As some of you know I dreamed about a worldtrip, so after saving money for a couple of years this old man finally did it.

To be honest i couldn't realize all my dreams, and this was not because lack of budget, but lack of time. After leaving Brussels for London I stayed only a few days in the neighbourrhood of Big Ben, and believe me, a couple of days with British food, beer and weather is PLENTY.

Singapore
Let's get the hell to the pacific! After I left the airport in Singapore someone hit me with a hammer. Airhumidity was so high that it felt like breathing and walking through water. These people know what luxury is! At the airport there was a swimming pool in that you could use if your next connection took too long. Hmmm furter on "a city is a city", the one special thing was that everyone had dollar signs in their eyes, even the girls I dated. If you don't need any electronical gadgets at ridiculously low prices - don't go there!

Australia (Sydney - Cronulla Beach)
I travelled from Singapore to Sydney and landed there late in the evening and then straight on to Cronulla Beach (just south of Sydney). Oh, my God! This must be a dream. The streets are filled with palmtrees and these trees are stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of all sort of parrots and cacatoes - ,screaming your ears out! Beautiful! I arrived in heaven, and what a perfect place to get over my jetlag (jetlag? what jetlag?).

Now, all I need to find out is where to buy bait, get a fishing licence and how to catch the locals fish here. It's the longest beach I've ever seen (found out later that there is just no end to it). They told me to put sardines on the hook, and so i did. I got a lot of bites and.....didn't catch a thing! What a terrible disappointment. I asked one of the local chaps for some advice. He seemed to be getting lots of fish. He told me about this dangerous hooking system of making a chain of hooks. You just keep putting one hook through the eye of the next one, doing so with up to 15 hooks and then take a whole sardine and cover all them hooks with it. Guess what? It worked!

First night of fishing produced a good catch - A couple of flatheads, tailors and some more weird animals. Perfectly happy I was walking along the beach headning back to the hostel when I ran into a couple of guys baiting their hooks (big enough to pull a car) with fish from around 1 kg. I asked them, friendly as always, if they were bloody drunk or just slightly pissed and with a big smile on their face they hand me beer (I start to like them Ozzies, they always go fishing in company of a truckload of beer)

They explained to me that during fullmoon (2 nights before and 2 nights after) this beach was excellent fishing for Jawfish and sharks. Yeah right! My second name is Thomas - I don't believe it before I see. Well, I am a believer! Good heavens! Somewhere during the fourth beer one of the rods starts bending over and the reel started screaming just as if they'd hooked a submarine. After a 40 minute fight I was handed the rod and the two guys put on some gloves and walked knee deep into the water. They land a fish about my size! I was sort of in shock and when I took a short look at this tiny telescopic rod I brought with me and started crying.

It costed them a few more beers to get me over it.This old man couldn't sleep to well that night.
That's all for this time. Next time I will tell you about the Royal National Park.

Tony


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