Australia: A Study Abroad Experience
I tried to think about whether or not I wanted to write a long or short post about the only other country I’ve spent a significant amount of time in. I’ll try to find a happy medium. I lived in Brisbane, Australia for a semester in 2007. I left almost every weekend to travel and explore the country. Did I go to Sydney and Melbourne? Yes, of course. Did I go to the Great Barrier Reef? I ended up there twice. It’s too much to talk about so I’ve chosen a few experiences that are some of my favorite memories.
From the research I did on cities before I moved, Brisbane seemed like the most Australian of the large cities on the east coast. Sydney is very Americanized. Melbourne seems to have a very European vibe. Brisbane is true blue, through and through. The state of Queensland in general has a stereotype… the accents are thick and it’s “patriotic” in the same way some southern states are. In the US, the more south you go the more of it you get. In Queensland, the more north you go, the more “troppo” people get. This is where I wanted to be. My campus was just outside the city, on the edge of a sub-tropical rainforest. We had wild birds in our backyards as well as goannas, which are the scariest thing ever when you’re walking home drunk from the campus pub. There were poisonous spiders outside our windows and one time we had to evacuate a restaurant downtown because there was a snake inside. This was what I was expecting when I moved and Brisbane did not disappoint.
My mother had made me promise that if I did anything crazy to not tell her until it was over. The first week I was in Australia I went skydiving. It was something I always wanted to do and my whole experience with it was rather silly. We took a trip with the school to Byron Bay, about two hours south of Brisbane. One night we were partying at a backpacker’s bar called Cheeky Monkeys (I should note that most people who travel to Byron Bay ended up at this bar — for better or worse). I won’t get into details about what happened in the bar, but at one point, after everyone had quite a bit of alcohol in them, a woman with a clipboard went around and asked everyone if they wanted to go skydiving the next day. Naturally a lot of us thought it was a brilliant idea and signed up. We went on a very hungover hike the next morning and then headed off to a random field to go skydiving. Turns out this place was actually pretty legit. They were a team of skydivers that were chosen to film a Coca-Cola sky surfing promo years earlier. Anyway, we crowded into a small plane and went up and over the coast to a height of 15,000 feet. My friend decided she would go first. If you’ve never been skydiving and are scared, go first. Watching someone flop out of the plane in front of you is probably the worst thing you could do for yourself. After she tumbled out I scooted up to the edge, my tandem guy attached himself to my back and then we rocked “one,” “two,” “I have a wooden leg!” This guy decided to yell as we tumbled out of the plane. After we landed he told me he let us free fall for longer than usual because I didn’t weigh very much. We had spectacular views of the bright blue coastline on the way down. Eventually he pulled our chute and we floated down to the ground. If you ever find yourself in the area, Byron Bay is a must see, even if you don’t go skydiving.
I’m going to take a short paragraph to discuss the Reef and the Whitsundays. We had originally planned a sailing trip around the Whitsundays with a tour group, but we got a call at the airport twenty minutes before we took off (it was 2007, luckily one of us had an international mobile phone) and were told the boat sank. They said “come anyway, we’ll figure it out.” When we arrived we had been upgraded to a family style yacht tour around the Reef with stays at a fancy resort on one of the Whitsunday islands instead of on a ship. The tour was amazing. I sat with a bunch of middle schoolers and watched Finding Nemo while we coasted toward the Reef. My friend and I flirted our way into the cockpit and they let us drive for a bit. Our other friends informed us they felt the ship get a little jerky. The Reef and the Whitsundays are something to not be missed in Australia. The wildlife is amazing. I’ve never seen whiter sand, or more beautiful beaches and coastline in my life. The air in that area of the world just seems better.
And now for my other favorite, our road trip down the Great Ocean Road and into the Outback.
We ended up renting cars a few times in Australia. Our biggest adventure was from Melbourne to Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road. It’s weird to remind myself that we embarked on this trip without iPhones or GPS. We had printed out MapQuest directions, because that’s how it was done back in the day. I ended up driving for a portion somewhere between the two. Driving on the left was definitely an experience and I don’t think I ever hit the blinker first, it was always the windshield wipers — a clear sign someone who wasn’t from Australia was driving the car. We stopped at the Twelve Apostles (or what was left of them) along the way. A picture can’t really describe how amazing it is to view them. They’re gigantic. And they’re crumbling, so it’s a sight that’s best viewed as soon as you can get there. In 2007 I believe there were only nine left and as of 2009, the one that’s prominent and closest to shore in the photo above has crumbled into nothing. When we got to Adelaide we returned the car and hopped in a Greyhound for an overnight journey into the middle of the Outback. We went to sleep riding in darkness and woke up to a sunrise in a flat, red wasteland. We stopped in the famous underground opal mining town of Cooper Pedy to fuel up. We didn’t get out of the bus, but it was surreal to see a few buildings above ground and realize that because of the heat, most of life here was spent living and working underground.
I knew the Outback would be red, but the way the dirt changes color with the sunrise and sunset is unreal. We did all the touristy things. We saw and walked around Uluru and Kata Tjuta. We hiked in Kings Canyon. We camped outside under the stars and saw the bright Milky Way (we also got this experience camping on Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world). I won’t get into details because, like a lot of other things, I could go on about the Outback forever. Like the Reef, the Outback is something to not be missed if you’re in Australia. It’s real Australia. It’s the Australia that’s uninhabitable to most. Dingos, camels and emus roam wild. Beautiful trees somehow manage to survive. It’s a long way from nowhere, but once you get there, it’ll be hard to leave.
Whether it’s in my near future or when I’m much older, I fully expect to travel back to Australia at some point. In 2010 and into 2011, Queensland experienced massive flooding. Parts of Brisbane were ruined. Things had to be rebuilt. I followed it closely and checked in with friends who were still there. I want to go back to see how the city and the country has changed after all this time. Does Brisbane still feel Australian? I bet it does and I’m excited to find out one day.
