Going Places: Last week Aengus Collins described the first half of his backpacking honeymoon. This week, in his final report, he and his wife fall in love with the other side of the world
After six weeks travelling south from Beijing, through China, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia, the second half of our backpacking honeymoon began with an overnight stop in Singapore. Technically, we were still in southeastern Asia, but the contrast with the humming chaos of the other countries we had visited was sharp. We were back in the world of conspicuous consumption, customer service and shiny, efficient infrastructure. Plus good western food - a lunchtime plate of spaghetti with garlic and olive oil provided a simple taste of heaven.
Singapore marked the start of a trade-off that continued as we made our way home through Australia, New Zealand and the US. In important respects the trip became much easier to organise from day to day. The language barriers disappeared and the tourist industry, even for lowly backpackers, became hugely professional and reliable. But everything also became much more familiar. There were fewer surprises and fewer culture shocks, part of what had made the Asian leg of the trip so exhilarating.
The costs soared, too. In Asia we never had to decide not to do something because it would break the budget. But that happened all the time from Australia onwards, despite having doubled our daily budget. We started having to get used to rooms without bathrooms and to rooms shared with others, whereas in Asia we had spent every night in an en-suite room - hardly luxury, but at least somewhere clean and private.
We flew into Sydney. It's a sunshine town, full of life, colour and surf kids during the day, surprisingly muted by night. It's also breathtakingly friendly. Casual requests for directions brought forth long explanations and furious map-drawing. People went out of their way to help as a matter of course. It seems to be a pace-of-life thing: everything sails along quite slowly, and nobody seems to mind the delays involved in being so polite to each other all the time.
From Sydney we flew up the eastern coast to Mackay, where we had to catch a bus to the town of Airlie Beach. Our bus was hours late picking us up, having broken down on its way, but somehow we kept just within our schedule's margin for error. We arrived at Airlie Beach with minutes to spare before boarding a yacht we'd booked on to for a three-night snorkelling trip, with a group of about 20 others, out to the Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef.
Idyllic is the only word to describe our time on the yacht. Three days of beautiful sunshine and clear blue water stretching to the horizon in every direction. Time divided between lounging on the deck, with a cold drink and a book, and snorkelling around with the unimaginably varied marine life. We swam with turtles, a manta ray and a Maori wrasse called Elvis. There was even a National Geographic moment, when a school of tiny fish swarmed around us like a living whirlpool. It was unforgettable.
When the yacht dropped us back to Airlie Beach we jumped on an overnight bus, to take us farther up the coast, to Cairns. We had four days there, using it mainly as a base from which to loop a couple of hours farther north again, to spend a night on a farmstead near Cape Tribulation, where the rainforest meets the ocean.
Having travelled most of the way up Australia's eastern coast, we had to start going back south, towards Adelaide, from where we would be flying to New Zealand. The first leg of the trip took us on a huge detour into the dusty heart of Australia, to visit Uluru, or Ayers Rock. It was a disappointment - not so much for the rock, nor for the extortionate price of accommodation, as for the cynicism of the industry that has built up around it.
Uluru is sacred to Anangu Aboriginals, who prefer visitors not to climb it. It's the kind of point a society needs to make a clear decision about: either you're unambiguously going to allow climbing or you're unambiguously going to restrict it. But at Uluru they try to have it both ways, paying lip service to Aboriginal wishes while selling trips up the rock and "I Climbed It" T-shirts. For us, it felt dishonest and distasteful.
From Uluru we flew south to Melbourne, where we joined a backpacker tour bus for a stunning three-day trip along the Great Ocean Road, to Adelaide. Built after the first World War by returning servicemen, the road has breathtaking views of the Southern Ocean and its ongoing battles with the coastline - the spectacular 40-metre limestone pillars known as the Twelve Apostles now number only eight, after another one collapsed last year.
After a few days killing time in Adelaide we flew to New Zealand, where our schedule gave us an inadequate 11 days to make our way from Queenstown, on South Island, to Auckland, at the top of North Island. We spent far too much time in transit rather than seeing the sights. The only must-sees we managed to do justice to were the still beauty of Milford Sound and the whales at Kaikoura. Between Wellington and Auckland, North Island passed in the blur of a single overnight bus journey. Rotorua, spiritual home of the Maori, I remember only as a foggy smell in the middle of the night.
Although it slipped by swiftly, New Zealand brought home the once-in-a-lifetime aspect of our trip. It's just so far away. It wasn't the most romantic place we visited, but in some ways it made the trip feel more like a honeymoon than any other country did. Here we were, newly Mr and Mrs, traipsing around in the chill spring sunshine on the other side of the world. Getting married didn't feel much like a life-changing rite of passage, but in a strange way this did. It was private and new - ours alone. There was also a romance to having dropped everything and set off to see, together, sights we might otherwise never have seen.
The flight from Auckland to the US marked the beginning of the end of our trip. With only a fortnight to go, the real world began to loom again. Thoughts turned to getting back to work, to relaxing on a sofa, to having a choice of more than two pairs of trousers.
We had been ferociously disciplined in the 11 weeks before we reached the US. We were under budget and on schedule, and our backpacks had never weighed more than 12kg each. So we took it easier on ourselves in the United States. When we weren't staying with friends, we stayed in proper hotels rather than in hostels - a brief run-in with a filthy hostel bed in San Francisco made that decision for us. We ate, a lot. We visited galleries. We shopped. In San Francisco we took a boat out in fog so thick we could hardly see the Golden Gate Bridge even as we passed beneath it. In Dallas we ate more red meat in a few days than now seems feasible. In New York we walked all day, every day, seeing the sights, soaking up the atmosphere, loving being back in a big city after all the wide-open nature of Australia and New Zealand.
And then, after a few short days, we were on a flight back home, our three months over. In the early days of the trip it seemed as if it would never end; three months seemed such a long time to be on holiday. But it passes quickly, and then, all of a sudden, it's gone. Another two days and I was getting up at 6am, travelling to work in the dark, and it almost felt as if if we'd never been away. The only answer, I suppose, is to start planning for the next trip.
HOW MUCH YOU MIGHT SPEND BACKPACKING
Singapore Lunch €10 Dinner €20 Room €36
Australia Lunch €9 Dinner €22 Room €60
New Zealand Lunch €11 Dinner €24 Room €32
US Lunch €17 Dinner €50 Room €125
All costs are for two people; accommodation is for en-suite double or twin rooms