3 years and 35000 kilometres, uncounted countries and experiences, sunshine and headwind, fight and glory, we reached the final destination.

We made it, we are in New Zealand, fireworks are already over, the champagne bottles empty and we've got the flight ticket back home in our pocket.

The welcome party will be at the 16.07. in Berlin Friedrichshain at the Mainzerstrasse 1a.

That's all for now.

Missing a big city since very long time, we enjoyed ourselves for a few days in Melbourne with street festival, exhibition and music around every corner. But a real Metropolis feeling we just got in Sydney, which is, surprisingly for us Germans, pronounced "Sidni". The first walk took us to the Opera. We've seen it a thousand times on pictures but were still impressed. Arrived in the evening we couldn't let our eyes go off it until sleeping time. In the middle of the night we woke up. Rain. And we slept outside without tent. Fantastic idea. At least the Opera was still lightened. The rest of the night we spent wet and freezing and with the funny possums, which couldn't give up searching for food around us.

The next morning we let go from the beautiful sight of the opera, packed the sleeping bag and left the park on the way to a backpackers hostel, like every other normal person.

The following week was packed program with classical sightseeing, clubbing, museum, exhibition and gallery visits. We stayed in a korean backpackers in the tourist- and red light district. It seemed like a mini version of the Hamburg Reeperbahn. We walked to the city center, crossed a district with the funny name 'Woolloomooloo' (I hope I spelled it the right way), passed beautiful victorian city mansions, visited 'Bondi Beach' and the historical district 'the Rocks', we strolled through the shopping areas and chinatown, where it seems like 90 % of the passing people are Asians. And wherever we went, we always came to the harbour where you can get a view within a few steps at the Harbour Bridge, the Opera and the skyline.

In contrary to the rest of the country the 'sydneysiders' prooved that they are a folk of outside living people. The city centre was crowded with people every evening. Of course there were plenty of tourists as well, but it was difficult to separate, because the immigration country itself has a wonderful mixed people.

The time in the city passed quickly and soon we had to go to the airport. New Zealand is waiting. What will it be like? It'll be the first time for long we will have winter but first of all: will New Zealand be as we dreamed it to be? or will the worst imaginations be true that the tourism industry did a brilliant job and the country isn't that wonderful? we met a few long term tourists being deadly disappointet of NZ... will the 'Kiwis' be different to Australians? are two months too much or not enough at all?

We'll see.

The youngsters stand silently beside each others. A tall guy finishes a monologue and pushes the black glasses with his skinny forefinger up the nosebridge. His thin greasy black hair moves a bit when he sheepish rolls his head from side to side.

"Whaaat!?" shrieks a girl from the group. "What did you do, Nathan?" feeling the gazes of the surrounding people on her, she turns around theatrically, pulls the shiny black coat with the skull emblem tighter around the hips, grins towards her friend, taps her top hat and squeaks "I go home and kill myself!"

A man in the midthirties with flip flops, billabong shorts and a muscleshirt covered by miscellanies throws a casual glance at the teenagers before his little daughter demands attention, who fights with the glaring blue soft ice, which is spread all over the short pink skirt with the white "Paris" inscription. He doesn't pay attention to the shrill "Uuuh! How are ya?" beside him any more.

At an embullient embrace the top hat falls off and one centimeter ashblond hairline appears, shining beside the matt black in the sunshine. The friend bends down and shows dangerously much smooth shaved leg. Her hair smells like fresh coloured blonde. She presents new bought shirts, skirts and shoes and the painted tattoo, which a popstar on MTV had just shown.

Rosalie passes by wih her bike, her short cut dark hair hidden under a helmet. She doesn't care much about fashion, she busies herself rather with sociocritical topics, the two boys and her partner and the big hobby cycling. Apart from boat and trampoline, a recumbent bike, tandem, folding- and racing bike adorn the garden of the family at the northern part of Adelaide.

"The australian media is quite onesided" she says. "Rupert Murdoch is involved in quite everything. I don't feel well informed by newspaper and television. There are far not enough critical voices. Not in the population either."

Rob doesn't seem to feel like that, not even after several days of non stop tv watching in every free minute. The fifty year old self-employed antennabuilder is well informed about everything going on at the current disaster scene due to the 24-hours news channel. He tells us about the amount of missing Australians and knows about the mother how had to decide which of her two kids she would save from the water. This kind of stories and all the new knowledge about the origin about the tragedy he tells his wife Jeanene as well, who just closes her trainers for going to the beach and nods absent. Emotional by all the reports, Rob donates generous and announces proudly that the Australians gave more money in the world than anybody else. Reminded by the tragedies in the world, he shows us pictures of the little Thai girl he and his wife fund since 7 years for that she can go to school.

Also Australians get support by other Australians. We watched the boxes for the victims of the biggest bushfire since 150 years near Adelaide filling up fast with blankets, videogames, chips and television, while the newspaper tells about a girl, who gets married as planned despite the total burndown of the parents farm. The Melbourne news report about a robber, who catched a handbag of a couple the previous night. The rest of the country seems to be quiet.

Quiet as in the room of Bruce and Brian on the pear farm. The two brothers came from New South Wales to the Murray river in Victoria for picking fruits. The season is over since a few days and they use the free time for smoking weed and drinking all the beer they bought from the alkohol shop. I wonder if they drive with the taxi through the bottle shop drive in? At the moment they cure their hang over. There is no clattering laughter today. when money and beer are empty they want to go "far up north", near Brisbane. They don't belive us, that we cycled all the way through the middle of Australia. Their world starts in New South Wales and ends up shortly after the federal states boarder. The 'Great Ocean Road', situated directly beside Melbourne on the south coast, seems to be in the middle of the outback for Bruce and Brian.

Since we left the outback, several weeks passed by in ehich we visited the 'real Australia', the areas where all the poeple live. We are in the country for 5 months now. 5 months in which we understand the news, we get something to know without questioning everybody and 'pulling eveything out of peoples noses'. It's so nice. A common language exists, bodylanguage doesn't cause misunderstandings any more, again we can talk to people we meet on the way and get a much bigger impression of how their lifes go and what bothers them. We noticed that Australia is, despite the distance, very close to our homeland. At least compared to all the other countries we visited during the last months.

Richness and poverty aren't the main topics any more, rather the question who is earning very much and who's 'just' receiving dole. In place of tumultuous markets full with strange smells, tastes and consistencies, there are supermarkets with sterile wrapped eatables where the eyes and the dollars have to decide what to take. Instead of self built hut areas and masses of struggling homelessness, we see neat homes, ordered via catalogue, and a few homelessness, who don't know where to store all their possessions. A loo isn't a shithole in the ground any more, it is a clean and tidy water-closet with shiny white paper in easy reachability. There are no traffic jams caused by bicycles, rickshaws and all kind of other vehikles, but well ordered car traffic and nobody to ask for the way on the roads. Religion isn't obvious therefore we deal with the unfamiliar styled fashion and other hobbies of the "Aussies", like boats and quad driving.

Somehow we feel like being home and somehow we don't. To answer a question we ask ourselves, we ask others and others ask us frequently: despite all the blue sky, the wealthiness, all the great people we met, their friendliness and generousity, the funny animals, the fantastic starlit sky, the cheap huge portions of hot chips and the cheerful australian english there are things in 'Oz' which we wouldn't like to live with for longterm. We wouldn't get fat that fast at home. The tv isn't running always and there aren't as many fashionvictims and dolls like here. Our economy isn't 'running as a steamboat' but however in return nobody would say "basically this country is boring". Our national pride could increase, but therefore happenings in other countries beside the own are important as well. Everybody is always polite and friendly here, but a smile can disappear within parts of a second. Unfortunately they don't have real wholemeal bread, but instead plenty of asian food. Despite multiculturality, the white briton from the 5th generation on still seems to be the real Australian. The whenever immigrated Asian stays Asian and a Briton in the 2nd generation is still 'a pom'. Potato, bread and meat are a main dish, like at home, just different in form of hot chips, toast and the everyday convenient BBQ or 'barbie' (=barbecue). But the main thing I couldn't bear for long: I don't have to wear a helmet for cycling yet in Germany!

We were out to billy-yo. Thru the middle of the bush. What a rip-snorting place. Strewth! People were bullfighting friendly. Then we were up the creek. The pushie it's carked it. we lookedlike a stunned mullet. It was a stinker of a day, we were spewin' and didn't know what to do. but then a mate came, gave us a lift and a beer and took us to town. It was flat out like a lizards drinkin'. nd there we are, back in Katherine, that's the story for now.

In short version and without bushie slang this means two days after we left Katherine, Mareike's back wheel broke, as expected. Alan, a really nice Australian guy gave us a lift and a beer and took us back to town. We tried to get a reasonably priced wheel in Katherine, but as it was impossible, we phoned around and finally waited a couple of days for a package from Adelaide which should come with the normal bus. After we spend enough time at the local hot springs - quite refreshing with 40 degree celsius - and the package finally arrived, the wheel was replaced and we could go on without any more disturbances.

Day after day we went up with the sun, cycled through the heat of the day and went to bed with the sun again. The road was long and straight, never before we could see the horizon from that long distance. Just few cars passed us, less enough for enjoying the nature fully and plenty enough, for not worrying about dying in case of a bike or personal breakdown. It was exhausting riding. We felt the heat, constant frontwind and plenty of extrakilos with food and water. Still the kilometers were easily passing by. Slight hills raised us up to a level from where we even had a greater view over the area. Nowhere a city, a town or even a house, just every now and then a hut with solar power for refreshing signals of optical fibres over these long distances.

Plenty of cockatoos flew screaming above us, their sun lightened light yellow-white, pink and black wings looked fantastic in front of the deep blue sky. Eagles cruised along with their majestic huge wings, watching trivialities of the world from different dimensions or came down to earth for rudimentaries like eating from half rotten carcasses beside the road. Heaps of kangaroos, some lizards, a stinking emu and a pelikan. How did this one came here?

Just few living animals stepped into our sight during the heat of the day. The most we saw cangaroos, fighting with the never ending fences of the cattle stations. Incredible huge areas surrounded by wire and barbed wire, just few cattle we could see, the main station building was just able to imagine because of the signs at the road. A tractor wheel leaning on a huge creaky tree, a white painted barrel beside it with "Numagalong station 158 km" on it, close to a gravel road. Or an old broken fridge, also used as a letter box.

Once we met a real cowboy. He went to town for drinking a few beers with his mates. He was about 70 years old and the furros in his face were telling stories. He wore a sweaty leather cowboy hat, a bluegrey shirt with squares und his waistcoast and jeans. Even if he wouldn't have told us, we could see from his hands, that he was working on this farm since he was a kid. Huge rough hands signed from repairing fences, bull catching, dingo shooting and cattle signing.

Just three fulltime cowboys take care of the 4000 cattle on his farm. Most of the time they are stilll riding horses, just seldom they use the four-wheel-drive. But his farm is a small one, he said, while he rolled a cigarette with three fingers of his left hand. Other stations around have up to 40000 cattle. The work is fantastic, a smile played in the edges of his mouth and he moistured the paper. There are beasts, which get lost in the wide open space of the territory and lonesome born, which saw a farmer the first time after 5 years. He takes care of the water sources and removes poisonous plants from the ground, which could harm the cattle. The old cowboy put the cigarette unlightened in the edge of his mouth. He told about drought seasons, changings during time and about his total trust to his men. When he said that, he remembered his appointment, he apologized, stood up, shook hands with us and left straight to the pub.

We went on driving towards the sun. We needed up to 30 litres of water per day. Still the lips got dry and finally splitted. Water sources were rare but always enough. And when it happened that the workers of a roadhouse didn't want to give us water for free, just had bottled or salty one from the bore, there was always a helpful soul around who gave us water for free.

The area became more dry. The small eucalypt trees changed to bushland. Dead dry parts of thorny bushes were blown over the road within small tornados. The nature offroad became more and more inhospitable with all those thorns.

Different types of termites, which built their enormous termite mounds everywhere right from the north of the country, offered themselves a terrific final of their architectural challenge. Within a small area there were multiple colour changes of the ground. Grey, red-brown and beige termite mounds were close to the others. Tall sharp ones and stout round ones stood a last time beside each others before the landscape changed again and the termites built their tunnel underground.

Golden spinifex grass moved slowly in the wind, and because there had been more rain than usual this year, small purple and yellow flowers grew beside the road in the gravel. Tender and fragile in this rough area. Silence surrounded us, just every now and then the sound of some birds or a lizard, flitting away.

An aboriginal family, which we had met before, passed us waving happily and wishing “Merry Christmas! God bless you”. The shaggy heads of the four kids stuck out of the dirty white van. When we met the first time they couldn’t believe where we intended to go. “There’s nothing but bushland. You can’t go there.”

But along the Stuart Highway, called after the big pioneer, who was the first to cross the country from south to the north, were not just endless plains, bushes and red sand, but often some "Historic markers". More or less interesting places, which documented the young Australian history with pioneers and miners, important places of WWII up to bridge building in the 1980's. One of the more interesting places was an old telegraph station, which was part of the line linking Australia to the world from the1870's on. The peaceful surrounding and the buildings in good shape allowed us to step back in time, when there was no road here, when explorers and travellers had to risk their lives for trips, we can do nowadays without problems. Jerome Murif was 1897 the first who cycled from south to north. When he arrived at this telegraph station, he was half starved and half dead and had to recover for a while. Luckily the station was prepared. They had own cattle and sheep for milk and meat, homegrown fruits and vegetables and a line to call for help, at least within a few weeks.

Nowadays the Stuat Highway is one of the main roads in Australia for freight carriages, but the traffic didn't seem much more than in the old days. A couple of times a day roadtrains passed by, huge trucks with up to 4 trailers.One of the huge trucks with just 3 trailers is already more than 50 meters long. Giving way and braking isn't possible too quick, which causes death kangaroos or in general, several 'roadkills'. But one can see long distance on straight streets and whenever they could, these grimmy looking trucks made a huge turn around everything alive, like us, for that we don't loose control in the suction.

In the evenings we put up our camp in the shelter of the dark beside the road. With sunset the hundreds and thousands of flies, which survived the heat of the day sitting on death animals or on our back, came out to see if they could find some liquid in our eyes, ears and mouth. Sitting and sucking, making cooking and eating difficult until the temperature fell and it was too cold for them. Exhausted by the exertion of the day, we fell onto our mattresses and recovered with the impressing views to the pure and overwhelming starlit sky. With full moon it was even enough light to read around midnight without any supporting light. There was no disturbing artificial light from towns, no cloud, just sometimes a passing roadtrains, roaring and fairly lightened. It was the first time that we saw a nightsky like that and we thought about our beloved home, that they can't see the same stars like us.

A warm smile welcomed us on board of the Qantas flight QF 0132 to Darwin / Australia. Not quite the youngest, not even the prettiest but extremely relaxed stewards served us well until we reached the town at the northwestern top of Australia.

At the customs we faced the strict immigration rules. "Do not bring soil, or articles with soil attached, i.e. sporting equipment, shoes, etc." Although we found this rule weird, we had scrubbed an polished our bags and bicycles for the first time since we started and thought they look like new. The custom officer thought differently. In a harsh way she pointed to indian mud on the raindress and indonesian dust all over the cycle. With hard voice she murmured "Quarantine?!". From the outside we stayed cool but in the inside we felt panic. Quarantine would be the worst! After very long moments she luckily softenend her face and said "No worries!" with this soft singing australian voice, took the dirty parts and cleaned them up herself in the special sterilized area.

Airports are clean everywhere, but when we went outside, we felt the tidiness on every tree, house and street. We cycled on black smooth new streets along plenty of empty parks and spacious areas behind high metal fences, probably the living areas. The city centre had the same wide openess, calmnss and artificial cleanliness. It felt like a sunday afternoon in Europe, but it was actually a thursday morning with all shops open.

We stayed with a hospitable couple who liked to show us the australian way of life and for example told us, that Darwin once was a so-called drophead city. During the time of settlers and pioneers and even later, Darwin was far off the rest of Autralia and many gangster and looser of the society found shelter here, because the police wasn't informed about the rest of the country.

Actually, Darwin got a fully sealed road connection from Adelaide in the south as late as 1987 and a complete rail connection just 2004. That's probably, why it still fells a bit far of everything and we often felt like seeing dropheads in the third generation and other interesting people.

Like the "bushies", men who live and work in the outback, easy to recognize by the short shorts, a dirty shirt and dusty boots, a crocodile dundee hat a dirty white pickup trucks and their habit to put the word "mate" at least at the end of every second sentence. Alright, this was cliche, but often true. Other interesting poeple were the tourists, which loaded all kinds of rented cars, jeeps and caravans full with instant food for long outbacktrips. Aborigines in all kinds of conditions from totally deformed by alcohol to normal people people just wearing no shoes but therefor colourful dresses or even a business suit walked around, so did white skinny pale women with leggings, fat people in all ages and huge bearish bold men with long beards and wild tattoos. And whoever we talked to, they were all kind and helpful.

As the other tourists did, we bought awfully lot of food for the trip right through the centre. But due to limited storage facilities we had to think and pack extremely well organized. We were glad when the food for 7 days fitted in and didn't imagine, that we would store food for 14 days later on easily.

The bicycles were extremely heavy. The weight of food and water made us worry about Mareikes backwheel, which we had to buy in thailand after the crash. But as we tried to get some spare parts in Darwin, we got to know that it costs about triple of the european price here or they didn't even had everything on store and would need to fly it in from Sydney. We forgot about it and just hoped everything would be fine.

After a couple of days with lots of friendly and helpful people around us, we started our real Australia experience: nature! We choose a detour through the Kakadu National Park. The first day, the first animal: a kangaroo. It watched us and we watched it standing in the high golden grass, the arms angled until it got bored by us and jumped away slowly. It was exactly as great as expected. We could hardly stop ourselves from jumping up and down ourselves.

The next days we saw even more animals. Dingos, wild horses, cockatoos and eagles in wild nature and impressive saltwater crocodiles on a farm. The animals outside were rare and shy, but they were there in the forests with bushes and small eucalyptus trees. Small probably because the area gets frequently burnt down. We saw many areas were bushfires had been months or just weeks ago. We asked around and found out, that still Aborigines burn the bushland down, due to tradition or boredom. The life of the aboriginals is a main topic up here. White australians mostly talked respectful and understanding about "their black people", but the behaviour in the streets spoke a different language. Whites ignored the indigenous people and the indigenous people ignored the whites. We were warned to talk or even to look at the Aboriginals, and because of their specially formed faces they didn't look friendly in the first moment, but after months of training not to be frightened by the unknown, we dared and spoke to one of the young men hanging around at the supermarket. His name was Simon, he had a fluent australian english, wore an Eminem- shirt, baggy pants, had black skin and a strong view out of his deep laying eyes. He told us about living in the Aboriginal community, that they still live traditional life, don't wear shoes and even not the rap fashion and that they have TV and soundsystem at home. He had the same contentment like the other Australians, but was it all real? It can't be everything alright if he and his friends hang around at the supermarket day by day. But it's a difficult topic and we are not enough into it to give a statement.

We went on and met more great people. Two bavarians, who survived tropical camping without shower and mosquitonet directly beside the "Beware of crocoldiles" sign, shared their evening and their beer with us. We learned a lot about effective travelling. 7 weeks around Australia and New Zealand with hiking, canoeing, sandboarding, diving, cangaroo cooking and lots more. That's powerful. The next morning we said "See ya, mates!" like the Australians do. It made sense, we met them later on 3 more times.

Kind of the same happened with to northern german sunseekers who told us about working on a mangofarm near a town called Katherine. We went there for work and some workmates had already heard about us by the bavarians and lived at the same backpackers hostel as the to sunseekers, which we met again and again as well.

The work was quite good, the money even better and fruit picking seems to be an effective and usual way to earn money. When we arrived at the mango camp in the middle of the fields a huge group of mostly german and canadian backpackers hang around, chatting, flirting, drinking, partying. At the beginning it was too much for us. We missed the peace of nature, the absolute calmness when sleeping outside and watching the starlight night without artificial light around.

But after a while we were no misfits any more, enjoyed even the half-hour-daily romantic moonlight talks of a canadian couple which didn't see us sleeping outside, we had fun with our team and the harvester machine which goes to the left when you directed to the right and other way round.

After 8 days it was enough and the harvest nearly done. We said "See ya" to the workmates and to our always smiling boss and left to the south.