A multicoloured Sydney Opera House at night

After a long flight (sixteen hours) from Buenos Aires, we arrived in Sydney early on Sunday morning. We were met at the airport by Tom Geier and his wife Betty, who were patient enough to wait until I reported my Swiss army knife missing - it had been taken from me at Buenos Aires and subsequently "misplaced" - along with the knives of four other people on the same flight. A protracted process led to my receiving a cheque for the replacement value some six weeks later.

In Warner's Bay, we stayed with Anna Jurczenko, her daughter Ellyen, and her granddaughter Sophie. Ellyen had built a house next door to Anna's, and so we had a house all to ourselves. After all our travelling and staying in cheap (and often dingy) hotels, it was very pleasant to find ourselves in such luxurious surroundings. It was also very refreshing to be able to cook properly and have all the little luxuries of home that you miss so desperately when on the road, privacy being the most obvious.

We stayed in Warner's Bay for a little over a month, getting our bearings and hoping for some work to pay for the next stage of our trip. Unfortunately, the work for the most part failed to materialise, but we had a very pleasant time in the Newcastle area, thanks to our most excellent hosts. Christmas was spent with the family, and we were treated to a fantastic feast courtesy of Anna.

During our sojourn in Newcastle, we recovered from the trials and tribulations of travel in Latin America. In particular, it was a great relief no longer to be viewed as rich tourists ripe for the rip-off. In fact, one of the highlights of our stay in northern New South Wales came when I was asked for directions in Warner's Bay, suggesting that I appeared to be a local!

A strange coincidence came when I sent an email to our contacts in Australia telling them that we had arrived. My (ninth-)cousin Steve Wakely immediately wrote back in astonishment to let us know that he was amazed, as his sister lives in Warner's Bay. In point of fact, it turned out that she lives in the next street to where we were staying. Steve came up to visit his sister on Boxing Day, and so I finally had the chance to meet a long-term correspondent; we had been emailing each other for a couple of years.

After our R&R break in Warner's Bay, it was back to some travelling. We caught the train down to Sydney, and then made our way across the city - so big it covers an area 60% of the size of Slovenia - to Wentworthville. In Wentie (everything in Australia is abbreviated to something, usually ending in -ie, such as bikie (bikers), footie (Ozzie rules football), or -o - as in "Have you got any more avos for the guaco?"), we stayed with Veronika's first cousin once removed (if I can get a bit genealogy-technical for a moment) Zoran. From our base in Wentie, we visited Sydney on several occasions, with the Sydney aquarium representing a particular highlight - they have sharks inside plexiglass enclosures with arched see-through walkways allowing visitors to see marine life close up. Amazing.

Tall Ships Race winner, Australia Day, Sydney

We were also fortunate enough to be in Sydney for Australia Day, which this year coincided with the Tall Ships Race. I had witnessed the race once a few years back in Edinburgh, where they had considerably more ships, but I must admit that Sydney harbour is incomparably superior as a venue in comparison to the run-down Leith docks. Still, I must admit to being more than a little disappointed that there seemed to be only half a dozen or so tall ships participating in the race. The rest of Australia Day was spent trying to avoid the crowds and generally having a pleasant time.

While in Sydney, we also stayed with Glennys Ferguson and her husband Keith (Glennys is also distantly related) and with the aforementioned Steve Wakely. We were very fortunate to have such friendly hosts, making us feel extremely welcome and at ease. Having said that, on a couple of occasions, Steve and I had more than a little too much to drink and ended up the worse for wear the next morning - in our travels I've become unaccustomed to five-in-the-morning seshes.

Fergus on the beach at "Summer Bay", home of Home and Away

One Sunday, Steve took us on a tour of Sydney's famous and not-so-famous beaches. A special highlight of this was (if you're reading Gordon K, read it and weep!) a visit to the beach where they film Home and Away! We also visited the famous Bondi beach, and gained a perspective of the truly amazing natural harbour which is the reason for Sydney's very existence - if the British had come to Australia and not built a city where Sydney now sits, they would have been, in the words of a Bosnia-Peruvian we met in Arequipa some months back, world class idiots. The harbour is truly spectacular, and just huge - when we visited the waterfront and Darling Harbour, we only saw a tiny fraction of the harbour, which goes on for miles.

Of course, one of the other landmarks for which Sydney is world famous is the truly spectacular, albeit more than a little odd, Sydney Opera House. We didn't make it to a performance there (Phillip Glass was performing Koyaanisqaatsi live with the Australia Symphony Orchestra, but it was sold out and was in any event prohibitively expensive), but we did wander around outside (and inside for a short time when we needed to visit the loo), and despite the recent addition of horrendous-yet-somehow-inevitable wildly expensive luxury harbour-side apartment blocks with designer shops on the ground floor, it still retains its grandeur and downright weirdness deriving from its utterly unique design. Little wonder that when they were commissioning the Scottish parliament building, the brief was for a building that would be as iconic as the Opera House. Sydneysiders are justly proud of their strangely formed baby, and I can only hope that when the upturned boats finally take their place next to Holyrood Palace, Embra fowk can feel the same - although somehow, "ah hae ma doots".

The day before our spectacular guided tour of the beaches around Sydney, we went to the Blue Mountains for a day. These are so called, because the gum trees which constitute the forest emit such high quantities of eucalyptus oil that, when the bright southern sun is not busy bleaching all the colour out of the countryside, the whole landscape takes on a rather bizarre blush tinge that has to be seen to be believed. Cousin Steve drove us around several of his favourite spots in the area. Fortunately, he has a decent 4WD vehicle, the car that reaches the parts other cars don't reach, so after driving down a dirt track for 20 kilometres, we walked another mile or so to McMahon's lookout, providing a magnificent view over a wooded valley with a meandering river, a vista which just seemed to go on for ever. Australia of course has one significant advantage over Europe when it comes to wide open spaces: lots of land, but very few people, and 90% of them live on the coast.

Three Sisters, Blue Mountains, New South Wales

However, the real highlight of the Blue Mountains was the spectacular rock formation known as the Three Sisters. Aboriginal stories tell how a father used magic to protect his three daughters from a predator by turning them into stone and himself into an echidna, but after the danger had passed he lost the magic shinbone which would enable him to turn his daughters and himself back to their normal forms, and so the sisters remain today as pillars of rock, while the echidna, sort of like a European hedgehog only larger, cuter and marsupial, to this day fossicks around the ground looking for the shinbone that will enable the return of the three sisters. Whatever the story, the scenery is just fantastic, and the thoughtful Aussie tourist board have even placed a convenient viewing platform (two in fact) at a suitable point across the valley to allow coachloads of daytrippers from Sydney to see it. Despite the crowds (and the sun, and the heat), it is truly spectacular and more than worth a visit Veronika has frequently painted Australian landscapes, and this was the first she had actually seen "in the rock" (or whatever the lithic equivalent of in the flesh is).

We wandered slowly back to Sydney in time for a barbie (aside: one stereotype turns out to be true - Aussies do love their barbies - backpacker accommodation often has only barbies as cooking facilities) and a bit of a serious sesh, something Steve and I made a Saturday night habit of, much to our chagrin on Sunday.

On Monday we went on a Carstairs-related trip. Glennys Ferguson's cousin, Keith Carstairs, has a beautiful place up in Mount Wilson, high up in the Blue Mountains, so we caught a train to meet up with him. Keith, being the eldest progenitor of the William Carstairs of India line, has inherited a number of interesting family heirlooms, including a bible which was taken to Sweden and the Netherlands in the late 17th century by a Carstairs who would have been in today's terms a refugee or asylum seeker. We had a lovely day with Keith and his wife in Mount Wilson, which is an extraordinary contrast to the dry surrounding countryside, as its micro-climate is considerably wetter and its rich volcanic soil means that it is a verdant oasis in a dusty surrounding.

Sydney Opera House from the Manly Ferry

Eventually, we caught a bus to Melbourne, 13 hours overnight. We'd become somewhat lazy in recent times, having rested for over a month in Newcastle, and we were not used to long-distance travel. Distance in Australia is a fairly deceptive thing - places that look fairly close on the map ("they're only a couple of fingers apart" is a very dangerous presumption) turn out to be 900 kilometres apart (Sydney and Melbourne). After a fairly uneventful journey, in which our only slight concern was an encounter with some examples of absurd regulations (federal health regulations apparently prohibiting the consumption of food on bus journeys - or was this a scam cooked up by the bus company to encourage us to eat at their chosen food outlets?), of which fortunately we were only informed after we had eaten our dinner.

We were met off the bus in Melbourne by Jenny Nielsen, a YAIC (Yet Another Internet Cousin). She drove us slowly back to her house in Kyneton, just over an hour's drive north of Melbourne. We took a couple of detours - first of all to Mount Macedon, from which we caught a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside, and Hanging Rock, of Picnic At fame. We finally made it to Kyneton, a very pleasant small town (3500 people more or less) with some fine colonial-era blue sandstone buildings. We were only to spend one night in Kyneton before heading on for a week up in the mountains.

We stayed in the Melbourne Walking Club's lodge up at Mount Buller, and it seems that we chose without doubt the best time to go there. Although we were not very high up, especially after our experiences in the Andes, the difference in temperature was mercifully high - while the rest of Victoria was sweltering in 35-40 degrees combined with restrictions on the use of air conditioners and fans because of an industrial dispute in the electricity industry, we were enjoying a very pleasant climate, with only one day when the heat really kicked in. I spent the week slaving over a hot keyboard, splitting my time between translating/editing to pay for the rest of our trip and for the cost of "developing" Veronika's increasing photographic habit (150 films and counting) and catching up with some genealogy, courtesy of Jen's LDS-produced CDs of the 1881 census and some other records. Veronika went for a few walks in the surrounding area, and then on the Friday we (V, Jen, Carl and myself) travelled through the rain on a day trip to Beechworth, a beautiful old (in Australian terms at any rate) little town, with a very pleasant bookshop, a decent pub for a fine lunch, and a very pleasant main street. Unfortunately, the weather chose this day to play up, and we spent most of the time in torrential rain.

We came back to Kyneton after a week, and spent the time taking things easy - becoming a bit of a habit, it must be admitted. One day we visited Black Hills Nature Reserve on the outskirts of Kyneton. This used to be an open-cast mine, and when the mining company moved out, they simply left the site as a barren scar on a beautiful landscape. Carl, together with a couple of mates, basically single-handedly regenerated the whole site by spreading soil, digging drainage channels to remove the water in such a way as to avoid wholesale erosion of the soil before the plants could take root, and using old tyres from his family business to shore up the ground. Had it not been for his explanations, we would never have known that this had once been the messy aftermath of less ecologically aware times.

Friday 18th February we drove in to Melbourne. Jen and her daughter were going in to book a holiday in Europe in September, and Veronika and I came along for the ride. Typically, we chose what was possibly the hottest day of the summer to go wandering around the city. We had a good time, but man was it hot - 40+! (*"!?@) We wandered around trying to find cheap films for Veronika, and in the process discovered a really wacky shopping centre built around an old factory called the shot tower, complete with tall chimney. The factory itself has been converted into a large eatery, and built all around and above it is an ultra-modern shopping centre. I wasn't terribly impressed with the shops, but the building was certainly unique.

Inside Melbourne Central shopping centre

We then foolishly made our way back out into the heat to catch a tram. Melbourne has a very sensible policy (I am a budget traveller, after all) of providing a free tram service in the city centre, presumably to help cut down on traffic problems. Australia isn't quite as bad as the US when it comes to traffic, since most cities actually have reasonable public transport systems, but the Ozzie lifestyle of a large single-storey home with a fair-sized piece of land for a garden means that the distances between houses tend to be large, and the urban sprawl that typifies Australian cities (Sydney covers an area over 60% of the whole of Slovenia) makes it almost essential to drive - somehow in Europe I never quite feel so much a pedestrian as I do in Australia or the US. Admittedly though it's not quite as bad here as in the US - people don't (usually) look at you here as though you're a freak or a crim because you happen to walk.

On the Saturday, we gave ourselves over to family history again, travelling to Sunbury, original "home" of cricket's ashes, to visit the LDS Family History Centre. Jen and I have been trying to piece together the connection between our various Pearson families in Coldstream for a couple of years, and we hoped to get some information from them to help us in our task. We spent four hard hours frantically transcribing details from a variety of microfiche to help us in our task - a very pleasant time for the avid genealogist, probably boring as hell for anyone else. Needless to say, I enjoyed myself, although I'm not sure my right hand will forgive me for quite some time - in this hi-tech age when as a global backpacker I travel with the digital essentials - i.e. a laptop computer - I hardly ever write any more except to sign my name.

Sunday came along, and we headed off to the 60th birthday celebrations for a distant relative who has triumphed over adversity to achieve an academic career. We met loads of people, and on the way to Bendigo, we came across the house that had belonged to the Pearson family, who represent my connection to Carl and Jen. We even met yet more distant relatives who were staying in the house for the weekend, and we arranged to meet up again when we return to Melbourne in about a month's time.

Monday we went for a day trip to Castlemaine (original home of the famed XXXX), Maldon and a number of the old mining and service towns in the Victorian goldfields. We had an excellent day, capped off with an excellent lunch on the shores of Lake Daylesford, which could not be spoiled even by the presence of a disturbingly large (for my northern hemisphere sensibilities) spider which, while apparently not poisonous, would allegedly have hurt considerably had it chosen to bite me. Needless to say Veronika and I were more than a little nervous, and carefully kept an eye on our arachnid friend during the lunch just to be on the safe side. This was followed by a trip to a bookshop which, while not reaching the levels of style and sophistication reached by the legendary Second Edition in Edinburgh (none-too-subtle plug for the greatest second-hand bookshop in Scotland), had one of the best settings for a bookshop I've ever come across.

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