As you may or may not already know, I came home a little early.
A couple days of surfing in chilly/rainy Byron Bay was enough to learn and enough to want to surf more, but I was ready to come home.
All it took was a 12-hour overnight bus, 24 hours in Sydney, and […]
Surf’s up. I surfed today for the first time. Sweeeeeeeet! I took a lesson with Black Dog surfing, which was funny because I was wearing my Black Dog shirt from MV.
Anyway, the feeling of catching a wave on your own (albeit an already-foaming wave, on a 9-foot foam board) is pretty […]
Now the trip is really flying. The last two days, I’ve been on Fraser Island, just a few hours north of Brisbane. I’ve seen a shipwreck from 1935, whales migrating north for the winter, a couple of dingoes, some scary-looking spiders, beautiful lakes, sand dunes, and lots of people trying to drive 4×4s […]
I’m so relaxed right now you might think I were drugged or something. Not so. I’m just back from 70 hours on a tallship, the 19m “Alexander Stewart”.
I couldn’t really begin to explain my state of mind right now, but I will try. You know the movie Office Space, right after they visit the hypnotherapist? […]
Time for a quick update. After a very long day of buses and such, I am now in Airlie Beach. I went diving in Port Douglas on Wednesday and met several people from Port O’ Call (the only backpackers’ with free transport to/from Cairns). We went out for seafood; it was probably […]
Cairns isn’t a very nice place. Yesterday was pretty awful all around– it will suffice to say that service in Australia usually isn’t quite what it is in the States, but in Cairns it suffers incredibly from temporary workers servicing backpackers. Probably a maddening experience, but still not worth being explicitly rude for […]
Smart move to ditch “the Port,” as locals call it. I was definitely getting itchy feet, and it really had nothing to do with the shower floor in room 8 at the Parrotfish. (Just as an aside, the water shortage going on in Sydney is definitely NOT a problem here– the showers at […]
I should have just paid the money for DHL. At least the woman at the Post Office here is really nice. Things to note: a) “next day” express only applies between capital cities. b) registered mail with insurance can only be sent slowly. c) slowly means 8 days from melbourne to […]