CAIT AROUND THE WORLD

March 1, 2023 — A new month, a new adventure! This day officially marked five weeks away from home and also marked my return to the mainland to continue my journey up the east coast of Australia. I had a fantastic time under down under and in Melbourne and Sydney but I was super excited to head to the beach towns and to more and more beaches with awesome waves.

I spent the morning packing my things up, checking out of the hostel, and FaceTiming friends and family back home. I had wonderfully long chats with people whose faces I hadn’t seen in over a month because we’d just been texting and talking over voice-only calls.

I got the Skybus to the airport using my return ticket (excellent forethought!) that I had purchased just over a week before when I touched down in Hobart. The ride was about forty minutes to the airport and when I arrived I finished off the last of my water and some of the food I had leftover before I went through security. One secure checkpoint later, I was sat at a table by my gate, waiting for the call to board. I was still super-early, even though I had only shown up at the airport two hours ahead of departure this time. I even had enough time to remember that I was supposed to grab a postcard from Tasmania that morning and rush down to the airport convenience store to get one before I had to board the plane.

We touched down in Sydney two hours after departing Hobart and I hopped on the train from the airport to Central Station. (Yes, thankfully, it was operational again and not shut down for maintenance!) I got off the train at Central Station and quickly popped over to the Sydney Central YHA to see if they had found my missing Bluetooth earbud in the week since I’d been there, but was sadly disappointed. I made my way from there to the Woolworths Metro just across from the train station and picked up a Caesar salad for the train. When I checked the train timetable, I found out that a train was going to depart in just ten minutes and made my way to the platform and onto the train. I found a nice and spacious seat so that I could tuck both my bags under my legs and stretched out with my Caesar salad for the six-hour ride to Newcastle.

Filling time on long journeys is an art form, I’m convinced. My years of practice have come in handy on the journeys I have been on so far. On this particular trip, I watched What to Expect When You’re Expecting which is on Australian Netflix. When it was over, I listened to music for a while (still so glad that I picked up a pair of corded earbuds). I finally did a little work on the blog and started looking into more of my travel up the east coast.

Word to the wise: have terms and conditions fully explained when you purchase bus or train passes. I was looking into Greyhound travel up the rest of the east coast since they service the areas that I’m travelling to. I looked into the costs to purchase tickets on travel on an ad-hoc basis and totalled that up, then checked into the travel passes that they offer. The 7-day East Coast Whimit looked promising and would have been cheaper if I’d actually gotten seven travel days like it sounded I would. Instead, I got seven travel days within a fourteen-day window. I emailed Greyhound immediately and thankfully got a refund (less a 10% stupid-you processing fee) of the pass. A few days later, I booked all my travel up through Greyhound and Premier Motor Coach, another bus company who also operates through a lot of the east coast areas that I’m travelling to.

I arrived in Newcastle late that evening and walked to the hostel, making it just before 8:30pm, which is the time I’d told them I would be there for. The air felt so different from Tasmania and even more humid than Sydney, though it was a little cooler with the sun down. I had a bed in a 6-person dorm here, and enjoyed the bottom bunk after a wonderful shower in the extremely clean shower complete with a rain head. (My parents just put in rain shower heads in both our bathrooms at home and I was sad that I wasn’t there to try them out. This made up for it a little.) I was also super happy to see that there were outlets by the beds, making it super easy to charge my stuff while I slept. (Sometimes there’s only one outlet and it’s far away. Outlets by the bed is a big selling point.)

I was curled into bed and winding down for the night when one of the girls in my room popped over and asked if I wanted to hang out tomorrow and head to Merewether Beach and the Bogey Hole. We made plans to meet at one the following afternoon and I went to sleep, happy to have plans and something to look forward to.

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