this blog is now probably about nine weeks of lurking australia

my nomadic desires are battling my financial planning. i am really really tempted to have a bit of a cruise of the west coast before coming home. i'm not sure if i've mentioned but caroline and i are now tour addicts. we love them. the painful bus music, the awkward people who loiter around you while you cut up the onions. the irritating ones who refuse to even rinse their bloody tea cups. we're hooked. and there is this 21 day tour across the west coast. it will make me outrageously in debt to the commonwealth bank, take just under three weeks of uni off me and it is incredibly cool to pay for a tour in your own country, and yet, temptation is getting me.

We're in Airlie Beach at the moment, arrived in the afternoon yesterday and we're leaving just before lunchtime tomorrow. almost everyone here is going on sailing tours but we decided against, mostly because i've done a couple of family sailing trips up here already and also because apparently you dont even really sail. not too sure if cazz wanted to because i think i just assumed we wouldnt but she doesnt seem too upset.

tomorrow we are headed to rockhampton, getting there at night before setting off on our farm stay the morning after for three days. cazz and i are stupidly excited. we're quad biking around a cattle farm, we actually have no idea what we will actually be doing but we're looking forward to it alot. lucky i have my beautiful akubra so i can be cattle farm chic.

magnetic island was strange. they had just had a half moon party a couple of days before. we were there for tuesday and every tuesday they play bingo. we nearly won the first round which had a prize of a free jug, we only needed one number. the third round prize was a double room in stead of a dorm and the fourth round was like $200. naturally the game was very tense. we were sitting by the beach complaining about the trance music being played at 11pm when an awkward english boy who was 18 took a liking to cazz, trying to impress her with him music knowledge, she destroyed him with hers, his was notably underwhelming, then we went to bed thinking we would be first... but turns out our whole dorm was asleep already,.

In Airlie we;ve met up with Lewys, the welsh boy we met in port douglas snorkeling. he is staying in the same hostel as us and might even end up being on our bus tomorrow. he isnt coming to the farm though, i think he is off to fraser island next.
Apparently welsh girls don't drink beer so lewys was impressed with our efforts and subsequently, we've decided to be adored in wales.




















In Airlie they stop doing jugs after midnight so after moving from bar to bar and even spent a while in the irish pub listening to bad live music and watching a drunk girl trying to seduce the singer we went for a walk that culminated in tree climbing and playing at the park and ultimately mcdonalds.I know this is against dorm etiquette but i couldn't resist this morning snapping a photo of the pantless annoying girl who came home in the wee hours and woke everyone up...

second part of our adventure, north queensland

No photos today either. we're at magnetic island and the internet is stupidly slow so i;m going to save my global gossip money for airlie so all my dedicated readers will just have to wait. i know this is killing you.

After a tiring day of snorkeling cazza and i had an early night in preparation for all sorts of inquisicazzing on our way up to cape tribulation. we felt very uncool because our dormfriends were ridiculously cool and had been out until 4 in the morning the night before and were going out again. the girl was all ruby rose before she went all industry and the boy was this skinny nordic babe who even ironed his shirt.

our day was odd from the start. we thought we lost our whole group and that they had gone with out us because we went to this koala talk first and cazz and i decided to sit that one out, choosing coffee instead. so we wrote in our journals and figured out how much m0ney we owed each other (we have been scrupulous) when we looked up everyone was gone. we found them (sort of wish we hadnt, they were all a bit dull and our guide was a creepo.) That guy bellow took us on a crocodile hunt, that's fat albert in the background. he rules this massive area fighting crocodiles who wander over into his land, although the babes are allowed to stay for reproductive purposes.


cape trib was really beautiful but it rained almost teh whole time cazz and i were there. our hostel was a million miles from anything and we forgot cheese. this was detrimental because we were set on not buying our meals there because it was expensive, we ended up buying snacks as well as unlimited tea and coffee but we cooked our own dinner. we made tuna pasta, it was lacking without the cheese and caroline was very upset.

we spent literally our whole day in cape trib imagining up the plot for our film on the gray nomads (a slight obsession) the night we stayed it poured down and we both had crazy dreams. caroline was a zombie killer using all sorts of bizarre weapons to protect her people in her dreams while my imagination ruined the romantic plot of a dream by killing off all the characters and changing everyone's races.

after cape trib we went back down to cairns to have three nights of free accommodation on dad's boat. when we first got there the toilets were all blocked up and disgusting and we couldnt get the gas working properly so it took us hours to boil water, we didnt eat until like 11.30. caroline was frustrated that we didnt just buy food but i was on a mission. then we got locked out of the yacht club because our passes expired, pier master joel seemed high and made us wait ageeees to let us in while he ate his dinner. here i am showing cazz that it is possible to jump on to the boat if you have mad boating skills.


the next day we failed at everything we had wanted to do, sleeping in too late for the markets. in the end we spent the day reading books and eating pasta. clare came over that night for dinner and drinks and then mum dad bella her friend naomi and the dogs all arrived. they were quite the entourage but i neednt have worried about them terrifying clare, she could handle her own with ma crazy family.

yesterday was our last day in cairns and my only day with the fam. cazz and i took bell and naomi to the markets which stressful. we missed the 11.30 bus and then nearly missed the 1.30 bus. we had to run to chase it but then cazz was running her little heart out and bell and i couldnt contol ourselves, we had to stop and laugh,. cazz was not impressed but dont worry, we made it.

i'm now the proud owner of an akubra, caroline and bella cant get enough of teasing me but i am wearing it loud and proud. after that we went out of dinner, the family plus cazz and naomi. cazz and i ate until we couldnt move knowing we wouldnt get a feed like that for weeks.

then we saw clare off, she was getting a midnight bus to airlie.this morning cazz and i were up at 6 and getting on to the greyhound bus to townsville. that took 5 hours but it was ok, my ipod was flat but cazz lent me hers and i listened to hamish and andy for hours. this is the town we stopped off in for lunch.
at townsville, we waited an hour for a ferry and now we are in magnetic island. it's really beautiful and our hostel is surprisingly great. its tightarse tuesday so chances are we wont be feeling our best on the bus down to airlie tomorrow morning.

as soon as we got here we went and read our books on the beach. it wasnt until we left teh beach as the sun started going down that we noticed the crocodile signs. silly melbourne girls.

cazz is telling me to get googling, we havent really thought about where we are stopping off on our way down the east coast. 'i'm not your tour guide', she says.

salty sea water and spicy cooking

there are absolutly no photos for this post, which i find disrtessing. today caroline and i went snorkelling in the great barrier reef. i wasn't looking forward to it much because i always get so much water in my snorkel and end up drinking litres of it and burning my eyes with it.
however, today was brilliant. we saw a whale, it literally swam a meterorsounderneath us, it was man size, seriously. we also saw turtles and some other people got to see a reef shark.
we also met a lovely welsh boy called lewys (welsh spelling apparently) who we're going to see again for a drink at airlie beach.we took lots of underwater photos but theyre all on film so we dont get to seethem for a while.

oh, and some betches on the boat had our camera while we thought we had lost it... this silly family had the same one as us and had packed it away in their stuff.. luckily they found it at the last minute after cazz and i shrilled all about the boat making lewys help us go through the piles of flippers and snorkells.

off to cape trib tomorrow morning. we also planned this farm stay tonight so we have lots to look forward to at the moment. cazz is downstairs in teh kitchen starting out curry (thai green) i'm going to ahve to go and help or i will starve. the cooking is at a very high standard at this hostel so we are stepping up to compete.

a round about morning

safely in port douglas. nearly missed our flight on account of still being out drinking and dancing on tables twenty minutes before we were supposed to get in our taxi, packs werent packed and there was lots of bickering between my husband and me in the halls of our last hostel, the youth shack. some angry sleeper yelled at us on our way out.

so we were at that awful backpacker bar again and once again it was a brilliant night. teh dancing was a bit more pg rated but this time caroline joined in on the games and won! her clair and kenny and another boy had to take their clothes off and make the longest line possible with them. this is the moment cazza and claire found out that they had won, it was a great moment for the team! caroline was well and truely converted to the embarrassing games.

claire had previously played some lap dancing game and got extra free champagne for her efforts (ladies night, oh so cringe but oh so fun)

the photo on the left is of diane who was with us in kakadu, and marika who was with us from alice to darwin. two of our faves. bellow that is kenny and claire who were also with us from alice to darwin.

it was an awful moment when someone asked me to check my watch and we realised that we could hardly walk and that we had twenty mintues to run to our hostel, pack and then run to where we were meeting the taxi, there were seperate hostels. caroline and i were a sight for sore eyes trying to run through the streets of darwin with all sorts of things draped over our arms and around our necks with flailing backpacks and still in our party dresses, luckily when we got to claire she was as disgraceful as us.

vivienne had told claire that drunk people werent allowed to board aeroplanes and then the line got diverted in front of us, we had one of those blue queue security barrier things, you know what i mean. we were convinced that they werent letting us on. eventually caroline took the barrier down and we marched on through and no one stopped us. we were not at our most ladylike in the line.

and yet it was probably even worst waiting in the loungey bit. caroline went and 'borrowed' a book from the shop opposite and sat there reading.

then claire told us that borders had shut in the UK and we had a bit of a moment of silence, feeling sad that the happy place for lovers of books was no more.

As soon as the plane took off we were all down and out. literally droolling all over the people sitting next to us. we were in three seperate rows, all in the middle seat.

it was sad once we arrived, not only did we have to hand back our very cool boarding passes but we also had to say goodbye to claire, although we do have plans to see her in cairns for a night in a couple of days.

the bus to port douglas was hell, even cazz with her stomach of steele got carsick on the bus, going through the hundreds and hundreds of roundabouts between cairns airport and port douglas. so now we are here, in the best hostel so far, stobes would love it here, they're her people, half the hostel is dorms and the other half is converted vans and tents with proper beds. we slept all day and now we're going to attempt to cook without throwing up in the saucepans,.

sleep deprived traversing the never never

T Minus 14 until the internet cafe shuts. In Darwin at the moment, leaving to cairns at 3am tomorrow. i'm getting very behind on my blog as i knew i would. but this is an attempt to catch up a little bit. So the last post was from our last night in Alice Springs. Since then we have endured a hellish bus trip of 13 girls and 1 boy. the girls insisted on playing bloody pink and briget jones soundtrack the whole way, for those not in the know that's 1500 kilometers.

Although the music was awful there were some lovely people on the bus. that photo is of geoff, viv is the girl on the left in the acubra, then its marika, cazz is standing in front of racheal, and steph is looking all mysterious on the right.

Geoff was our tour guide, he was a quirky character. On the second night he enjoyed telling us backpacker murder stories. it was scary around the fire sleeping in tents with massive road trains speeding by 100 meters away, theyre so loud. we got to meet some road train drivers and they told us about the kangaroo and cow they had hit the night before. The roo had broken into millions of pieces but the cow had gone under and damaged the bottom of the road train. then one of the drivers tried to seduce a lovely german girl marika into hitch hiking the rest of the way with him, promising all sorts of adventures. It was fun being with a massive group of girls for moments such as these, sunbaking in literally the middle of no where, somewhere of the stuart highway, taking out mattresses off our camp beds.

We stopped of at the daly waters pub, teh oldest one off teh stuart highway which is the highway that covers similar ground to stuart on his trip from adelaide to darwin. you leave a gold coin donation for the flying doctors and get to leave something in the pub, cazz and i left business cards and i left the picture of chris i had in my wallet.

In Katherine gorge we did this boat cruise thing, it wasnt great and the guy that took us didnt speak clearly but it was beautiful. normally we would have gone in the canoes but because of the late wet season we werent allowed to because of the sneaky crocs. it's actually annoying the photos i have that i can use for this blog as we are using three cameras and cazz didnt bring her cord and the other one is disposable but whatevs, these will have to do.

This is eidith falls, the last place we stopped before darwin, the water was so nice and chilly. the day before this we went to mararanka springs which was full of old people and hilarious but this was much much nicer.

so we have well and truely experienced the gray nomads in their natural habitat. there were so many caravans. it was hilarious sharing a hot spring with them. there was 15 of us and like 40 of them. all wrinkly, even us from the water. caroline and i are now planning a film script about the gray nomads. it will be speccy as our latest tour guide, mark likes to say in place of spectacular... i think it is an adelaide thing.

so with mark's tour around kakadu we were not going to leave music to chance. we demanded to sit up the front and told him about how awful the last three days of music has been, i think we scared him until he realised we liked similar music to him. it was great sitting up the top of the truck. it was a proper truck converted into a sort of bus for 4wding. we got to go though rivers a meterish deep also.

i'm going to add photos to this post once i get to cairns or maybe even a bit later because i now have 4 minutes to finish. i stupidly bought three hours of internet when there was 20 minutes left before closing and this place is only in darwin...

cazz and i are doing washing at the moment also, this is vital as we are totally out of clothes that dont smell like something died in them. seriously.

our last tour guide mark was really lovely and put up with all of our questions. cazz was particularly impressed that he asked questions back. he is 23 and used to be a school camp leader. he told us about sneaky 15 year olds trying to seduce him....

kakadu was really great, on the way we went to this traditional (well its open to the public so not toatlly traditional) aboriginal camp. we were shown interesting plants in the area, we were welcomed to kakadu by having a man spit water on our foreheads (i had to go first cause no one else would) we leanrt about the weaving and how to make a didgeredoo. cazz and i enjoyed this more than the other people we were with, they were this big group of sulky germans, luckily there were also three swiss and they were great.

we also went to this great site for aboriginal drawings, some being thousands and thousands of years old. we also climbed to this lookout which was out of control, kakadu is massive, like as big as some small european countries. the next day we went to these rockpools were cazz smashed her legs up sliding around.

ok, time out.

take me to heart attack hill

So I threw up last night from excessive beer consumption, as we all no, my stomach of steel only allows this sort of behaviour once every two or so years. Sad to have missed dear public bar yet again I think caroline and i made up for a couple of weeks last night.

Two days ago we got up at 4 30 am to make a 5am bus. We did a one night tour to kings canyon (amaaaaaazing) uluru and kata tjuta. There were fourteen of us on the bus plus our guide with dreadlocks. We drove through the town at the center of australia which was a strange feeling, being that far away from any ocean.

We went to kings canyon first and climbed heart attack hill, a freaking million rocky steps. we loved it, saaa beautiful. This is cazz preparing for the daunting climb ahead..

The few from the top was breathtaking, honestly did not want to leave. the colours were so so vivid. the reds and the blue sky and the green thanks to recent rain. This photo really doesn't do it justice but uploading is painfully slow so i cant handle uploading a larger one.

After Kings Canyon we drove to our campsite, which thankfully had an outdoor kitchen and proper bathrooms with warmish showers. There were permanent tents and there was a fire place. We also went to a lookout the see the sunset and uluru.. we were pretty far away and the sun was setting behind us when we looked at uluru so we went back to the campsite because caroline was eager to start the fire. We had a feast of kangaroo meat and camel sausages... turns out there is something like a million wild camels in central australia. they were yummy. We went to bed early because we were getting up at 5.30 to see sunrise at uluru. There was the option of sleeping in a swag under the stars or sleeping in the tents. Stringer, our guide suggested the swags would actually be warmer so we decided to do that. It was bloody freezing!!! Although lovely sleeping under the stars. The sleeping bags were awful and apparently theyre summer sleeping bags. it was 0 degreesish so it was hell. i didnt fall asleep until stringer got up (about half an hour before we were meant to get up) to prepare stuff for us. Hahah this is cazz in her swag.

So uluru is out of control. Like out of control massive. we'd both seen billions of photos of it but it doesnt capture the magnitude of this massive rock chilling out in a flat desert. its something like 9.4 kilometers around the base of uluru and we had two hours to walk it. no one in our group decided to climb it. which i was glad about.

Those are two of the girls on our bus, German Lisa and Danish Louise.

after uluru we went to kata tjuta, where the sacred men's business takes place.We're allowed to walk through the middle though. you feel so so small and insignificant as the natural environment is so overwhelming.The whole time caroline and i kept saying to each other, every australian should come here. and see this. it's so frustrating how small these photos make it seem.

On the way home (roughly 500km) we drove past the underwear tree which was the highlights of the bus ride. Apparently it had started a couple of weeks ago with a pair or two and was not covered in peoples dirty knickers, so of course caroline and i had to leave ours there. The cars that drove past beeped at us and congratulated our efforts.

We got back just after 6 last night. then went out with the younger people from the group and our guide for $5 dinner at another backpackers and drank far too much beer. Cazz and i ended up staying at the trashed tour guide mansion (used to be a brothel apparently, lots of small rooms) this morning has been an epic struggle. in the supermarket i had to rest in the pasta isle, everyone should try using pasta as a pillow, very effective. so we're back at our hostel (a different one from the first few nights as this one is free with the tour we did...) there are some lovely irish and english boys in our dorm, one shaved his head while we were resting in my bunk... we watched from above being creepy as per usual. but they dont seem scared of us...yet. i was being a paparazzo and caroline told me it was inproper however, here they are.

Delayed Arrival in Alice Springs

In the tv/internet room at alice lodge, it's free which is nice. This computer doesn't do that red squiggly line for spelling and typos so apologies in advance. Caroline is sitting outside in the sun on a swinning chair thing doing her puzzles in the book she bought yesterday at the airport.
Bloody Tiger got us here two and a half hours late which was hell.

By the time we got here almost all the restaurants were closed but we managed to find pizza thank goodness. A very odd man at a pub told us he would takke us all home and cook us a dinner(their kitchen was closed already). we laughed awkwardly and startde to walk away, a female patron called us back to make sure we knew he wasn't joking.

We've met some nice people already and lots of strange ones. Caroline thoyght one of the boys was lacking in teeth but we arent sure now. At the hostel we sat around the fire drinking beers and ended up in a bizarre argumet with a boy obsessed with bears underground in bern, switzerland. it was six of us against him, he said teh bears were underground because they were in teh ground but we were trying to say that to be underground there has to be ground above you and that these bears are just in ditches. It went on for over two hours. Eventually cazz and i went to bed, very little sleep on friday night after a seedy night at revolver. my four hours sleep was well below what i require to function and this argument was killing me.

Tomorrow we have to get up at 5am to start our tour. we're off to uluru which should be fun. ALice Springs is actually fascinating, we had been worried that we have too much time here but so far i'm really enjoyng it. Very very different to melbourne (bayside in particular!)

Went to teh market that was on today, it's once a fortnight apparently so that was lucky. Having a bbq tonight and cheap red wine for around the fire. We're off to the supermarket to stck up for snacks (you know how i feel about midnight snacks!)

Further updates soon x