Twenty Years Ago (Part 1)

Twenty years ago we were spending our first full day 'travelling'. The previous day we'd dumped our battered old car at Auckland airport (the guy who had crazily agreed to buy it was going to come and collect it from the airport later that day), checked in our huge rucksacks at the desk and flown to Sydney for the first leg of a convoluted trip back to England.

I'd already spent a couple of days in Sydney with work so had a vague idea of the place, and we were very fortunate that former work colleagues put us up for a couple of days at their beautiful flat in Cremorne Point. But they had a very young baby and were not too comfortable with us staying there for long so we shortly found ourselves in the first of many backpacker ghettos at Kings Cross. Nothing we'd read had prepared us for the real perils of Sydney: cockroaches. Everywhere. Hundreds, thousands of them pouring from the walls of our room, across the bags, across the bed... The room looked fine when we first went in but at night, once the lights went out it was like a scene from a horror movie. We ended up sleeping in the hostel's 'TV room' and moving the next day but from what we heard it was (probably still is) a common issue at the (ahem) budget end of the market. To be honest we were so freaked out by it that we didn't really enjoy Sydney much (it took another trip for us to really appreciate it) and we were glad to leave. I remember thinking 'if the cockroaches are this bad in Sydney what the hell will it be like when we get to Cairns?!

Fortunately for us, Australia turned out to be a huge amount of fun. We tried to do too much in two months and vastly underestimated the sheer size of the place, but learning to dive and the two weeks travelling up through the red centre from Adelaide to Alice Springs were just fabulous. Met some great people on the way who we've sadly lost touch with (no Facebook in those days) and it was a perfect 'easy' introduction to the trip.