David Whitley gets ready to roll in Sydney

I step out through the glass door with a beer in hand, ready to go old folk-spotting. After all, that’s what bowling’s about isn’t it? A nice way for retirees to get some exercise in their gleaming whites. It’s fair to say that bowling (the outdoor on a green type, rather than the ten pin version) doesn’t really have the sexiest of reputations across most of the world. But in Australia, this isn’t the case. In the last ten years, the sport has undergone a remarkable resurgence and become cool amongst hip young trendsetters.

David Whitley finds himself gawping at near-extinct creatures on a tiny speck of land in the middle of the Tasman Sea.

Ambling along the wooden walkway from the room to the restaurant, a little brown thing scurries through the foliage. It’s a bird; more specifically, the Lord Howe Woodhen.

It’s not the most spectacular creature we’ll ever see, but the fact that only around 250 of them exist in the world makes the spotting truly remarkable. It’s this sort of thing that people come to Lord Howe Island for. It’s a romantic getaway destination, with a population of around 350 people, a maximum of 400 visitors at any one time and no mobile phone coverage.

David Whitley goes rolling downhill in a giant plastic ball in southern Queensland.

Welcome, my friends, to Teletubbyland. On top of the lush green, perfectly-sculpted hill, closely cut and rolling like a particularly vicious golf green, is a giant ball. About four metres high, made entirely of see-through, bubble wrap-style plastic, it bobbles around, reflecting the sun and looking quite, quite surreal.

David Whitley swings from the treetops near Launceston.

The tree is shaking almost as much as I am. The towering eucalypt can blame the wind – every gust sends it lurching from side to side. For me, it’s just cowardly nerves. I’m stood on a ‘cloud station’, 23m above the ground. It’s essentially a circular metal brace around the tree, complete with a trampoline-like platform for the trussed-up victims to wobble about on as they prepare for the death swoop.

David Whitley tries to get his hands on what he patently can’t afford in Western Australia.

In a climate of banking instability, bail-outs and business collapses, it’s unusual to come across an operation that is not just surviving, but booming.

The Perth Mint is one of the unexpected beneficiaries of the global financial crisis. With the public jittery over the banks, house prices rocky and stocks and shares plummeting, people have turned to gold as a safe investment. And if there’s one thing that the Perth Mint has got, it’s lots of gold. The Government-owned institution produces commemorative coins and bullion, plus it acts as both a depository and trading centre. The gold price has shot up in 2008, and the Mint has seen a flurry of interest, both from investors and curious visitors. Sales of gold and silver coins from the Mint’s shop have more than doubled in the last year – visitors are clearly putting their money where the metal is.

Former Sydney resident David Whitley shares his top five local secrets for those who want to go beyond the usual Bondi and Opera House trail.

Admittedly, I’m biased here, but I doubt there’s a better city in the world for a holiday than Sydney. You could spend weeks exploring it, getting equal doses of nightlife, culture, beach-bumming and the great outdoors. But to get the most out of Sydney, you need to venture beyond the highlights reel. And here are five great ways to start...

David Whitley changes his tune on bikers as he rides down from Sydney to Wollongong.

Sometimes it’s good to be proved utterly wrong. For an entire lifetime up until this point, I had firmly held the view that big noisy motorbikes are a total scourge on society, ridden entirely by possessors of alarming personality deficiencies. Harley Davidsons, I would thunder, serve no purpose but to annoy people they drive past. 

David Whitley gets an insight into how prison life used to be in Western Australia – and vows to be a good boy from now on.

If the Australian government really wanted to cut crime, then the best thing they could do would be to put Old Fremantle Prison back into use, and from there broadcast a reality show on prime time TV. From tax return ‘massager’ to murderous psychopath, everyone would think twice. Sharing a tiny room with a violent criminal and a bucketful of festering human waste - in 40 degree heat with no fan or air conditioning – is no fun.

Off the coast of New South Wales, David Whitley stumbles across a scheme to save the fairy penguins and rid their island habitat of an unwanted invader.

The ranger removes the brick from the top of the wooden box and lifts the lid. Huddled away in the corner is a sight of such undeniable cuteness that even the most emotionally-stunted meathead couldn’t resist crumbling into a gushing “awwwwwwwww!” The two little penguin chicks are essentially just big balls of fur with intensely lovable faces, and they are one of the main reasons that so much work is going into Montague Island.

Landlubber David Whitley gets a taste of sailing without leaving the beach in Northern Queensland.

It’s a wonder that everyone in Mission Beach doesn’t have one of these babies. The four villages that make up the area are spread four or five kilometres apart, and the most direct path between them is straight down the 14km-long beach. As I stand on the shore, considering the post-pub transport possibilities in a one taxi town, Chantelle pulls up her Blo-kart. It’s an enormous contraption that she somehow pulled out of a bag half the size of a surfboard. At the bottom, there’s a metal frame with wheels and a seat. On top of that, there’s a big sail.

David Whitley becomes a temporary part of the family at Bullock Mountain Homestead near Glen Innes in New South Wales.
 
Containing the sort of energy usually associated with a nuclear reactor, Cruiser bounds down the bank, ploughs through the water and digs his paws in to climb up my chest. My new friend indulges in a frenetic bout of face-licking; a sure sign that he’s not planning to leave me alone for the rest of the stay.  I’ve been out in the bush for less than a day, and I’m evidently part of the family already. Cruiser is the younger of the two dogs at the Bullock Mountain Homestead, and the boisterous Labrador-cross comes everywhere, be it on a scramble down the river, a drive through the forest or pre-dinner kangaroo hunt. He’s after rabbits rather than roos, however.

David Whitley discovers how northern Australia has turned from shooting crocodiles to showing them off to visitors.

Swimming in front of us is one of the finest killing machines ever devised by nature. Even its swimming strokes are menacing; the slow, deliberate movements of the tail cut through the water in eerie silence. And nothing else on the Adelaide River is stupid enough to come near it. The estuarine (or saltwater) crocodile is an amazing creature. It is our closest living reptilian link to the era of the dinosaurs, and the essential design of the saltie hasn’t changed in millions of years.

David Whitley trudges along to Darwin’s sunset market like a moody teenager, and ends up a convert.

To me, the most distressing part of any holiday is the day that starts with: “Ooh, the market sounds quite nice.” I grew up in a market town. I know what markets are like – someone bellows “fresh bananas” all day, an old woman sells rubbish old books and the other stalls flog cheap boxer shorts that wouldn’t even get past Primark quality control. Abroad, things tend to be little different. You might get different types of fruit being shouted about, whilst if you’re in an area vaguely frequented by tourists, the pants will be accompanied by colourful bits of cloth that you’ll never wear and ‘trinkets’.

In Alice Springs and Katherine, David Whitley discovers how people living in the remotest parts of Australia remain attached to the rest of the world.

The real Outback?

On my journey through Australia, I have been travelling across what I deem the Outback. In reality, I’ve been sticking to the main highways with the odd diversion up a short gravel track. It’s still more than many Australians will cover in their lifetime, but I’d be deluded if I tried to convince myself that I was really living the Outback life. For a reality check, a visit to the Royal Flying Doctor Service Visitor Centre in Alice Springs is in order. The RDFS is a truly remarkable organisation, and one that literally keeps the people of the Outback alive.

David Whitley attempts to tick off Sydney’s must-sees and cultural attractions – but ends up on a glorious walk to nowhere.

Noble intentions and savage hangovers don’t tend to mix that well. And that’s my excuse for spending 20 minutes shambling around the Museum of Sydney before conceding to myself that I wasn’t taking anything in. Sydney is my second home. I lived there for just under five years, and enjoyed the experience enormously. But as is so often the case when you live somewhere, I was a bad tourist whilst there. There are so many things to do and places to see in Sydney, but I’d only scratched the surface during my stint as a resident.

David Whitley discovers why Big Things are a big thing in Australian country towns – and stumbles across a new favourite.

Australian country towns can be comically magnificent. Most labour under the impression that they are comfortably the greatest place in the world. And, if by ‘greatest’ you mean ‘having the highest ratio of mullet hairdos’, then they’re usually spot on. The combination of big hearts and big hair tends to be a winning one, however.

David Whitley looks with older eyes at Melbourne’s city centre – and finds that it has rediscovered its soul.

My hazy recollections of Melbourne’s city centre are not all that favourable. Back in 2002, I trawled the rigid grid delivering magazines every week, and found it all a little dispiriting. There were a few decent pubs and Chinatown was mildly diverting but central Melbourne always struck me as having a dull functionality and little heart.

David Whitley strikes gold when he veers away from the big names in Australia’s most famous wine region.

Outside the church, I am greeted by a man pushing a lawnmower and bearing the hallmarks of having spent the last hour or so lugging firewood around. He is clad in wellies and sports a splendid moustache – making him look a little like Timothy Dalton in Flash Gordon, albeit having retired and moved to the country.

It would reasonable to assume that this redoubtable chap is the groundsman but, as I am soon to discover, he makes the best rosé wine I have ever tasted.

David Whitley meets the cave-dwelling opal miners in Hollywood’s favourite piece of post-apocalyptic Outback real estate.

The walls of my hotel room look like they’ve been splattered in blood, and there are no windows to allow natural light in. It would appear as though I am the unsuspecting star of the latest film in the Saw series. In Coober Pedy, this is all perfectly normal. My hotel room is underground, having been dug out into the side of a hill, and the deep red streaks are part of the remarkable natural sandstone in the area.

David Whitley’s travelling partner was sceptical about the merits of Australia’s famous big red rock. And then she walked around it...

“Well, it’s just a big rock, isn’t it?” Katrina, it is fair to say, was excited about our drive-through-the-Outback adventure, but didn’t quite get why Uluru was so special. OK, we pretty much had to go there if we were heading through central Australia, but paying to stay at the severely overpriced resort and taking a six hour round trip out of the way was of debatable merit.

David Whitley hits the Stuart Highway, and feels humbled by Australia’s vast, dry interior.

You can quickly go off kangaroos. Don’t get me wrong, under normal circumstances I can happily watch them all day. But at 6.30am, when I’m bleary eyed, behind the wheel of a strange car and tentatively inching my way through the minimal dawn light, they are less welcome. At this time of the morning, kangaroos are a ruddy nuisance. They come out in force, leaping nonchalantly across the road from all angles and making driving a test akin to The Gauntlet on Gladiators.

Eager to get his hands on a few deadly missiles, David Whitley pays a visit to a secretive military town in the South Australian desert

I thought my primary school had a pretty cool setting – the playground was surrounded by corn fields, and we often got to see a tractor. But the primary school in Woomera wins hands down – it has a park full of intercontinental ballistic missiles outside. There are a fair few bizarre places in the Australian Outback, but Woomera takes some beating on this front. Approximately 300 miles north-east of Adelaide, Woomera has an eerie Truman Show-like feel about it as you drive through. The houses are prim and neat and the streets are kept spotless, but there seems to be no-one there.

David Whitley braves the foul food and pricey petrol to discover glorious slices of Outback absurdity in the Northern Territory.

One thing that will become unavoidable if you decide to take on a big driving adventure through Australia is the roadhouse. These lonely outposts of expensive fuel, culinary horrors, country music CDs and porn mags in plastic wrappers quickly become something of an institution. They keep truckers in energy drinks, bacon rolls and staple-adorned libido appeasers - and tourists in reminders of how while remote Australia is great to visit, you wouldn’t want to live there.

In the Northern Territory, David Whitley finds the antidote to Australia’s disappointing drinking establishments.

There are a lot of rose-tinted myths about Australian pubs. The idea that they’re all magnificent places where everyone’s your mate and will buy you a beer as the good times roll is utterly absurd. The sad truth is that most Australian pubs are on a sliding scale of awfulness.

In search of Australia’s greatest adrenaline rushes, David Whitley goes surf rafting and kayaking on the New South Wales coast.

Aside from the caws of a lone seagull and the ominous rumble of the waves crashing to shore, all is eerily silent. The sense of tension and anticipation in the air is palpable. Everyone waiting, a brooding alertness, as the ocean lumbers beneath us, slowly building itself up for a tumultuous peak.

The helmets in front turn round, partly to check the looks of concentration on the faces behind them and partly in solidarity with their comrades. We’re on the front line, you can trust us to do our job.

As the swell mounts, the piercing battle cry comes from the rear. “NO-O-OW!” our commander hollers, and six oars plunge into the water as one. We launch through the water with perfect synchronicity, spurred on by the yells of “HARDER! HARDER!” coming from behind us.

David Whitley heads into the recording studio in a bid to make it as a rock god.

As locations go, it’s about as far from rock and roll as you can get. In deepest suburban Adelaide, there’s a grill in the back yard and a few plastic chairs out the front. I knock tentatively. “Er, is this the right place for the groupies and throwing TV sets out of the window?”

Inside what looks like an average family home is a full-blown recording studio. 52 Nelson Street is the unlikely home of Beat Records. But more importantly, it’s home to Rock Star For A Day (Rockstarforaday.com).

The idea is staggeringly simple: wannabe megastar goes into studio, records a few songs with professional equipment and engineers, then goes home with their very own CD, complete with artwork.

David Whitley gets away from the tour buses to go canyoning in the Blue Mountains near Sydney.

Unless the inner child has been thoroughly buried, its very existence wiped out by a space age memory eraser, it’s very difficult not to sneakily enjoy water parks. You know the sort – those giant aquatic adventure playgrounds, infested with giant, curling slides that spit screaming kids out into pools of water every few seconds.

Unfortunately, there comes a certain age where it is officially no longer cool to be seen bombing along foaming torrents in a rubber ring, shouting “Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” before creating a giant splash as the big blue snake releases you. It’s somehow a little unbecoming for a sensible adult, even though we’d all probably leap at the chance to have a water park to ourselves for the day. Just as long as our friends didn’t find out, of course.

David Whitley gets a true taste of the Outback, going out with one of the world’s most isolated posties on his rounds.

Sheep logic works entirely differently to ours. The three woolly merinos can hear us approaching along the dirt track. They can sense the dust storm being kicked up behind the Landcruiser. They know that this means danger, and they need to get out of the way.

As we thunder ever closer, they panic and break out into a run. And it seems that straight in front of the rapidly approaching vehicle is the optimum route to safety. “That,” says Steve. “Is why sheep and intelligence don’t belong in the same sentence. At least the goats tend to run off on the right side.”

David Whitley mounts a prized Australian camel in Port Macquarie.

The toothy grin would be quite menacing if it didn’t look so ridiculous. Kneeling down, being strapped up with all manner of tethers, hooks and attachments, is Liela, the massive beast that I am about to entrust with my safety for the next twenty minutes. Her big yellow teeth hang down gormlessly as her handler finishes tightening the saddle.

Emerging from behind the truck and the camels, he looks surprised. “Blimey! We don’t usually get this many for the naked ride,” he says, as we all look nervously at our trusty steeds.

The exercise yard for these ships of the desert is the extraordinary Lighthouse Beach in Port Macquarie, New South Wales. It’s a phenomenal stretch of sand, disappearing for 9km towards the headland on the horizon, as the perilous-looking surf crashes repeatedly into the rocks. Aside for one dog-walker, we’re the only people (and animals) in sight.

David Whitley gets a taste of Australia’s dark whaling past, and realizes why the only boats going after whales now don’t have harpoons.

The bay is awash with blood. Sharks, whipped into a feeding frenzy, surround the boat, as the men on board battle to drag their precious haul ashore and keep it intact. Gunshots ring out above the howling wind, a shoot-to-kill policy adopted to keep the circling predators away. To go overboard now would be instant death, as it has been for colleagues in the past.

This scenario, mercifully, is at least half a century out of date, from back in the day when hunting whales was a lucrative way of life. But, at Whaleworld in south-western Australia, it’s not difficult to find yourself going back in time. Now a museum, this site was formerly home to the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company, and it’s not difficult to surmise that it must have been a stinking hellpit.

David Whitley discovers a bizarre slice of Spain in the West Australian bush, and finds that the monastic community looking after it is struggling to survive.

The artwork inside the chapel is astonishing. The murals fill every available bit of wall space, climbing towards the patterned roof. The scene is a riot of angels, and in contrast to the puritan wooden pews lined up in front.

It would be an eye-opener in a fine old European city, but to find it on a patch of red dirt in the Australian bush is a little unusual. What’s more, the standards of architecture and decoration are maintained across the town in prayer rooms, old schools and the Abbey church. As a result, 27 of the 65 buildings in New Norcia, Western Australia are listed by the National Trust.

David Whitley heads out to the alternative lifestyle hotspots in northern New South Wales in search of the elusive hippy.

“I-I like to call it Amazonian Fizz Guava,” comes the toned-down New York accent from behind. It looks so placid and juicy, but as soon as it hits the tongue, its sourness makes you recoil. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good, but it attacks with surprising bitterness.

“I-I told you, didn’t I!” says Paul, with almost childlike glee, as he turns around and meanders back through his threadbare wooden shack.

Paul Recher is a hippy. In fact, he’s almost a dictionary definition of the word. He initially came out to the forested Northern Rivers region of New South Wales to dodge the draft for the Vietnam war, and ended up staying to grow his own jungle.

“That’s the thing about Aus. It’s vast!” my fellow passenger was saying, as we shot across the desert at 100km an hour while gulping at frosted glasses of Victoria Beer. “People from outside just can’t grasp the sheer ‘vastity’ of it.”

The Indian Pacific train had been trundling across the Western Australian Outback for close to twenty hours already and I had to admit that I was struggling to come to terms with it myself. We were now in what my friend might have called the complete ‘emptity’ of the Nullarbor Desert. The name derives from Latin for ‘treeless desert’ and apart from a few scraggy bushes there had been nothing worthy of the name for the last two hundred miles. Then we came upon a little collection of a few shacks around a railway watering point. At some point in the past some optimistic (or perhaps just humorous) souls had planted about a dozen scraggy pines here and they had named the place ‘Forest.’

There are few things more hypnotic than watching a desert highway flicker out, like a shaken rope, as it stretches out into the limitless distance. Moreover you can be pretty sure that no cop in his right mind is going to be sitting out on this blood-boiling forty-five degree outback day. So you keep the needle hovering at a steady 130km/hr and listen to the wheel purr over the hot sticky tarmac.

It’s now almost seven months since I left London for Panama and began this little jaunt around the world. Seven months living out of a backpack, eating in cafés and cheap restaurants. Seven months of working on magazine stories (more stories than I can remember now) in what must by now be a couple of dozen ‘hijacked offices’ in the corners of cafes, bars, airports, hotel lobbies, private sitting rooms and even railway carriages.

Seven months sleeping in such a motley mingled mishmash of different accommodation that it is almost impossible to recall them all now. There have been nights lately when I’ve woken up in the complete darkness of the wee hours and literally struggled to remember where I am: well I can remember going through X…and the night before last I slept in Y…therefore I must now be in Z. One night I lay in bed unable even to reach for a light switch because it was impossible to conjure up a picture of what the inside of the room looked like.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge climb must be the most successful tour operation of its kind anywhere in the world. It is a complete human conveyor belt – an entire factory dedicated to elevating whole groups of people spiritually and physically skyward. The Bridgeclimb complex is erected in a series of tunnels where, until a few years ago, they did nothing more adventurous than sell Porsches. At the height of the season Bridgeclimb is now processing groups of up to 10 tourists, 24 hours a day.

You are prepared, kitted out and trained in a super-efficient environment. You are shown how to attach your harnesses and are fitted with earphones that instead of going in your ear rest on your cheekbones and send vibrations that your brain deciphers as your guide’s voice. This way your ears are also open to eternal sound. The whole atmosphere feels strangely like it will on the fateful future day when some of us (or some of you) will be selected for transfer to a less exhausted planet.

You can count the miles down the Stuart Highway from Alice to Urldunda in dead kangaroos. There’s not a helluva lot else to look at though and my eyes began to glaze over somewhere after the thirtieth ‘roo road-kill.

These road-kills have had a horrifying effect on Australia’s biggest bird of pray. The wedge-tailed eagle, with its eight-foot wingspan, is irresistibly attracted to this transcontinental smorgasbord and, having no natural predators, it is quite ready to do battle with any vehicle that has the audacity to try to scare it off its meal. Trackside roadhouses are full of yarns about drivers who were terrified to see a half-dead wedgie coming through the windscreen at him. “He was all torn and bleeding and spitting feathers when he turned up here,” they tell you. “Funniest bloody thing you ever saw!”

First-light is referred to in the picturesque Outback slang as ‘sparrow’s fart.’ It was not this, however, that greeted us as we stepped out of our cabin, but the cackling call of the kookaburra that is known as ‘the bushman’s clock.’ We’d cracked a few stubbies the night before and, as we started out towards a ridge that was just beginning to rear up against the paling sky, my usually tireless sidekick Crocodile Dougee was sporting eyes like the slits in Ned Kelly’s tin helmet.

Contrary to popular belief, orienteering skills are not an important part of hitchhiking across Australia. Having found the Stuart Highway out of Sydney we simply went straight on across the Blue Mountains and the miles of desiccated, lizard-baking wasteland that is bizarrely known as ‘The Accessible Outback’ of South Australia.

Two weeks, and 1,500-miles, later a sign outside the Kulgera Pub advised us that we had finally reached ‘The Real Outback.’ This was the Northern Territory and any self-respecting ‘Top Ender’ will tell you that any other part of the Outback is strictly for Sheilas.

Cook is known, with typical Outback humour, as ‘the Queen City of the Nullarbor.’ According to a signpost outside the little village store it has a population of ‘4 people, 40 dingoes and 4,000,000 flies.’

It is fair to say that not much happens in Cook and the arrival of the Indian Pacific is still a highlight of the week. The railway has traditionally played a vital part in the ‘taming’ of the Outback and a rail journey across Australia remains one of the world’s epic travel experiences.

Australians, accustomed to the mind-boggling distances involved in travelling their island continent, might tell you that the Outback is boring, that it’s empty, that there’s not much to see in what they call ‘The Great Bugger-all.’