The End

Sitting in Beijing now after a 12 hour flight from Sydney, managed to sleep for a good portion of it. My spare parts for the MGB that I bought in Sydney caused a bit of an issue in the Beijing security check and held the line up for quite a while. When neither of you speak a common language its hard to explain that a bag of brass parts is a repair kit for a British sports car carburetor! Any way we survived that and are now in the lounge for six hours waiting for a 13+ hour flight to Montreal, at least a shower helped freshen me up a bit.

So, thoughts on Australia: We are really glad we did the trip, at the end of it we had no complaints at all, with the possible exception of the lack of filtered (Canadian style) coffee. Aussies are really big on their steam frothy machine style coffee (Thanks for the tip Ted, our coffee supply ran out on the penultimate morning!). Driving was a breeze, Australian drivers never seem to be in a rush to get any where, speed limits are obeyed meticulously, they stop at red traffic lights and there are no attempts to run amber lights.

Life is a little more expensive here than Canada, but it is affordable. Tipping is not a way of life, neither is it expected. Australian service industries pay their staff a decent wage, so subsidies are not needed. Why can’t N. America adopt that policy. The nearest the industry gets to tipping is an increase in prices on holidays and Sundays to allow them to pay the staff extra for working those days.

Taxes are built into the advertised price, if a sweater is advertised for $30 then that is what you pay, not $30 + GST +PST. Again N.America take note. One additional cost we did come across was the addition of 1% on many credit card sales to cover expenses imposed by the Credit Card companies. This was mostly charged by the small Mom and Pop type stores, not the big stores.

Talking of big stores, there is NO Walmart. This means towns still have main streets with a variety of thriving stores. 

Cell phone plans are cheaper in Australia, but beware of the coverage. As we found out Vodafone works fine in the large cities and along the major highways, but is useless in the back country. Telstra has far better coverage, but at a cost. 

Just back from a walk around the Beijing Terminal, walked about 2500 steps from the plane, through security to the lounge and another 5200 walking once around the terminal!

Back to Oz, there was plenty to see and do, and we did almost all that we had planned with a couple of exceptions. The weather didn’t co-operate for our trip  to the blue mountains, we got fogged out. The whales didn’t read the tourist book schedule and stopped their migration early and finally an uncooperative boulder leapt out into the middle of the road, striking Lyn on the head and knocking her off her scooter. Other than that the only other issue we had at times was the heat/humidity.

We purposely avoided cities because we don’t like them, we’d much rather see rural life and scenery, there plenty of that to see. We have learned from previous trips not to go, go, go to the last day as we return home kn&($ered, hence the slow trip south from Cooktown.

A return trip is not out of the question, finances, health and time permitting.

Future travel is uncertain at the moment, there will be the usual snowbird trip to Alabama in January with the possibility of a road trip to Utah, Montana etc in the fall. 2020 was planned to have a South America cruise around whatever Cape it is down there, with a side trip into Peru. That may now get sidelined as Lyn’s aunt will be celebrating her 90th in March that year, so a trip to S. Africa may happen for another family reunion. Perhaps we’ll be reckless and do both!

Hopefully toy enjoyed the blog, the next one should be in the fall of 2019.