Matt, a ute and a case of wet bottom
Trip Start
Apr 01, 2010
1
34
53
Trip End
Mar 31, 2011
Wauchope, New South Wales, Australia
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Pronounced "war-hope' .... obviously. A slight detoured stop along the coast because there was the chance of a couple of nights rent free courtesy of Helen's relative. That's what seems to happen when travelling, not only do you take people up on offers but you go out of your way to make those offers come, even from people that you haven't seen in years. But once again, we were looked after amazingly at the motel that they ran as their business.
In exchange for a free motel room for a few nights all we needed to do was pretend to run a motel when Vicki and Ian wanted to go for lunch. Helen was the 'face' at the counter and on the phone whilst I was the 'muscle', moving things and driving the UTE to collect people and drive people into town.
Now, its mainly because the Australians are very lazy (or should that be 'chilled'/ 'laid back'), but they shorten every word possible. The classics such as "arvo" (afternoon), "ambo" (ambulance), "abbo" (aborigine), "smoko" (smoke break) ... you can see the theme here, but also UTE - short for utility vehicle.. basically a van with no top on the back. This is the vehicle equivalent of the White Van in England. So with Page 3 of The Sun on the dashboard and our middle fingers constantly raised we set off to explore this particular area of the Oz.
Amongst other things we went to a koala hospital/ sanctuary where we learnt the biggest killer of Koalas... Chlamydia, followed closely by falling out of trees and getting run over. Now the TravelPod Blog is not the place to get into the deep conversations of evolution but maybe Darwin was slightly wrong. This animal which sleeps 20 out of 24 hours because it takes that long to break down the poison of the eucalypti it eats, only eats 5 of the 30 varieties of said Eucalypti, who cant even breed without getting chlamydia (or "wet bottom" as the guide termed it for the family friendly grouping) and who will randomly forget to hold on to his tree is probably not the best advert for evolution.
On the plus point there was a Koala called "Matt", who was quite active. After a few obligatory photos of my namesake we left him to rue over his personal STD whilst we washed our hands. Many times.
