As my mom likes to tell me, inertia is the most powerful force in the universe, and unsurprisingly it took a bit longer than originally planned for me to finally leave Sydney. This was in no small part because I was having a really good time, so no complaints! The van’s mechanical issues turned out to be minor, which was a huge relief. I spent an extra few weeks hanging out with friends diving, hiking, relaxing, and generally avoiding doing anything at all to get ready to leave.

There were a couple of things that needed to be done to the inside of the van and my roommate was incredibly kind and generous with his time, even the morning of his flight to Singapore, to help me with them. Which is great, because simple as they were, they otherwise likely just would not have gotten done (who knew it was so hard to drive screws into metal…? apparently not someone like me who’s never done a real day’s work in his life). He got my sink hooked up to a gray water tank, which turned it from a useless hole in the counter to an actual sink, and he also helped me put a couple of extra d-rings on the wall so that I could hang my surfboard. As you’ll see in the pictures, it looks sweet, even if I never go surfing.

It’s currently the season for giant australian cuttlefish, so I got to dust off my SCUBA skills and go look for them at Shelly Beach. And man, what a spectacle. There was one in particular that my friend, an australian wildlife photographer, said was probably the biggest he’d ever seen. It was pretty impressive watching it cruise around and occasionally flare its tentacles in a display of… something. Crazy that you can have wildlife encounters like that right offshore, right in Sydney!

Speaking of, it’s also whale season right now. They’re migrating from somewhere to somewhere else, and if you stop anywhere with a view of the ocean for more than 5 minutes you’re basically guaranteed to see them. They pass quite close to shore, and when I finally remembered to use my handy binoculars I could get a great view of them breathing, slapping their tails or fins, and diving deep. To cap off the spectacle, one of the days that I was checking out the whales with a friend in Bondi Beach we also saw the biggest pod of dolphins I’ve ever seen, surfing the waves and generally jumping around. What a world!

I also got to do a couple of hikes, and I really enjoyed getting back out strolling in the forest. In retrospect this was very dumb, but I had imagined Australia as basically just a coastline that transitioned immediately to barren desert. As it turns out, there are lots of mountains (or hills) and forests a bit inland, before the desert gradually takes over. A friend and I went for a really nice stroll in the Royal National Park, just to the south of Sydney, and later for a couple of hikes in the Blue Mountains. I had gotten somewhat mixed reviews of the Blue Mountains — they were consistently recommended to me as the best nature thing to do just outside of Sydney, but I was also cautioned a few times that they weren’t really big mountains (especially compared to New Zealand, where I’d just come from) and to temper expectations. Which was great, because I was pleasantly surprised! They’re not, in fact, big mountains, but they’re really beautiful rock formations and river valleys, with lots of lovely forest to walk through.

I eventually did have to leave town though, laziness be damned. My good friends Daniel and Jennifer are coming out on vacation, so I’m meeting them in Brisbane on the 25th. It’s roughly a 10 hour drive from Sydney to Brisbane, so I ended up giving myself about a week and a half to meander up there. The first stop was a place called Seal Rocks, a couple hours north of Sydney, that everyone had recommended for diving. Luckily my friend Matt was going diving up there, so we met up for a dive and good lord it was spectacular. The conditions were impeccable and the area was just stunning — lots of beautiful kelp and seagrass, huge schools of fish, more wobbegong (google them they’re rad) than you could shake a stick at, 5 or 6 turtles cruising around at dusk munching away, and a couple of grey nurse sharks checking us out. And probably lots more I’m forgetting! If you’re getting tired of videos of marine wildlife, well, I’ve got bad news for you buddy…

The camping situation here in Australia is going to take a bit of getting used to. In New Zealand, they have an official self-contained certification that vans can get, and there are officially designated free camping areas in many places for self-contained vans. That system is a bit in flux, but it’s still something. Here, on the other hand, free camping seems to be prohibited pretty much everywhere, so everyone just… does it anyway. Enforcement is quite patchy, and everyone seems to agree that stealth camping is fine as long as you’re respectful. I’m choosing to view this as a positive development — it will be good for my between-the-lines, following-the-rules, navigating-by-apps brain to have to get outside its comfort zone a bit and take things a bit more as they come. But it won’t necessarily be comfortable. A few nights in I haven’t gotten fined yet, so that’s good.

Finally, life in the van. What a dream! It’s been a real steady upgrade from a hatchback and tent, to a small van, to this absolutely palatial Sprinter. The previous owner had converted the van to a camper but hadn’t really lived in it full time, so the building work was done but there were plenty of things to buy and set up, in particular around organizing storage and filling out the kitchen. It’s been fun getting those things sorted over the past few days and feeling like I’m starting to really settle in. The first day or two everything was just all over the place, with no real rhyme or reason, but now everything is all over the place according to a chaotic organizational system that only makes sense in my head. Progress! I even get to have fun with extremely complex DIY projects like taping pieces of non-slip matting to the bottoms of the baskets so I can have some accessible storage that’s not flying all over the place whenever I drive around.

So that’s pretty much where we’re at! I’m trying to keep reasonably active this week – I hiked this morning, am planning to surf tomorrow morning, and then have what’s supposed to be an extremely cool dive through a cave/tunnel thing to a huge fishbowl area full of sharks scheduled for the following day. After that I think I’ll just pick a couple of random spots to spend the remaining two nights, and then it’ll be rendezvous at the Brisbane airport before I know it!

You can check out videos for this post here. There are a ton of them! Apologies for the often crappy quality, I haven’t really figured out how to take good videos on the gopro. But I’ve been looking at a lot of really cool marine animals and I want to share!

P.S. Well, it took a few days from drafting this post to finally getting the photos and videos uploaded and publishing it. I’m currently parked somewhere in Brisbane, in front of one of the many payphones with free (but somewhat slow, though obviously I can’t really complain) WiFi, having just finished uploading photos and still working on the videos. I’m going to try my first night of real stealth camping tonight, finding some quiet residential area and just parking up for the night. In a lot of ways I feel more comfortable about that than the camping I was doing before, blatantly parking overnight in places where it’s prohibited and just counting on the council rangers, as they’re called here, not coming by. Still adjusting…

Surfing the other day was fun, though it’s going to take a while to get in shape and really comfortable in a lineup again. The dive was very cool as well—I was feeling a bit off, having not slept or eaten enough, but the sharks were big, the cave was very fun to go through and covered in beautiful coral and who-knows-what, and it was fun to do a bit more SCUBA again. Now the alarm is set and I’ll be picking up Daniel and Jennifer early tomorrow morning!