Cameland

With the new year in, I have decided that it’s time I started to post the photos from our Queensland trip. I tallied the photos and have found that we took a total of 2991 photos during the trip, on my camera (which is now non-functional).

This will probably dominate all of Cameland’s posts for the next week or two, and steal the thunder from John’s trip to Japan as well as our New Year’s celebrations, but what the heck.

Anyway, on to the photos!

Today, I will be bringing you the photos from Day 1 - the drive from Melbourne to Sydney. Following is a selection of 55 out of the 311 total photos taken on that day.

Our first stop was at the Athol Road shops, because Dom for some reason decided that the day we were leaving was a good day to go to the post office to run some errands. (9:14am)

John also takes the opportunity to get himself an Asian pork roll, and enjoys it as if it was the last one he’d get to devour in his life. (9:25am)

We passed through various landmarks of Melbourne suburbia such as the Bosch factory (9:35am) and the cemetery at Carnegie (9:56am).

Then there were more photogenic views, like the Melbourne city skyline (10:04am) as well as the West Gate Bridge (10:08am). It’d be our last view of real civilisation for quite some time, given that we just avoided most of Sydney and stayed in the outer suburbs.

Eventually, we reach the junction on the freeway, and we depart on our northward journey. (10:34am)

Weird blue walls and only 849km to Sydney. John is asleep already. (10:35am)

The highlight of the drive - we encounter a huge traffic jam which appeared out of nowhere, and this is what we see (10:57am):

Eventually, we reach our first stop at Seymour. (11:32am)

Nothing interesting seemed to happen in the next two hours, since there weren’t any photos until our next stop, at Glenrowan North (1:16pm):

You can also see the infamous Ben hand:

Tony’s not really asleep here (1:44pm):

But the drive on this section is pretty long and boring. No scenery to speak of, and the road is so straight and flat that 110km/h feels really slow (1:51pm):

But at least we are slowly making progress (2:15pm):

We pass through the border city of Albury-Wodonga and finally cross the Murray River and enter New South Wales. There weren’t any pretty billboards, it might have to do with the fact that the new freeway across the city had only opened pretty recently (2:24pm):

The signs do remind us that we’re slowly approaching our destination though. (2:32pm)

We pass the former Australian Navy submarine HMAS Otway, which has somehow sailed hundreds of kilometres inland (3:07pm):

And another highlight came as we were driving across a dusty construction site and saw a mini tornado (3:11pm):

We saw a car with the dodgiest number plates ever (3:16pm):

The new road didn’t seem to be ready yet. But without a divided road, overtaking trucks and other slow vehicles is no longer the simple task of using the other lane but a careful game of skill and planning. (3:22pm)

Vroom. 487km and time for a break, says the car. (3:40pm)

So we stop for a break at Tarcutta (3:50pm):

I got bored and pulled out the infrared filter to do some surreal landscapes. Doesn’t really work as well on a moving car though. (4:51pm; 4:51pm; 5:40pm)

And here’s a landscape with some more realistic colour rendition (5:42pm):

Getting even more close (5:43pm):

We missed the famous MYASS billboard coming back, so this was the best job we could do. (5:47pm)

And nobody really decided to take any more photos for another two and a half hours. By then, it was almost getting too dark to take photos, and this is the final photo we took on the road (8:21pm):

And finally, we reach our low budget cheapo accommodation which would provide us with some beds for the night. Took quite a while to find the actual place though. (9:34pm)

So in total, from Melbourne to Sydney, we spent about 12 hours on the road. We finished off the night by watching Predator on the motel TV. We would later learn that our way of stopping for breaks is horribly inefficient and cost us several hours in the end.