Gabriele Steindl: Professional Kitesurfer & Freelance Writer - Action, Lifestyle & Travels

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Australien – Part 1

Australia .. already since ages on my ’wish-kite-trip-in-spe-list’, over the wintermonths 2007/08 my dream should come true…

The plan was as follows: departure from Vienna with British Airways to London connecting with Qantas to Singapore and further to Perth, West Australia where European winter supposedly is the best for consistent winds and fat swell! Yeah, how exciting!! Just shortly before my departure, I received a phone call of my loyal travel agent Roli of www.tobistravel.at with a horror-message: British Airways had changed their luggage policy from one day to the next and as with immediate effect, won’t transport anymore surf-equipment .. AT ALL, no routes, no exceptions. Honestly, I think the people in the head office must have been smoking crack when coming up with this idea, there is hundred thousands of surfers of all kinds in the UK and a decision like that is a shot-in-the-own-foot (if not heart). Hehehehe, Virgin Atlantic immediately acted and made their statement: free transport of surf-stuff on all of their routes! Me in any case, I felt a little sick when I got those bad news. I just had received my brandnew waveboard of North, the Rocketfish 5’9’’ 2008, for sure the sweetest of its kind in 2008, and kind-a-main-reason for my trip to OZ as I wanted to shred fat waves along many thousand kilometres that I intended travelling….

Not with Kitegabi – I will spare you a protocol of the discussion with the staff from BA – and I boarded the plane in Vienna together with 2 monster-quiverbags (each about 40kg).

30 hours later, a huge amount of disgusting plane-food and a dozen of started-but-never-finished-movies later, I finally set foot on the 5th continent. It was 3am in the morning and I was totally spaced out, feeling like a zombie … longhaul travel in economy is serious torture, isn’t it!? Happily exhausted with tiny red eyes, I waited at the outsized-luggage counter … what never arrived: my bags, neither of them. Qantas had no explanation or information as to where or why the bags didn’t make it but reassured me to deliver the stuff asap to the backpackers that I had chosen as home for the first couple of days in Perth.

Crazy start to one of the best trips in my life … this is only part one and a brief introduction to my trip.