It's hard for me to believe we've been here over a month already! It's officially been 35 days traveling, and we still don't have a return ticket, so you never know... (just kidding for all the parents... we will be back in March, I promise)!
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| Our sticker collection is growing! |
Our impressions of Australia remain the same, we love it here. If it wasn't so far away I would consider moving here. Out of the cities we've been in, we both still really love Cairns, but the Sunshine Coast (where we've been the last week and a half) would be a close second. Basically we should eventually live near the ocean :) Preferably one with great scuba diving, another area Australia excels in.
I thought in this post I could share some pics from the last week or so, but also talk about some differences in Australia we've noticed and how our plan is going so far.
Sunshine Coast
We've really enjoyed the past week and a half just simply relaxing on the Sunshine Coast. We kind of just played each day by ear and didn't do any major tours.
Peregian Beach
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| our public beach entrance |
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| Lots of wind surfers every day! We want to try it. |
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| hmm.. who said blue bottles weren't at this beach? only saw them the first day. |
Noosa National Park Coastal Trail... so gorgeous!
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| Looking back towards Noosa Main Beach |
Wild Kangaroos
We biked down a creepy swamp trail that lead to Murdering Creek Road... to see if we could see wild kangaroos :) :) We saw three!
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| Yo... nom nom nom... |
Just hanging out... mostly shopping :)
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| Huge markets about 20 min from us, got some cool stuff! |
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| Amazing mango popsicle from Frozen Sunshine! |
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| Dinner selfie... LOL |
So, what's different here?
Overall it's not a culture shock by any means... but we have noticed some things that stand out.
Food
- Beer and liquor are expensive... (we paid $19 for a six pack in Cairns, since then we've bought only wine... and Malibu was 2x for $75... um yeah no)
- Restaurants seem expensive to us too, average appears to be about $35 each to go out to dinner.
- Grocery stores so far as we can tell seem to be similar in price, in fact we are spending less since the conversion rate is in our favor so much.
- Muesli (granola with dried fruit and nuts) is a big thing here, well I think it is in Europe too, but we love it. We've had it in the US but it's more expensive, here it's the price of cereal (our fav is on Royal Caribbean - Vera you need to check the breakfast buffet line!)
- Mangoes are amazing here because of the tropical climate... we've had one every day on the Sunshine Coast. A mango a day keeps the doc away (??)
- Coffee is different here, I ordered an iced coffee and didn't realize that was two scoops of vanilla ice cream with expresso :) Not complaining but it was also $8 so that explained that. A long black is the most popular order I think, which is an expresso with hot water (kind of like our Americano?)
- Overall food seems to be in a healthier direction.. tons of juice/smoothie shops and healthy pre-made options, but I do feel like both of those are picking up in the US. Australia still has McDonald's, Subway, KFC, and "Hungry Jack's" (Burger King in disguise here), oh yeah and Domino's. We haven't gone to any of those. And Outback Steakhouse is not here (Foster's beer isn't here either).
Transportation
- There are tons of roundabouts instead of traffic lights, the double lane ones are especially tricky!
- Oh yeah, and they drive on the left :)
- On a one lane highway, passing lanes are every so often and are on the right. So if you want to continue your same speed and not pass anyone, you actually move to the left lane, then merge back into the right lane. Basically the person going faster just keeps going, which makes a lot of sense.
- Side note, I parallel parked!! Ok so it was a large space and I have a TINY car, but...
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| our cute kia rio :) |
Other Facilities :)
- For those curious, all toilets seem to just flush straight down... there is less water in them to start so a bunch of water comes out when you flush (no swirling action). Also all toilets have two options for flushing, even ones in parks
- All electrical outlets have an on and off switch, so it seems very environmentally friendly.
- Every place we've been in just has air conditioning units that you use a remote to turn on and off. All hosts have requested the air be turned off when we aren't home. In our current Airbnb it's only in the bedroom, and when we get to the next two Airbnbs we won't have it at all... questioning that decision now! lol. But that also is very environmentally forward... we like it!
Culture
- A lot of word/slang differences, just to name a few, "parcel" instead of "package", "takeaway" instead of "take-out", "mozzies" is shorts for mosquitoes, jellyfish are called stingers. I also like how they say "hey" at the end of a sentence, seems like it's instead of "you know?
- Aussie BBQ, not what North Carolinians think of when you say BBQ :) We've had a real Aussie BBQ twice, and it seems to be either a giant steak, burgers, or sausages, or any combination of those, and lots of salads as sides. Definitely yummy! Their BBQs are a flat surface grill, kind of like at Kanki if I had to compare.
- Money looks different obviously, but I didn't realize how pretty Australian Dollars are! The coins are a little odd to me since the 1 and 2 dollar coins are smaller than the 50 cent coin.
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| dolla' dolla' bills y'all |
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| note the size of the dollar ones |
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| Target? Is that you?? |
There are a lot of other differences but those are the main ones/ones I can think of so far... will update once we've explored more areas!
Are we following our plan?
For the most part, yes. I've learned most things don't follow the plan seamlessly, but I've realized those instances are usually the most interesting and fun. So far we've found the non-touristy things we do on our own feel a lot more authentic. Once we got to the Sunshine Coast we were kind of burnt out on group tours so decided to skip seeing Fraser Island.
We also learned from our 1 night in Ayr and 3 nights in Airlie beach that that was moving too quickly for what we are trying to do. I knew that would be the case, but Ayr didn't have much going on and Airlie was expensive. The rest of Australia we are in each place a lot longer, except for Kangaroo Island and the Great Ocean Road.
The biggest change so far is we booked three extra nights on the Gold Coast and canceled our stay in Tamborine Mountain. Instead we will just do a day trip there so we can get set up and stay in one spot longer. We've found that works best for our luggage situation and being able to work part of the time also.
Are we following our budget?
So far we are, our biggest expense is obviously the overhead of staying in an Airbnb every day. In Australia we are averaging about $90/night overall for an entire house/apartment to ourselves with a kitchen, washer, and wifi. Our next largest expense is probably a tie between groceries and tours. The tours were expensive for November but mainly because of the 3 day liveaboard we went on. The other major category is transportation, which includes domestic flights, greyhound buses, taxis, and rental cars/gas. We've found some good deals on those but it definitely still adds up.
Since we both agree we'd rather do a tour or something like that instead of eating out, we have been very careful with our eating out budget. That has been very low since we've only eaten out for lunch so far and only about 4 times. It's been super easy to grocery shop and cook here, and that way we save a ton of money for exploration! We're actually spending less on groceries here than in the US because
of the exchange rate. Outside of that we just have the usual small
expenses, souvenirs, coffees, treats, etc :) We will go out to eat more when Chris comes though so we are also saving for that.
Thank you for following the blog! We love and miss everyone so much!! It doesn't feel like Christmas here at all since it's so warm, but we are looking forward to Christmas on the beach. I know Justin is missing his bball peeps and I'm definitely missing my boxing crew!
Sarah
"Pay attention to the things you are naturally drawn to. They are often connected to your path, passion, and purpose in life. Have the courage to follow them."
~ Ruben Chavez
