When we travel abroad we are always struck with how young our county is compared to European countries. In Australia they always say how young their country is compared to the U.S. The Commonwealth of Australia was formed in 1901 when the six colonies became states.

 

The first inhabitants of Australia where Aborigines who migrated from Southeast Asia during the Ice Age at least 40,000 years ago. In 1770 Captain James Cook beached his ship of a coral reef off the coast of an island and claimed it for Great Britain, calling it New South Wales. The rest is history, as they say

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We had a very active trip compared to visiting art galleries, museums, and castles as we do in Europe. We started in the city of Cairns in northern Australia and visited a working crocodile farm in the bush, hand-fed kangaroos, and cuddled koala bears. We spent a day at Wetherby Station (a cattle farm) where a “jillaroo” (Australia cowgirl) who ran a heard of 1,000 cattle by herself with the help of her cattle dogs. Sheep dogs are too timid for Brahma cattle so they bread Border Collies with Blue Heelers (an Australia dog that bites heels) to produce a more aggressive dog. We saw one dog herd a large group of cattle by jumping up and biting them on their heels, legs and tails. We visited Port Douglas, a very upscale town near the Great Barrier Reef, where Glen Close and Bill Clinton have homes.

 

We dressed in our “cossies” (swim suits), boarded a high-speed catamaran and rode over two hours out into the ocean to the Great Barrier Reef. The wind was blowing very hard and the waves were quite high and half the people on board got sea sick. We tied up to a large diving platform anchored to the bottom, which we dove from. The reef, described as the 8^th wonder of the world, is 1,240 miles long, composed of 2,900 individual reefs and 1,600 species of fish. We saw the greatest varieties of fish, the greatest number of fish, and the best coral we have ever seen. We dove with rays, sharks, and sea turtles. I would go back to Australia just to dive on the reef.

 

We went up to Kuranda in Northern Queensland and descended to the floor of the rainforest where we visited an Aboriginal village. Naturally we learned to throw the boomerang and bought some for the grandchildren. For 40,000 years aboriginal people have lived in Australia as hunters and gatherers. They had no agriculture since they were so isolated from the rest of the world they had no access to maze or wheat. They were decimated by the Europeans when they arrived and were not even counted as people in the census, but were considered to be like a tree or animal. Europeans came on hunting trips to track down and shoot an aborigine. They did not get the vote until 1960.

 

From Cairns we flew to Sidney. Sidney is a big, beautiful, clean, informal city with the harbor as its center piece. There you’ll find the Sidney Harbor Bridge and the iconic Sidney Opera House, where we saw a play and a concert. It is a spectacular building with its sail shaped roof. A guide showed us where Lleyton Hewitt (Aussie tennis pro) got married.  Everything centers on the harbor - restaurants, pubs, shops, hotels, office buildings. People get around the harbor on ferries, water taxis, and high speed catamarans. We took a ferry across the harbor to the Sidney zoo to see one of a kind native animals. We saw wallabies, platypus, wombats, Tasmanian devils, koalas, kangaroos with joies popping out of their pouches, and emus (the last two on the Australian flag).

 

Real estate prices are astronomical in Sidney. If you have a view of Sidney Harbor, a very small 2 bedroom apartment (they don’t call them condos) would go for about $1 million. Russell Crow just bought a place of the top floor of a small apartment house at the Navel base for $36 million. The government is tearing down the slums and spreading low income housing throughout the city. One apartment building is directly on the harbor near the opera house. These apartments that would sell for about $2 million are rented to low income residents for $40 a week.

 

Food is very interesting, naturally a lot of very good local fish. We had croc and kangaroo, it all tastes like chicken, in fact it probably was chicken. Australians do not tip when they go out to dinner. Our guide said that if you tipped like the U.S., the server would probably follow you home. When shopping, all taxes are included in the stated price. They go nuts when they come here to shop, with all the extra charges.

  

Voting in Australia is compulsory. If you don’t vote you are fined.

Rugby, Australian Rules football, and cricket are big sports. A local player explained cricket to me twice, I watched it on TV, and still don’t understand it. Any sport where a match takes 6 days is much too boring. A big women’s sport is net ball. Like our basketball but when you have the ball you cannot move your feet. Lleyton Hewitt’s mother was a star player. Men’s basketball is the same as the U.S.

 

We loved Sidney and Australia, just wish it were as close as Europe.

We flew from Sidney to Christchurch on South Island in New Zealand. We visited the U.S. Antarctic Center which is the departure point for Antarctic exploration and the resupply station for McMurdo Base, the permanent U.S. South Pole research center.

 

We and another couple had dinner and spent the night at the sheep farm of a host family outside Christchurch. He was a local bank VP and his wife ran the ranch with over 300 sheep and 30 cattle. When we arrived she was in the family room caring for a 24 hour old lamb that lost his mother. We took turns feeding a bottle to the “wee fellow” as they called him. Her husband told her not to name the “wee fellow’ because once she gives them a name she won’t send them to slaughter. They send the lambs to slaughter when they are 4 months old. They had a beautiful, new, 5 bedroom home about 20 miles outside the city. There are no farm subsidies, no barns (not cold enough), animals stay outside. Hay and wheat are bailed in plastic and are used as fences.

 

Fishing for trout is big business in NZ. It is illegal to serve trout in a restaurant. You have to catch it to eat it. They are protected for the sport fishermen that come to fish. There are no native animals in NZ, all were introduced. There is no hunting season, no hunting licenses, and you can hunt any animal any time. 

 

After Christchurch we went further down South Island to Queenstown., which is the sports capital of NZ. There is skiing (not nearly as good as U.S.), paragliding off mountain tops, bungy jumping (the home of the bungy jump), sailing, parasailing, river jet boats, heliskiing, windsurfing kiteboarding, hunting, mt. biking,  a cable plane (one person plane suspended from a cable between two mountains that goes 150 mph. We did some mountain biking, bungy jumped off a bridge, and took a jet boat up the river. The jet boats have a water propulsion system, like a wave runner, that allows it to go 50 mph in a few inches of water and do 360’s. It was to cold for other sports as it was their winter.

 

All the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed here. Everywhere you go someone points out the location of a scene in the movies.

There is a lot of deer farming in NZ. They also farm wapiti, a cross between a red deer and an elk. The deer genes make them easier to handle and the elk genes make them larger. There were only a few hundred a couple of years ago and now there are over a million. They export the meat to Germany and the horns to Japan.

 

Next we went to Auckland, the City of Sails, where they have the America’s Cup races. It is just another big city except for the boats. There are 70,000 boats in the city of Auckland and the largest yacht club in the Southern Hemisphere, where Dennis Conner is a member and has a home. For America’s Cup fans, they have the winged yacht that NZ raced about 12 years ago, displayed high above the Auckland Harbor. That was the race that Dennis responded with the controversial catamaran. After that race the rules changed. NZ is currently racing their challenger boats in Sweden. Two captains of sailboats we went out on told us that if NZ wins there is a rumor they would defend the next cup in Dubai. Emirates Airlines is a major NZ sponsor and they have built a major sailing resort in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. It’s all about money, not country any more.

 

The last stop on our trip was Fiji, composed of over 200 islands. It is a third world country but is getting ready to boom. Vijay Singh, the pro golfer and leading money winner, who was born in Fiji, was just there laying out a PGA course where they are going to build hotels, etc. Near there Mel Gibson bought one of the islands for $16 million and Britney Spears spent her latest honeymoon on another island. We stayed at a beautiful beach front resort on the largest island, but since the island is surrounded by a reef about 200 yards off shore there are no serious water sports. There is a very large Indian population that were originally brought in to work the sugar cane.