Author Archives: Justin

Now that we’ve announced mini-Mocho is coming into the world, many people have expressed interest in coming to visit us during the second half of 2013. Yes, please, we’d love for you to come. Australia is a beautiful, diverse, and gigantic country. Enough people have visited us already that we put together a little ‘So you want to visit Australia’ guide to help you plan.

First, and most importantly, Come Visit us in Melbourne!

Flickr: WanderingtheWorld

Melbourne (pronounced: Melbin) isn’t Australia’s most famous city, unless you’re an urban planner. If you are an urban planner, you know that in both 2011 and 2012 The Economist Intelligence Unit  ranked Melbourne the world’s most liveable city. There is a reason for this: living in Melbourne is amazing.

The city is vibrant, fun, and worth at least two or three days of exploration.

Start your trip with two or three days in Melbourne
- Spend half a day exploring Melbourne’s laneways. Or get a guided tour on the laneways street art tour.

Flickr: Leigh/J/M

- Spend the rest of the day viewing Australian art at the Ian Potter Center (it’s free!) and/or the Immigration Museum (it’s $10, which in Australia is practically free!). Or take a walk along the Birrarung Marr or in the Royal Botanical Gardens.

Flickr: p.medved

- Grab dinner at one of Melbourne’s award winning restaurants and see what a downtown with lots of housing can be like on a warm evening.

Flickr: avlxyz

- After dinner, walk down to the Treasury gardens on the edge of downtown and see the bush-tailed possums while you watch the giant flying foxes feed on insects overhead.

On day two:
- Rent a car and visit Phillip Island and its famous Penguin march.

Flickr: hangdog

Or,
- Catch the 19 tram from our apartment to Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne’s largest and most visited outdoor market. You’ll find its full of tourists, locals, delicious local cheeses and meats, and as much Australia themed crap as you could be interested in buying for friends at home.

Flickr: avlxyz

- In the afternoon head to St. Kilda – Melbourne’s favorite beach neighborhood. Take a walk down the boardwalk, take a kiteboarding class off the historic St. Kilda pier and stay until dusk when the fairy penguins return to roost.

Flickr: ~David

- On the way back to the northside, catch an Australian Rules Football match at Australia’s greatest sporting arena the Melbourne Cricket Grounds.

Leave Melbourne for up to a week to find the mythical Australia you flew half-way around the world to see!
Australia is a huge and varied country. It’s also shockingly expensive (a recent article from the BBC explored why a single lime in Australia costs $2.25). Unless you have months and thousands of dollars to explore the country, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions. For most people, visiting Australia will be a once in a lifetime experience so they want to see ‘all of’ Australia. This is, sadly, impossible.

Doing some research on what you want to see is, of course, essential. Are you a diver? Explore North Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef or the Whitsunday Islands. Want to see the red center? Visit Alice Springs, Uluru, or Adelaide and head north until you find Australia’s famous underground city. Interested in seeing one of the most beautiful cities in the world? Head to Sydney and explore it on the ferries and buses. Spend a few days to the west in the beautiful blue mountains. Interested in the outdoors? Cross over the Bass Strait to Tasmania where you’ll find amazing scenery, beautiful beaches, rugged coast, a thriving farm to table movement, and quaint Hobart.

One of the few things in Australia that isn’t shockingly expensive are internal flights. A number of airlines compete for low cost internal fares: Jetstar, Tiger Airways, and Virgin Australia.

Then come back to see us for another few days!
We can make sure that you see all the Australian animals you haven’t seen!

Either in the wild on our world famous Great Ocean Road day trip (amazing breakfast in Geelong, winery visit for lunch, the twelve apostles, koala heaven at the Great Otway Peninsula, and kangaroos at the Anglesea golf course);

Flickr: brunom

Or, at the Healesville Sanctuary in the Yarra Valley (two hour drive to the foothills of the Victorian Alps, visit to the sanctuary’s open paddocks where you can walk amongst the animals, a visit to nearby vineyards, and dinner at a vibrant and busy restaurant);

Or, we’ll walk ten minutes from our apartment and meet you at the Melbourne Zoo.

And we’ll make sure that you get to spend at least a day cuddling it up with little mini-Mocho.

As of July 1, 2013 our apartment (also known as Dragonshire Inn) will no longer be available for home stays.  When planning your visit, mention the words ‘mini-Mocho discount’ to either of us and we’ll help you find discounted accommodation in our neighborhood. There’s no such thing as discounts in Australia so what we really mean is we’ll share the cost of accommodation with you (a small portion of the money we saved by not upgrading to a larger 2-bedroom apartment).

A Note on Visiting over Christmas/New Year’s
The best time for many Americans to visit Australia is between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The time off most people get helps offset the length of time it takes to get here, and it’s summer in the Southern hemisphere.  As we discovered this past Christmas/New Year’s, this isn’t the best time to visit Australia. First, an already expensive country becomes more expensive. Like August in Europe, a majority of Australians take two weeks off during this period so accommodation is tight. Combine this with a flood of visitors from the Northern hemisphere and you get ‘high season’ prices on almost everything. (I think Bryon and Nitika may have needed to re-mortgage their condo because of the cost to fly and stay two nights at Ayer’s Rock the week after New Year’s). Also, unlike in anyway that you could imagine in the United Sates, things close. When Bryon and Nitika visited us, Bryon really wanted to see Queen Vic Market. It was closed – and even when it was open almost half the stalls were closed. It was a disappointing experience at best. Not something you cross the world to visit. On New Year’s Eve, we made a booking at a local restaurant and went to get drinks beforehand. None of the bars within three blocks were open. This would be sacrilegious in the United States since New Year’s Eve would be almost every bar’s biggest night. Not in Australia.

In no way are trying to dissuade you from visiting during this period, but after our experience last year we do think it’s worth mentioning so that you can make an informed decision.

Mocho does Sydney

Two weeks ago we hopped a cheap jetstar.com flight to Sydney for a long weekend. We had heard lovely things about Sydney. Melburnians are quick to admit that Sydney is the more beautiful city, but they also like to get a pointed jab in when admitting it. ‘Sydney is a one night stand while Melbourne is a love affair”, they like to say. Would we be enamoured with Sydney at first sight but hope that we’d part ways  in the morning without exchanging phone numbers? We decided that three days would be just the right amount of time to figure it out.

To test this theory, we planned to explore Sydney’s Harbour on day one, its vibrant inner neighbourhoods on the second, and see some culture on the third. It was a pleasant three days in which we found many similarities between Melbourne and Sydney. On the face of it, we left Sydney feeling like the pithy metaphor was apt. We certainly enjoyed our exploration of Sydney’s neighbourhoods and cultural attractions but felt that Melbourne wins on both counts. What Sydney has that Melbourne can’t compete with is heart stopping geographic beauty. A city whose outright beauty calls you like a siren song; the furtive glances you catch of her in conversation only confirming that you want to see and know more of the stories she has to tell.

The highlight of our trip was the walk we took on the shores of Sydney Harbour.
If you plan a visit to Sydney, we highly recommend it. The photo above was taken mid-way through our walk. Here’s how to follow in our footsteps.

Catch the Taronga Zoo ferry from Circular Quay.
After disembarking from the ferry, turn right and walk along the road until you see a trail. The trail will have National Park signage and other useful information. Follow the trail along the water all the way to Clifton Gardens Park – about 6 km roundtrip (or as the Aussies would call it 6km return, you’ll also need to buy ‘return’ ferry tickets). On a high point before arriving at the Park you look onto the mouth of the harbour as it opens onto the South Pacific.
Just past the Park you’ll arrive at Bacino Cafe – which serves delicious coffee and Italian-style breakfast and lunch. It’s a great way to cap off a leisurely stroll that highlights some of the most beautiful urban scenery in the world – up there with Cape Town, or a clear day in Seattle or San Francisco.
We didn’t visit the zoo but combining a visit to it with the hike would be an amazing day.

A few weeks ago now, Laura and I took time out from a work trip to tour the famous sites of Myanmar. We hoped to see Myanmar before the onslaught of tourists and investors change it into the Southeast Asian tourist paradise that they envision. On my final night in Bangkok, for example, a Finnish man said to me, “Do you know what you what everyone should bring to Myanmar?”, after a long pause he continued, “$10,000 because I guarantee that within five years any land you buy will be worth at least triple”.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Myanmar. Having visited Cuba, Afghanistan, and a few other places that are off-limits to most Americans, I imagined that the country would feel run down, be expert at taking foreign currency (through differentiated pricing for locals and foreigners), and have a general, albeit under the surface, distrust of the motivation of foreigners to visit. We definitely found the first two and are unsure about the third.

The Temples of Bagan by Nobuhiro Nikushi

I spent the first week in Yangon commuting between the hotel and the office. The four or five square blocks of Yangon that I became acquainted with were not much to write home about. Most of the buildings show signs of tropical age – black or green (what I assume to be) mold developing on the vertical walls from years of monsoons and insufficient cleaning or painting. There were some things that reminded me of Cuba and Afghanistan, besides the general drabbines, namely the Sovietesque work trucks that turn the front wheels through an external fan belt, public transportation split between belching seventies era buses and modified pick-up trucks with benches and people hanging off the back, and traffic police that spend more time sleeping than doing anything else.

Schwedagon Pagoda at Night by Mikkel Winsvold Staff

The nicest aspect of my week in Yangon was its proximity to the Schwedagon pagoda, the largest Buddhist shrine in Yangon and all of Myanmar. Its golden dome shone in the sun during the day and glistened all night long.

From Yangon we flew to Bagan which is known for having 1,200 Buddhist temples crammed into a relatively small area. One thing became immediately apparent after arriving: it was hot. We never looked at a thermometer, but the heat reminded me of how my brother describes Tucson in summer, damn hot. I’m guessing it was 100-110 degrees Fahrenheit. And it was generally a dry heat, something we didn’t expect in the typically humid tropics.

Waking up early the following morning, we rented a horse and buggy to take us around to the temples. As the heat of the day built, we visited five or six. Most of them were impressively large and impressively serviced by people hawking the exact same crafts at every one. Laura and I would dutifully fall out of the horse cart, take off our shoes (you are not allowed to wear shoes in the temples), go inside, walk a circle around each temple looking at the architecture, fend off craft sellers, and drink as much water as we could manage. By about 2pm, and probably more like 10am, we were all templed out.

As it happened, our favorite temple was not particularly large or architecturally spectacular. It was the first we visited, so it was early in the day and relievingly cool when we arrived. Most importantly of all, it was empty; there was no one else besides us. While our horse and buggy parked under a nearby tree, we were able to explore it on our own, even climbing up the dank steps to the roof. It was like discovering an old tree house that was unknown to everyone else with views across the plain looking out upon the small and large temples near and far. We were in our own private Idaho.

The view from our own private temple – with our horse and buggy cooling in the shade of the tree.

If you love Buddhist temples and you love feeling like a traveller somewhat off the beaten path where you can discover the wonders of an ancient temple city all to yourself, we highly recommend seeking out Bagan soon and during the hot season! If the ‘all to yourself’ part isn’t a high priority, come during the main tourist season and you’ll probably enjoy it more than we did.

One of the mixed blessings of Bagan was the general lack of tourist infrastructure. Near our hotel, located in the main town, there were almost no restaurants that served food for tourists. We enjoyed trying different Myanmar food during our few days, but it was certainly hit or miss. Our favorite, and served at almost every restaurant, was Burmese tomato salad. We highly recommend seeking it out in a cookbook or at a website near you.

Our Hotel on Inle Lake

From Bagan we headed to Inle lake, where there is a town of stilts on the lake, floating farms, and locals that row (e.g., punt) with their legs. We enjoyed Inle lake more than Bagan, not least because it was blissfully cool after the hellacious heat. We spent the first afternoon walking as far as we could up the mountain road near our hotel because we had planned a lake tour for the following day. The trip up the mountain was quite nice. It was obvious that very few tourists venture up the road we took and most of the Burmese people we met were very friendly and smiled as we walked past their houses.

Leg Punting on Inle Lake

The following day we took a tour of the lake with a guide furnished by the hotel. The first stop was the local market, which was pretty cool. The market was thriving – with everything from local produce to machine parts for boat motors. Then we went to a silk weaving facility, a local smith shop, a silver smith shop, a temple, and by the floating gardens.

The floating garden (really farms) of Inle Lake

The floating gardens were a highlight of the day. The lake is shallow enough that if you stake down a local plant it will root into the lakebed. You can then begin to build a ‘floating island’ of variable size on which to grow produce. Most of the floating gardens were producing tomatoes and were arranged in long rows so that a farmer could paddle up and down the rows to tend their crop. Most of the farmers never left their canoes.

After the high intensity of Bangkok, Myanmar felt like a sea of tranquillity. But underneath the tranquillity, we left wondering whether we would recommend visiting to friends. For those that love travelling, spending a week or two would be a fascinating adventure. The people of Myanmar are friendly, the country is safe, and it sits at a unique place in its history. The Myanmar of today will most likely disappear, for better and worse, over the next few years. For those of you that are more like tourists, Myanmar has some infrastructure for you but there are definitely moments when you need to do it yourself or when finding the comfort of western food or other amenities can still be difficult. Ultimately, we wished that we had done more research before our trip and look forward to reading Burmese Days by George Orwell and Finding George Orwell in Burma by Emma Larkin.