Walla walla jumma jumma moy moy tabba

”Mum, Dad, what on earth are you writing?”  “it’s Aboriginal”. “No it’s not, you have just wrote rubbish – grrr”. “Oh come on Millie, our readers don’t know, they don’t speak the Aboriginal language”. “You two don’t either so stop it – I’ll let you keep the title though, that’s true Aboriginal”. “How do you know Millie?”  “I know everything now, you know that”  “Ok, we will keep the title, can we tell the readers what it means?” “Yes”. “Ok”

Where were we?

Oh yes, just writing some gibberish, we were going to pretend it was Aboriginal language, but Millie has given us a ticking off, so we can’t keep going.

The title though is Aboriginal and means ‘Hello – White Folk – Come Here – Mate’, go on, practise saying it “Kaya Gubba Cooee Bunji”, so that when we meet again, we can all say it too each other  –  Well done 😂😂😂

Right, lets get back on track, we finished the last blog as we were leaving Manly Beach to go to Sidney where we were booked into the Shanghai-La hotel for a couple of nights before we jumped on the NCL ship, the Jewel, for a two week trip, down the Australian coast, across to Tasmania, then on to New Zealand.

The first thing we realised, when we got to Sidney and took the hire car back, was that we didn’t need a hire car at all as there were very cheap frequent ferries from Sidney Central Pier all over the place, including Manly Beach and Bondi Beach, both places we hired the car so that we could visit!

The pictures below show the views from the three big windows in our hotel room!

Sidney Opera House

Sidney Harbour Bridge and the Sidney Observatory.

As you would expect, we managed to find the oldest pub in Sidney to refresh 😂👍

Ahhh 🍺🍺🍷🍷👫

Later that first day, we caught a ferry across the Harbour, passing the Opera House

on the way, to Taronga Wildlife Sanctuary, where we saw a variety of the unique Australian animals 👍

The next day we jumped on the Hop on Hop off bus service that runs all around the city, which is a great way to explore it.

Then the next day, it was on to our Cruise ship for the 13 day trip, with three more Australian stops before we sailed across to New Zealand, which were, Eden, Melbourne and Burnie (in Tasmania).

”Hang on, you’re doing it again!, the Garden of Eden is here in EVAN, not there in Australia” “Sorry Millie, it’s just a town called Eden, not the Garden of Eden, although there are a few campsites around the town that use that name”. “Oh, ok”

As you would expect, around Eden, there were a few places that added the term Garden to their name!

It was quite a small town and we were the first cruise ship there for several weeks owing to the bush fires that were still burning around the town

We would imagine that this had a severe impact on the business in the town

Then it was off to Melbourne for our next stop

Like most cities, Melbourne these days is a huge place with hundreds of high rise commercial and residential properties and we had booked a city tour plus a visit to a wildlife sanctuary, where they reared endangered Australian species (like the Tasmanian Devil) and also provided a hospital service for injured wild animals, usually damaged by vehicles or farm machinery, but recently a lot of animals injured in the bush fires.

And where we actually got to hold and pet a real life Koala (honest 😂) As you can see in the first picture below 😂😂

After quite a tiring day in Melbourne and only seeing a tiny fraction of it, we set sail across the sea to Tasmania, landing in Burnie quite early in the morning and were quite impressed with the view, when we looked through the window!

This huge mound is wood chips, that are exported all over the place from this harbour, to be burnt and they say that it is a sustainable fuel, as the 12 to 15 years the trees take to grow before they are chopped down, the trees absorb carbon dioxide!

So off the ship we went to explore the place and to our surprise, found that this is home to some cute little penguins

Which nested in hundreds of ‘concrete’ nests that were all along the beach/rocky shore alongside the town.

Although this was ‘Australia Day, we couldn’t find a single flag flying, which was rather a surprise, so we asked around, only to be told by the locals that the original Aboriginal people, were very offended by the thought of celebrating the day, when the vast majority of them lost their traditional homelands, so it was played down in many parts now!

The Aboriginal people call Australia Day, Invasion Day!

There was a great Scottish Bagpipe band welcoming us back on the ship, which we forgot to photo as we were in the big queue to get back on and being as we had a pocket full of change, the assistant popped back off to give them all our Australian coins (a lot of dollars worth!), whilst the Manager stayed on our balcony to supervise 😂😂👫

Right Bunji, we are off to the Billabong to have a Corroboree (right mate, off to water hole to celebrate), but don’t forget that there are between 100 and 250 different Aboriginal dialects, so in the few weeks we have been here, we haven’t quite learnt them all 😂😂 yet.