you that it made quite an impression...

Anyway, after all this excitement we are now back in Perth (recently vacated by hordes of embarrassed England cricket-fans) for a few days recovery, before flying on to Adelaide at the weekend. We've had huge fun in W.A., and definitely recommend it!


26 January
Adventure Tourism

Having spent a lazy December spent relaxing with relatives in Sydney, I'm delighted to report that we made up for it in January. Mr Dog's sister got married on 4 January, and for their honeymoon she and her new husband joined us in touring around New Zealand's South Island for three weeks.

We started in Christchurch, a very pleasant city, and spent three days mooching around town and recovering from our Christmas-New Year-Wedding partying extravaganza. While there we made a visit to the fascinating Antarctic Centre, which contained exhibitions about the antarctic continent and the various research programmes based there. It included a room filled with ice and chilled to replicate the climate at the South Pole, into which you could venture to test your endurance. I now realise this experience was designed as a cunning introduction for visitors to New Zealand, intended purely to make the country seem warmer and more hospitable by comparison.

From Christchurch we headed to the spectacular mountains and glaciers of the west coast, treating our guests to their first experience of my mountain-driving skills on the way. We stopped for a few days in Franz Joseph, with the intention of doing a "heli-hike" onto the ice - this would have consisted of being flown up to the glacier in a helicopter, deposited on the ice, given a guided tour of the blue ice caves and cravasses, and collected again by helicopter at the end, and it sounded like an amazing experience (also much easier than the alternative, an eight hour hike up the glacier to reach the blue ice caves and cravasses). However, we had our first brush with the New Zealand climate, being told on several occasions by a distressingly gleeful operator that the weather (three-day non-stop torrential rain) was too "unstable" to permit the tour. During the wait we did go for our only hike of the last three weeks, up a mountain to look down on the glacier, during which we were humiliated to discover that our hard-won canadian fitness had totally evaporated and that our guests, who do no exercise whatsoever at home, found the hike much easier than we did.

From the glaciers we headed south and spent a week or so with millions of other tourists in the Queenstown region, where we took shelter in a motel for a few days to dry out our sodden tents. Queenstown is the "adrenaline capital" of the South Island, and offered an unbelievable number of ways in which to frighten the wits out of yourself. We all had great fun doing a quad-bike safari and riding at breakneck speed through narrow canyons in a jet-boat, making tandem paraglides (jumping off a mountain attached to a parachute and a bored instructor) and waging a fierce two day war on a luge track (sort of down-hill go-karts) of which the only casualties, fortuntely, were a few small children who should have known better and got out of the way.

However, the most dramatic (and for me, traumatic) experience of the trip was white water river sledging. Among the numerous operators offering white water rafting we found this novelty - one offering the same tour but without the raft. I can only assume that I was extraordinarly drunk when we signed up for this. We turned up one cold wet Sunday morning, hopped into the river armed only with small plastic boards to lean on and launched ourselves into the grade IV rapids. The 40 minutes which followed will haunt me forever - trying to avoid getting sucked into the eddies or pulled down by the whirlpools, I kicked until exhaustion overwhelmed me, floated miserably, facing backwards, when I couldn't kick any more, and then screamed in terror whenever I came up for air after getting knocked away from my sledge and going under in the middle of a violent roaring rapid. I totally panicked, convinced I was drowning inspite of my extremely buoyant wetsuit and life jacket, I whimpered like a baby when one of the guides helped me regain the small comfort of my board, and I generally made a total idiot of myself. The others enjoyed every minute of the experience, of course, but it definately isn't one I'll be repeating. Although today I consider myself to have had a fortunate escape, because I just read in the guide book that on the North Island you can also participate in white water sledging, and the operator there offers "one of the biggest buzzes you'll ever get in adventure tourism - going over the 7m Okere Falls". *Shudder*

After Queenstown we visited the stunning glow-worm caves of Te Anau, and spent a beautiful, if slightly surreal, evening floating in total silence and total darkness on an underground river through caverns filled with tiny blue twinkling bugs. We took a day trip to the spectacular Milford Sound, where we took a short cruise and saw dolphins and seals, walked on some residual glacier ice, and generally admired the scenery and imagined we were in Middle Earth.

The last week of our trip took us down to the south coast, where we spent most of our time wearing gloves and hats and narrowly avoided staying in a campsite which looked even worse than the one in Anchorage (didn't even have doors on the toilets). We saw beautiful caves, a 100-million year old petrified forest, seals, penguins and albatrosses, we lost lots of money in a casino, and we managed to save our tents and rain shelter from a raging gale and torrential rain in a dramatic 3am rescue operation. We finished off with an afternoon's horse-trekking, followed by a dip in some much-appreciated thermal springs.

We are now back in Christchurch recovering from our aches and bruises, before heading off the the North Island (reputedly warmer and less wet - hurrah!) at the end of the week. All in all, it's been one hell of a month.