Melbourne: the perfect cocktail

Put Berlin, Brussels and New York in a cocktail blender and the result might be something like Melbourne. It's been a week now after we left that astonishing city, but it's vibe is still resonating in our brain.

Maybe it's about the night, when the tall buildings seem to disappear in the skies, embraced by the clouds lit up by the bright city. The casino blows fire in the sky and during the weekends thousands of dressed-up fancy people are crowding up the streets. It's just wonderful. While wandering through the city, we discovered narrow streets with astonishing graffiti arts, fancy little bars and well-hidden pubs - luckily, we were helped a little bit by Sharon, who guided us through the darkest places of Melbourne. We got ourselves into outdoor bars and museums, Dimitri enjoyed the traffic infrastructure and Graham went out of control in the games museum. You wouldn't believe us, but we kinda fell in love with a city.

Let the pictures speak for themselves...

Groene Vingers, aflevering 3

Melbourne by night

Nelson's case: solved!

News update from Colombia. As you might know, we were robbed in Colombia. Nelson, the off duty cop who was walking with us that day, was also robbed.... but started an extensive investigation operation. He just sent us an email with great news: "La banda del cerro Las Tres Cruces" has been arrested!

RIP! (P for Prison)

It's big news in Colombia!

Newspapers about the group - they should've read our blog! 

Santiago M., the leader of the group which robbed us, was killed one month ago. Risky business, high stakes.

The guns which were pointed at us...

First impressions: Australia

Just a few hours after selling the car in New Zealand, and thanks to helpful Samantha and her colleages at the airport Flight Centre, we were already heading for the next destination of our Grand Voyage, Australia. Due to a pot of strawberry jam we underwent some extra x-ray screenings at the airport security, which resulted in some lessons about smuggling, knives and last but not least Dimitri's machete. Surprisingly Dimitri's "coconut slicing tool" (as he described it himself) is still travelling with us all the way from Panama.

Adelaide, our first destination, surprised us with it's young vibe, amazing museums and slick architecture. We rented some bikes, drove around to the beach and prepared our first expeditions here. To support global warming and palmtrees in Europe, we decided to rent a small car and drove around, enjoying extensive wine tasting tours in McLaren vale and Adelaide Hill, well-known wine regions in the vicinity of Adelaide. Then we met Tanya, the amazing host(el manager) of one of the best and most remote hostels ever. Just hoping that she didn't ruin someone's wedding, she sneaked into the cellar and 'borrowed' some wine bottles for us. We didn't need a lot of discussion to extend our stay... and we had the time of our lives.

Meanwhile we met Benedicte, who turned out to be 'the mama' of the group soon. This Bruxelloise dared to share a week together with us, driving up north to Flinders Ranges. The following pictures don't need a lot of words...

During this first week~expedition, we composed a ranking of the best wines, based on an impressive list of tastings and our personal palette and preferences. Coming up next: the one and only DG-wine-award. Stay tuned,

D&G

Groene Vingers

Car business

As our tour in New Zealand has pretty much come to an end, we had one more task to complete: selling our car. The car in question is a minivan which has been converted into a backpacker's dream-vehicle, with a big mattress in the back and plenty of luggage space. It's a good and reliable car, but quite uh robust on the outside with plenty of bumps and um rusty spots, not to mention a sliding door on the side which unhinges if opened too enthusiastically...

Not so bad eh?

We assumed we would easily be able to sell it to other backpackers. The only problem was... there are hardly any backpackers arriving in New Zealand at this moment. We spent an entire morning at car fairs trying to sell our car and saw about 40 sellers, and, wait for it, 2 buyers, none of which were backpackers.

We knew what we had to do: we upped our game and took a professional approach much like any company would do.

As head analyst, Graham predicts a downturn in the second quarter.  "All indicators point to a sellers market," he says, "There is not a doubt on my mind that prospective buyers will stumble upon plenty of bargains and affordable buying opportunities."

Newly appointed CEO Dimitri highlights a fresh strategy. "We have a quality product and we are going to let everybody know about it. We will not stop until every single person in Auckland knows who we are and what we represent."

In practice this meant that we made some flyers which we distributed in hostels around town. We pleaded and begged potential buyers who weren't interested despite the dramatic price cuts we offered.

At some point it got so bad that we went around town with flyers taped to our bodies to attract attention to our product. We were starting to get nervous and anxious, until we finally found a buyer at a car fair. Our buyer was not a backpacker, in fact he was more of a bargain seeker and so his price was disappointingly low. Barely enough however to not make us want to cry. After tough and heated negotiations (all the other sellers around us were following with more than normal interest), Dimitri managed to squeeze a bit more out of them and they handed us the money for the purchase, unaware of what was about to go down.

Right after we put the money away, the buyer opened the sliding door with a bit too much gusto and - much to the delight of the other sellers around (who were still watching with interest)- the door completely unhinged and fell off the car. With the money in our pocket and a huge car-door lying on the ground next to the car, the buyer looked down in disbelief.

Sure we didn't get the best price for our car, but the look on the buyer's face was priceless...