OZtralia.tv Blog

Giving You The Best Australian Travel Experience

By: OZtralia.tv Staff

We are proud to continue to give you the best travel experience for Australia online.

From our video map, you can see all of Australia. But now, from our direct pages, we also give you a wealth of written information on every location we cover in Australia.

Below are links so you can check it all out yourself.

Watch videos and find information about
all the amazing Australia’s travel destinations:

» Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest
» Sunshine Coast - Noosa
» Brisbane
» Canberra
» Melbourne
» Byron Bay and the Rainbow Valley
» Sydney
» Whitsunday-Overview
» Rainbow Valley
» Hobart and Southern Tasmania
» Northern Tasmania
» Perth and the Sunset Coast
» Cairns and Port Douglas
» Surfer’s Paradise and the Gold Coast
» Uluru
» The Great Ocean Road

By: Phoenix Arrien

In Australian post offices there is sand for sale.

Now this is strange you may think. However it is not just any old sand. Not the sand from the legendary Bells Beach on the South Coast or a sugar white beach from Queensland. It is not even from some island floating in a pea soup of blue and green on the Great Barrier Reef.

No it is sand from a beach in Turkey. White Australia (as different from Black of Indigenous Australians) has only a couple of hundred years of history on this great continent and we tend to grope around for meaningful legends that help us identify our national characteristics.

ANZAC means Australia and New Zealand Army Corps and it was the boys in the corps who landed on a Turkish Beach on the Gallipoli Peninsula on 25 April 1915. While Australians had fought in the Boer War in Africa, this was the first time the nation had really made its mark on the world stage.

Eight fruitless months of fighting, dying and rotting in trenches, finally saw a retreat, but not before the ANZACs got a reputation for courage, endurance and loyalty under fire. Through ingenuity and lateral thinking, the retreat was carried out without one loss of life. These attributes Australian’s view as the ANZAC spirit and hope we still display such things.

We probably do when fighting bushfires or a ‘mate’ is in trouble. We probably don’t when fighting for the petrol bowser during fuel strikes.

Which brings me back to the sand. The sand is from the beach at Gallipoli, the very sand that those troops stomped on and no doubt cursed. (Imagine running through sand with rifles, stores, equipment and such, yeeech!) Now however it is a tangible bit of our history.

So tomorrow is ANZAC day and while it is an enjoyable public holiday, it is also a day of pride and remembering for many with veterans of any war or their descendants march in parades through the streets.

Speaking of bravery, I am off to the north of Australia to hunt for wild animals. Join over the next few days and let’s try not to get eaten.

By: OZtralia.tv Staff

When I was told I was going to get into a “Zorb” I have to say, I really did not know what in the devil to think.

“So, just what is this Zorb?” I asked.

“It is a big plastic ball, similar to that of a hamspter ball, and we are going to roll you down a hill…” I was told.

-Literally that is what it is-

At first glance, a Zorb look like some space aged contraption. In actuality, it is a pretty simple concept. Inflate a big ball, put another ball inside of it, fasten the small ball (somehow) inside of the larger ball, and then roll yourself down a hill.

This is what the Zorb Gold Coast website has to say for themselves:

“A Zorb® is a BIG, fat, 3 ½ metre huge inflatable ball, round and bouncy, you jump inside it, it rolls and so do you. Excited – you should be as the ride begins with a drive to the top of Zorb® Park hill, then enter the Zorb® and be launched down our custom designed tracks.

There are two different ways to ride in a Zorb®, one involves getting wet and one doesn’t, simple!! Water in the hydro Zorb®s is to make the surface slippery so you slide rather than rotate with the Zorb®. The Harness experience is designed as a more extreme ride as you are rotating every 10 metres.”

I think they really want to let you know that “Zorb” is a registered trademark…

Nevertheless, it was a real fun time. A couple of times down the hill and I was finished, but some wanted to be tusseled around in the Zorb all day long.

Check it out.

They call “college” here “Uni.” At first, I did not get it. Soon, I was fast enough to derive the conclusion. School does not start for a couple more weeks. Next week is “0″ week followed by week one. During 0 week, we have get-to-know-ya games and the like. I am going on a surfing adventure that the college offers and a wet and wild adventure.

The Australians are a nice bunch. I live about 10 minutes, by car, away from Surfer’s Paradise. Do I have a car? No, but I have bicycle! A jolly ride on a bike to Surfer’s is over an hour.

If I receive nothing else from my time in Australia, it is respect for bicyclists. A friend in New York was the one to propose the idea to buy a bike. “Gunnar, you should really get a bike and explore,” he said.

I remember in Idaho, mother and I would be driving the van in some place like Lewiston, and I would poke fun at the bicyclists peddling their heart out alongside the road. I would try to sing the instrumental part of the Wizard of Oz hit, when the witch is riding her bicycle. “Dundantan dundantun da dun, Dundantan dundantun da dun, Dundantan dundantun da dun…”

Now, I am the proud owner of a bike. “One, and two, and three, and four,” I count to myself as I trudge up a hill. It is always best to have rhythm, right? “One, and two, and three, and four” and then some person thinks they are a barrel of laughs and passes me going 120 kph on their motor bike, and I am left to watch them cruise up the hill. Still, there is no better feeling of accomplishment than when I pass over the crest and am greeted with a cool breeze.

One could really get himself hurt here riding a bike. They have things called “roundabouts.” We have them back in the states, but they are few and far between. Here, you cannot go more than a half mile before coming to a darn roundabout. Riding a bike through a roundabout is hard.

Traffic is coming and going, and then horns honk because you are in the way…but I have managed to get the horn honking down to a minimum as I figure the system out.

It is very interesting to be watching the news in the U.S. right now. It makes me feel proud to be from there, but also very dismayed. Namely, the talk of gas prices gets me. Sure gas prices are bad back home, but here they are a lot worse, equivalent to over four dollars a gallon. Australians just go with the flow and are not complaining about prices too much, because gas here has always been expensive.

Maybe if they got rid of some of the roundabouts though, they could save on gas, as a straight line is the fastest way to any given destination, but that is not the point.

News.com.au says that Brisbane is a fantastic getway in this new article.

Brissy (as it is called by the locals) is a nice time. It provieds a “city” atompshere that we feel is the best in Queensland. Australia is known for its rustic beauty, but Brisbane offers the night life and dining that only a city can offer.

We all had just gotten out of the water. The skipper said that the jellyfish did not come out in the morning, only toward the night. I was drying off when I heard, “look!” A fin was slicing out of the water, not more than ten feet from the boat. A tiger shark, the skipper said.Four Germans and two Americans set out to sail the Coral Sea. No, not a set-up to a bar joke was quite an experience let me tell you.First, let me say that I have never stayed in a hostel. We all went up to Brisbane on a Friday, the day before our flight to Airlie Beach, to have a night out on the town. The idea was that we were going to stay in a hostel. The minute I walked in, I walked right back out in protest. I convinced my friends that it would be much more practical to get a hotel.
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