Busselton and Caves

Just after Christmas Lucy was kind enough to lend us her car so we went on a little road trip down south to a place called Busselton.

We stayed in a Christian campsite for $12 (cheap and cheerful...or so we thought) but someone stole our cheese from the fridge so the cost was bumped up to $17.

 Tom managed to persuade me to go to a cave (we had a bad experience in a Nepalese cave which housed a statue of a cow that supposedly produced real milk...the rest of the cave was dark, dank and slippery and felt like something out of The Goonies only we didn't have a flame torch to light the way) but needless to say the Ngilgi caves were much more enjoyable, spectacular even.

The famous Busselton pier. We walked a little way along but then got bored.

Stingray about 2m from the shore!

The last remaining picture of those flip-flops. The next morning we drove to a lighthouse and Tom changed his shoes and somehow left them under the car?

Lush.

 Stalactite and stalagmites.

You could lay on a mat at bottom of the cave and this was the view.

We decided that we weren't too big to go through the children's crawl space...somewhat regretted it part way through.

Our Christmas Down Under

We headed over to Penguin Island for a bit of an adventure on Christmas Eve, there were no reindeer in sight but the world's smallest penguins made up for it sufficiently!

(This one was wild!)

Well birds need a drink on Christmas day too :-)

Sydney in Photos

Jellies off the harbour!

We were probably the only people arriving in Sydney happy, grateful in fact to have an overcast mizzly day.

Sydney aquarium had loads of cool lego sculptures, I wonder what the career prospects are in that field.

Okay so I find jellyfish pretty mesmerising, these ones were in the aquarium though.

A friendly Dugong. It's amazing how this camera angle can make sea mammals incredibly cute and terrifying at the same time (see pic below).

Fine, a shark isn't a mammal. Whatever.

Can't remember what this place is called, looks pretty fancy though :-p

Sky scrapers definitely improve their street cred if they are mirrored.

No we didn't climb it. It's like $150 each!

Big bats in the botanical gardens.

Yay! The first Christmas tree we saw!

The gorgeous blue mountains. We went for a 3 hour walk down the bottom there.

The 3 sisters rock formation.

I know bush fires are really devastating, but the aftermath makes for a cool photo.

We got a train ride down to the bottom (the world's steepest railway on an old mine track) but then had to hike the 900 steps back up after our walk. The scenery made it worthwhile though.

A warm and cuddly looking little fellow.

The Harry Potter exhibition!!! :-)

The opera house at night.

The Last Few Days of India - Pondicherry and Mamallapuram

Mamallapuram is famous for its stone carving... I wonder why.

The novelty of every Indian tourist taking our photo wore off pretty quickly, so in the end we made use of the attention and got them to take one of us. Perhaps they're used to camera's with a built-in spirit level?

Krishna's Butter Ball. Can't remember the reason why it's called that but I'm sure it was pretty far fetched and  obscure.

There's a place near Pondicherry called Auroville where people from all over the world live together in a hippy commune  I mean harmony. Inside this massive golden golf ball is the world's largest crystal... of course you're only allowed to visit it if you have sincere intentions of merging with the cosmic bliss.

The picture before this one shows as close as we were allowed to the mystic golf ball so I just zoomed. Same difference.

Aside from the gift shop, this was the best reason to visit Auroville. This is a Banyan tree, it grows aerial roots from its branches which drop down and take root themselves, believe it or not but this is technically just one tree!

The 5 Rathas are 1400 years old and spent most of that time buried under sand. Pretty impressive that it's just one rock.

Not to be confused with Pride Rock.

Christmas, New Year and Birthdays in the Sun

I realise that we've been a little neglectful of the blog lately, but can you blame us? Here in Perth with the sun shining and the beaches' magnetic pull on us; its pretty hard to stay inside on the computer...take our lack of blogging as a sign that we're just too busy having the time of our lives :-)

Anyway, going to spend a little while uploading some photos from India, Sydney and WA so watch this space. Will do our utmost to provide captions! 

Nepal...again

Trying to get update with all of the photos, so going to post a few more up, this time we'll try and put captions and separate them into countries though I'm sure you'd be able to guess which ones are Australia!

 The most popular method of transporting goods in the mountains.

2nd most popular method.

One of many waterfalls on the trek.

Sights on lake Phewa.

Boating on lake Phewa.

So basically we liked this lake and taking photos of it.

The lake was considerably more enjoyable than the international mountain museum where this picture was taken.

Traditional Buddhist sand mandala.

No need to explain this one.

Views over Pokhara.

This is pretty, I don't really remember where it was but it looks good.

Amazing light.

Cave waterfall.