Tag Archives: Australia

The Big Banana

The east coast of Oz has so many gorgeous places to see, yet one of the most well know crowd pleasers is The Big Banana that sits glaring over the road just outside Coffs Harbour.

Now the problem with having the moniker ‘Big’ before your name is that you expect it to be nothing less than, well, big. The big banana didn’t really live up to it’s bigness in my books, but let’s not get Freudian about that or we’ll be here all day.

Here is a picture of the big banana, admittedly it would fill up your bowl of muesli should you slice it up for breakfast.

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Work Beach River Eat

Well that’s about it right now. I have to prise myself away from this idyll to take a look up country or I’ll have to take up residency here in Bellingen. Now that’s no bad thing and we are considering it as an option, along with half of the rest of the world too. It’s a nice dichotomy to be in, but for now we are up for a trip to the gold coast and some of those little waterfalls with idyllic little pools we have heard about up country.

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Batty

We crossed over the Bellingen river and took a left hand turn through the old caravan site to be met by a forest full of bats hanging in the trees like some mass vampire convention. They were taking little training flights, grooming, walking about the trees upside down whilst making an awesome racket.

When the time is right (sunset) they all take off at once and head off in search of fruit (they are fruit bats, or flying foxes). They seem to know where they are going as it seems each bat has it’s own destination.

At sunrise they all come home and hang out, literally.

If it gets too hot they die as happened a few summers ago, they just roast and fall off of the trees. They have little back legs but can’t stand up, so I am guessing they get most of the moisture they need to survive from the fruit they eat. Damned cute little fellers they are.

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Sydney

Australia is a bit more smoke and mirrors than I expected it to be. Maybe this is because over in the UK we think we know about Australia, it crops up in conversation and a good deal of it’s population think of London as a second home, so when I arrived I expected it to be familiar. But no, to be honest Hong Kong feels more like home – not only because I lived there for a year, but because more people seem to speak English than they do in Sydney.

Don’t get me wrong here, I know Australia is a melting pot, I just didn’t expect it to be melting quite as much as it is.

On a practical work front it is difficult to get Internet access too. I found it easier in Cambodia than I do here, which I explain to myself as being the result of Australia having a huge infrastructure to support – but this doesn’t compute.

I do love this city though, we went swimming in the Olympic sized harbour side pool today where you can swim lengths while the harbour bridge stretches above you and over the bay. This is such an outdoor place. I am having to adjust my white skin to the outdoors though as it is hot and humid here, in my 6 weeks across S.E.Asia I haven’t come across heat like this yet.

We have walked everywhere – a bicycle would be better and a canoe better than that, but for now we have walked. The markets over at Balmain and Rozelle were a treat – at Rozelle a jazz quartet played whilst I got my aching shoulders massaged, I was enjoying that melting pot right then as well as when we tucked into a Singapore Laksha at the Darling Harbour food circle.

Sydney is going to take a little longer than I imagined to get the hang of and I’m glad for it, it’s those songs you always learn to love the most isn’t it!

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