Places to visit: Lady Elliot Island

We have just come back from spending 3 nights on Lady Elliot Island at the southern most tip of the Great Barrier Reef. The photo I took from the plane says it all, mostly.

We took a 30 min flight there from Hervey Bay which I understand can be extended to have a nosey at any passing whales during the right season. Flights also go from Brisbane, Maroochydore and Bundaberg. Unfortunately, when we went all the whales had finished their holidays and scooted off back down south until next year.

Lady Elliot is a great place to go if you enjoy:
(a) snorkelling or diving
(b) bird watching
(c) great food
(d) excellent friendly service
(e) getting away from it all.

Do not go to Lady Elliot if you don't like:
(a) Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds"
(b) the smell of bird poo
(c) being woken up by screeching birds
(d) being crapped on from a great height
(e) being cut off from the outside world until your flight rescues you from the bird colony you accidentally had a holiday on.

Seriously though, I did enjoy my holiday in an eco hut. An eco hut is a part timber, part canvas construction with power, two sets of bunk beds and a polished wooden floor! This was the cheapest accommodation on special offer at $99 per person per night, including a glass bottom boat trip with snorkelling, buffet breakfast and dinner each day, but excluding flights.

I got quite attached to the little bird who was sitting carefully on her egg and quietly chirping to herself at the back of the hut. I found myself worrying that she was in a rather exposed place and I kept popping round the back to see if she was alright and whether her egg had hatched yet. It didn't hatch while we were there and as we were about to leave on our last day, she left her egg briefly to pop round to the front of the hut and have a look in through the doorway at us for a change.

On a tiny island surrounded by coral, Diver Dave was in his element, as you can imagine. Booking on for a dive seemed to be a pretty casual affair since the boat appears to go out just off the island four or five times a day so you can pretty much go whenever you want. I was happy just to snorkel and although I had my own gear, use of the resort's snorkel gear is free. Snorkelling through the coral gardens was beautiful. The local green and loggerhead turtles may not have been ready to come ashore to lay their eggs yet but they were certainly out and about in the shallow waters. I also saw cuttlefish, clown fish, reef sharks and an eagle ray. Diver Dave came back from his diving with photos of lion fish and eagle rays. Diver Dave's Dad, a.k.a. Not Diver Jim, was content with pottering about on the beautiful beaches and taking advantage of free tours around the island.

So all in all, a really enjoyable, relaxing and interesting trip that I can recommend. Just remember to bring a large hat!

Shopping in Australia: Supermarkets

It seems to me that about 50% of the ebayers I meet to collect things I have bought from them are poms like me. One lady I met who lived on the Gold Coast was selling everything from the house in order to go back to Blighty for family reasons. We asked each other what we missed about the Motherland and, as I was still in the heady stages of my emigration 'euphoria', I didn't say a lot, apart from missing friends and family obviously. She countered with a long list of things she was clearly looking forward to seeing/having again, one of which was Tesco!

I too was a regular Tesco-ite (?), mainly because it was on the way home from work and cheaper than Sainsbury's. But it was Sainsbury's I always went to for posh food for occasions or nice treat food. In all honesty, I don't feel I've missed out by not being able to frequent either any more. The supermarkets here are just about as good and very similar and familiar to shop in.

The choice of supermarkets in SE Queensland seems to boil down to a three horse race with Woolworths in the lead, Coles in 2nd place and IGA trailing way behind in 3rd. Yes, that's right, Woolies is where you buy your groceries in oz, not your cheap school uniforms or pick and mix as you do in the UK. Look out for Big W for that sort of thing (that's Woolies owned anyway).

I haven't found a supermarket here that's as diverse as a large Tesco can be, with clothes and furniture, etc, but most do sell some basic electrical stuff, like kettles and hairdryers, at reasonable prices in a corner of the store, plus stationery, kitchenware and DVDs, etc. Prices aren't too bad, except for milk and bread which are definitely more expensive than in the UK. Since the onset of globalisation, there are also quite a lot of familiar brands available too, eg. Heinz beans and Tetleys tea. However, only Coles could provide my favourite Colemans mustard and life saving McVities plain chocolate digestives.

The great thing about supermarket shopping in oz is that they automatically pack your bags for you as they scan the things in. This saves you from (a) the infuriating process of having your purchases thrown at you down the conveyor belt faster than you can pack them, leaving the next shopper tutting and waiting impatiently for you to finish packing and get out of the way after you've paid. Or (b) the humiliation of asking for help with your packing which somehow makes you feel inferior in front of the other shoppers in the queue who are all pretending they're not watching what you've bought. The shopping is usually packed very well too, with cold or frozen goods packed together and a consideration for individual items that might get spoilt in a bag of heavy things.

The downside is that aisles are really really long and I can't always see down the end of the aisle to the last sign to know whether to bother going down it. Inevitably, I give up and go half way down before realising I don't want to be there but there's still another half mile to go before I can get out. The other thing to remember is that they don't sell alcohol, although there's usually a bottle shop next door or nearby. So you will need to plan this into your shopping trip.

But all things considered, this is a small price to pay in a shopping world of friendly service, fresh (within its sell by date) food and produce that isn't battered beyond recognition from being hurled down a conveyor belt by a sullen, underpaid cashier who doesn't give a monkeys. Eh, Tesco?

Garden creatures in Australia - don't panic!

Well living in the Noosa 'hinterland', near Eumundi, for the last 2 weeks has been interesting. Being in such close proximity to snakes and lizards and stuff has had to make me adjust somewhat!

Mini lizards are cute and interesting to watch until they suddenly disappear into the waiting mouth of a snake you didn't know was lying under the back step. Fortunately, it was 'only' a green tree snake and, although we eyeballed each other suspiciously, it wasn't very interested and slithered back under the step. And at this present moment I can see what I have convinced myself to be a carpet python right outside my window. I would like it to be a carpet python because they aren't dangerous and only bite people when they have been seriously pissed off. They also, apparently, eat the young of other, more poisonous snakes and ensure your mice and rat population are in the past tense. It has fastened itself to the chain which anchors our bird feeder and pointed itself at the bird seed tray, coiled up and ready to spring. It has been in that position all night so we are speculating whether it has in fact died of starvation and rigamortis has set in. It certainly doesn't seem to mind us taking photos of it. Or maybe it's just lulling us into a false sense of security. Either way, our noisy lorikeets and flappy pigeons are notable by their absence! Shame really as yesterday a beautiful king parrot had a nosey at the bird feeder. A sort of grisly curiosity has got me intrigued as to whether a snake of that girth could actually digest a pigeon. Apparently the thing to do if you're worried about having snakes in the garden is to get a dog. The snakes will be put off by the scent.

We've also discovered what has been making the little holes in the front lawn. Not funnel web spiders, as I first worried about after watching a documentary about Fraser Island! But bandicoots! They look like a cross between a rat and a wallaby, and are about the size of rabbit - very odd. And I thought they were just a Sony invention.

(Non poisonous) Snakes and bandicoots I can cope with. Bugs and spiders I'm not very good with, especially if they are flying or running towards me. Redback spiders are ones to watch out for, although I still haven't clapped eyes on one since Diver Dave's been very pro active with the bug spray. They like to lurk about in exterior wall crevices and garden furniture. Like most things, they will only bite if they're upset and you should get immediate medical attention if you're the victim. Huntsman spiders are BLOODY scary looking (especially if you happen to notice one happily sitting on the sanitary bin next to the toilet that you are sitting on in Noosa National Park!), but they aren't aggressive. In fact one Aussie told me about their 80 year old grandmother who would pick them up and lob them out of the window if she ever found any in the house. Since they are about the size and shape of a tarantula, this is no mean feat. She obviously didn't have any fly screens though.

In the evenings we have literally been bombarded with massive suicidal beetles, jovially named Christmas beetles. They seem to bounce off your windows or head and end up breakdancing for hours while they shuffle off this mortal coil. They aren't engineered very well since they cannot upright themselves once toppled over and die if they aren't up righted straight away. What a stupid design fault. I am looking forward to whatever day of Christmas it is when these beetles cease to be.

Meanwhile, we haven't really had any problems so far with mosquitos. this may be because we have a yellow UV light out on the deck which apparently doesn't attract insects (tell that to the xmas beetles). A top tip the estate agent told me was to make sure you empty the water from the trays of any pot plant after rainfall as the stagnant water will attract the mozzies.

Unfortunately, this week Diver Dave had to dispatch a cane toad right outside our front door. Cane toads are officially a pest in Australia and you are supposed to get rid of them straight away by any means possible to try and stop them spreading, which they are doing anyway in their thousands. It's not really their fault. They can blame the farmers in the 1930s who introduced them to eradicate pests in the cane fields. This exercise failed monumentally and only served to introduce a non native species which is seriously poisonous to other, native species.

We had to consult the world wide interweb to confirm identification first though to make sure we weren't about to eliminate a cute native frog. It certainly didn't look very cute. It looked shifty. When they are croaking, these toads are bleedin obvious. They sound like mini jack hammers. But this one wasn't croaking, probably because it knew it was about to. Diver Dave identified it by its poison sacks on either side of its 'shoulders' and promptly used a rake handle. Yuk.

I will update this post with any further worrying wildlife developments!

Selling your house (UK): a cautionary tale

Selling a house in the UK is incredibly stressful where the odds are always stacked in the buyer's favour and people can mess you about for months. This has happened to me with two different house sales in the UK. In Queensland it's dead easy. You get tied into a contract within a week of making the offer, subject to satisfactory survey, and it is possible to have it all done and dusted with you safely in your new house within four weeks. Australia 1, UK 0.

When immigration gives you the go ahead to drop everything and bugger off to the bottom of the world, DO NOT do what I did in selling a house!

Having decided to leave in January so I could start the Australian academic year, I put my house on the market at the end of September and accepted an offer within a week. By the start of November everything was going well, the survey had been done and we were negotiating what I was going to leave behind. So I booked my flight. The sharp eyed savvy readers amongst you will have noticed a fatal flaw in my plans, ie. 'what if the sale doesn't go through?' I know.

By the end of November my estate agent had received a worrying phone call from the buyer saying that her circumstances had changed, she wasn't sure about going through with the sale and needed a few days to think about it. The estate agent and I agreed that I didn't have a few days to give her and we slapped the house back on the market.

At the end of that week my solicitor contacted me. The buyer's solicitor had rung them to ask why the house was being remarketed as the buyer had not said she didn't want it (?!). The estate agent checked and it transpired that the house sale was going to go through after all. A settlement date was agreed and we took the house back off the market. This was around the 2nd week of December. Did you spot another mistake there?

By Christmas, things had gone quiet again and the buyer was not responding to my emails about furniture and stuff. On the 28th December she emailed the estate agent and I to say that she really didn't want the house at all this time, three months after the sale had been agreed. My flight was booked for 13th January.

I am very fortunate to have a supportive family who stepped into the breach when they sensed that I could be about to have a nervous breakdown. I was even more fortunate to be able to accept another offer on the house within days. So thankfully I was able to get my flight and give my Dad power of attorney over my house sale. And this time it remained on the market until the contract was signed and sealed! The lady who bought it was a lovely local who will make full use of the pub next door (see above photo of lovely Greens Norton, Northants)!

So if your name is Hannah James, you know what I've been talking about, and you've just googled your own name and found yourself famous on the world wide interweb for all the wrong reasons, I hope you are very ashamed of yourself. Although we could speculate all year over whether this could in fact be possible.

OBVIOUSLY the moral of this story is not to make any plans until your buyer signs on the dotted line - duh! And keep your house on the market until then. Any serious buyer will understand why and probably won't object. This should save your time, money and nerves from being wasted by any selfish, useless, lying, two faced, schizophrenic f***wits.

Setting up home: Ebay Australia!

If you arrive in oz empty handed and homeless like me you'll want to set up home asap with minimum amount of expense, especially if you aren't sure whether or not you'll be staying. Enter ebay - ta da!

I am a self confessed ebay addict. Like the UK one it's possible to find some really good deals on second hand and new stuff. Plus if you were a member in the UK you can transfer it and all your feedback over to oz, although you may still find that your 'my ebay' section still sends you messages from the UK site which can get confusing. Whilst you can still use your Paypal account anywhere in the world, it may be better to set up an Australia one linked to an Australian bank account so that you don't have to pay commission on the currency exchange. In this case Paypal advises that you shut down your original Paypal account before you open a new one.

The good thing about ebay Australia is that you can get some billy bargains (especially if you use a bid robot to bid at the last minute!) which is useful in a land where furniture and appliances can be ridiculously expensive, unless you're lucky enough to live near Ikea and/or like Chinese branded washing machines. People are usually pretty friendly and polite, and are often fairly new to the game since ebay is a more recent phenomenon in Australia than in the UK and bid robots are not widely used - yet.

The drawback can be that ebay newbies often want to sell their goods for as close as possible to their original purchase price, even if it's a 30 year old wood effect melamine set of 'draws'. If it's in star quality condition some sellers may want their money's worth. I recently had a bad experience with an ebay newbie who tried to tell me that the $1000 dining table I'd won for $50 had been 'sawn through' whilst being used a workbench, even though it was advertised as being dismantled. It seems she hadn't heard of reserve prices and was highly disappointed with the price it sold for. So steer clear of an ebayer called lady*beetle84 -she's a big fat liar who I reported to ebay for seller non performance!

Also, the geography of Australia means that unless you want to travel for a week across country and back again to pick up that essential crystal chandelier, you will either have to restrict your search to a more manageable geographical radius or arrange for your goods to be couriered at great expense. Obviously, the closer you live to a highly populated area, the more choice you'll have.

One of the first things I bought on ebay Australia was a desk chair that I eventually had no need for. When I sold it on ebay I got back almost exactly what I paid for it. So if I ever need to get rid of my entire household contents in a hurry, I reckon I can get my money back by flogging it all on ebay where I bought it in the first place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYokLWfqbaU

Banking in Australia

Oh god, banking in Australia.

Right, so in the UK we pretty much all have VISA debit thingies on our bank cards and when we go shopping these days all you do is give the card to the cashier and type in your PIN number, yes? Now, if you try to use your debit card in Australia you will have to treat it as a credit card and put your autograph on a slip of paper the old fashioned way.

There is a sort of chip and pin style of system available in Australia known as EFTPOS which is common to all Australian bank cards. This is OK although it doesn't have your account number and sort code details on it for security reasons which means you will have to hunt around for it should the need arise. But the biggest drawback is if you are trying to buy something or guarantee a booking over the phone or internet, say for a hotel room, plane ticket or something you bought on Ebay!! In this case your EFTPOS is useless -a bit like those Electron things you used to get on Barclays Bank cards. So you need a VISA or Mastercard to be able to buy/book these things.

When Diver Dave and I opened a joint account for household stuff, we discovered that you can get a VISA debit card if you ask nicely but they don't like combining it with your ordinary EFTPOS card like you would get in the UK. You pretty much have to go down on your knees for one of those but it is possible, so the nice Westpac lady said.

Another unwelcome surprise is the fact that not only do the banks profit from the interest on 'looking after' your money, but they do not give you any interest on a cheque (current) account AND they charge you a monthly amount for the privilege. Presumably, they spend all their profit on ATMs (cash machines) since on any given stretch of street in a highly populated area there can be a line of them representing all the high street banks. This is because none of the banks have reciprocal arrangements with their competitors and as such you will be charged a fee if you use the wrong ATM.

The best thing I did before I left Blighty was to open a bank account with a well known UK high street bank, ending in '..wide' (!) which does not charge commission on overseas transactions such as VISA and ATM withdrawals. This has served me very well in Australia when my EFTPOS is no good, although I have yet to find out what their rate of exchange is!

Driving in Australia

Hang on to your eskies, it's going to get rocky... in yer Holden ute.

In SE Queensland at least driving is generally less manic than in the UK but can be stressful for different reasons. You can use your UK licence for driving through Australia but if you settle here you will need to apply for the relevant state licence.

Traffic on motorways is usually less congested -unless some plonker in a ute has caused a pile up - but inevitably there can be rush hour jams in the CBD like all cities. While British motorists can be at worst arrogant, vengeful (!) and aggressive, and at best polite, Queensland drivers seem to drive as though they have never encountered other drivers on the road before. Use of mirrors is limited, there is no real recognition of the needs of other road users and don't even get me started on roundabouts!!

Beautiful Noosa appears to be the first region in oz to introduce the revolutionary (geddit?) concept of roundabouts. The only thing is, knowing how to use a roundabout correctly is not part of the driving test and consequently nobody knows how to use them properly unless they've bothered to look up the road rules. Every time I tentatively enter one of these roundabouts I feel I'm risking life and limb, and have seen many hair raising moments. My advice is to expect the worst and indicate as though your life depends on it because it just might!

To bring or not to bring: Washing Machines!

Now, at the risk of conforming to stereotype and having a right old moan, appliances in Australia, compared to the UK, are either Not Good or criminally expensive. I’m not sure what the reason is for this but it took me by surprise when I was in the process of shacking up with Diver Dave. I bemoaned my fabulous no nonsense dyson that my Stepmum had volunteered to ‘look after’ and my beautiful sleek Hotpoint washer dryer with blue digital display-à-la-volkswagen-dash that I’d had to flog in a hurry on ebay for only £100 before I came away!! Yes - you read it right folks - unless your ebay user name is treadtrader you missed out on a billy bargain there. For the equivalent money on the Australian ebay I had to settle for a very inferior plain old washing machine with absolutely no digital display whatsoever and some of the little symbols rubbed off. Apparently we paid a premium for this unknown make because it’s a front loader.

Front loaders are new in Australia and seem to be viewed with a great deal of suspicion. The average aussie home will usually have a laundry secreted somewhere, sometimes quite cleverly (although not when it’s in the bathroom), which consists of a washing machine -often the sort of top loader that you may not have seen since the 1970s - a wall mounted tumble dryer and a funny looking basin unit that your washing machine pipes have to be attached to. I have yet to see a front loader in Australia installed under a counter with hidden plumbing like in the UK and so laundry apparatus seems to take up lots of space unnecessarily. But as far as aussies are concerned, the only saving grace of front loaders is the fact that they are highly water efficient and you get a rebate from the government (in Queensland at least).

So my Top Tip re washing machines is that if you were considering emigrating with a great big container of belongings, remember to pack your washing machine. You won’t find another one like it for the same price.

Halloween in Australia

I guess some things stay the same between different countries. The other week the doorbell of our first floor apartment rang and I looked down to find a motley assortment of trick-or-treaters, some of whom had actually bothered to dress up. I’d forgotten it was Halloween. Now that I’ve not been teaching for almost a year, I’m truly out of the loop when it comes to important calendar events, kiddie wink wise.

I’m not sure I really approve of the whole going round to strangers’ houses and begging for stuff idea (or am I just turning into my mother?), but if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. However, I never give out money (in case they shout down the street to all the other mini scaries that number 10 is where the money’s at), and I never give out sweets (so that they shout down the street that it’s really not worth going to number 10, etc).

The ghouls and goblins waited patiently while I scrabbled around the apartment frantically for something to give them, rather than risk losing our rent deposit through having our windows/doors/walls egged. Not being prepared for the big grab-and-go occasion as I usually am, the only things I had more than one of to give out were..er.. kiwi fruit. Well? They ARE a bit scary looking, with their brownish green hairiness. And, as a primary teacher, I wholeheartedly approve of their vitamin content, in sort of vaguely killjoy-ish way. I duly dished them out: “What is it?” asked a pint sized skeleton. To give them their credit, the group all politely said thank you and I left them explaining to the skeleton how to eat a kiwi fruit.

Next year I will be truly amazed if we get any trick-or-treaters as we are about to move to the countryside, up an unsealed road with an acre of land around us!