Dear Paedobear,
Well after our recent chat Im sure youd be proud of me. Its been two days and so far I havent slept alone in my stay in UB. It seems I've continued my incredible celibate bed hopping skills from Oz. I should be an international sensation.
I didnt land till midnight and when we finally pulled into the only person at the house was a teenage Mongolian girl who had prepared everything for my arrival. I was supposed to be staying wth her mother but because of my unexpected plane change she was on business in Korea. This was all fine until the guide who dropped me off left and we became alarmingly aware that neither of us speak each others language. Thank god for my charades practice (finely honed at Jess' house at Christmas- ask her about Dr Yarmulke and Man Thumb).
Even so, once we'd covered the basics; point at self and say Elizabeth, mime sleeping and look questioning, she rubs her stomach [No guys, she wasnt asking if I was pregnant but thanks for the faith] and I shake my head etc, it gets remarkably difficult to hold a conversation. Her name is Ariuka, she's 16 and still at school, helping her mum out at her clothing store at the weekends. I found this out in a manner of charades and with the help of a English-Mongolian phrasebook which had been printed in what must have been the 1960s- it considered where to buy men's cologne in a department store a fairly crucial piece of information evidently. I turned out that her elder brother Azaa was studying software in Bangalore but had spent several years learning English so she got hold of him on MSN and we spent a surreal hour trying to establish simple things like when we would wake up in the morning and whether I'd want breakfast and dinner. This was broken up intermittently by by exclamations of how beautiful I was followed shortly by a description of her beautiful brother. This is somewhat distressing. Updates shall follow.
By about 2am her brother called the shots and told us both to go to bed. Nice to see the control he had from across the continent. I pointed at myself and the bed and her and the bed and mimed out where we were going to sleep. I think somethings must have got lost in translation because, preparing as I was to sleep, she jumped in the bed next to me. Needless to say, it had been a while since a strange girl had hopped in my bed so I was somewhat thrown. But hey, go figure, its what they call immersion right? Nothing more integrating than a little cuddle. (I have now been informed that no, this is not the norm and I do actually get a room. The handbook had warned that Mongolians were very shy, conservative and withdrawn though friendly. I think it may need updating)
Their house is lovely- its absurdly clean and neat so much t\so that I find myself folding and ordering my clothes and making my bed in the mornings. I cant promise this will continue back home, so Duffyneed not fear hell be out of a job. Especially after the squalor we lived in in the Fish house with questionable hygiene, dodgy food-poisoning inducing meals, Roland the rat, Colin and his cockraoach family and the trail of ants who had made our kitchen counter their personal M1 and endless bottles, boxes, cans, glasses, mugs and tupperwares of ethanol-esque alcohol, it feels like I've returned to civilsation. Ironic, eh?
Not just civilsation but home- several of the other volunteers (older than me by a stretch of a few years) have never lived away from home (its more common in Oz where they dont live on campus at uni) so i dont think they appreciate how nice it is but my host family (Ariuka's mum Narya came home yesterday) are excessively kind about food. Eggs and thick, hard bread and long Frankfurter like sausages (oh grow up!) for breakfast, a stew called hosh or hoff of cabages, potatoes, mutton and rice and cake like cookies to have with tea- if I was a yeti when I left Sydney Ill be a veritable BFG when I get home.
Yesterday my guide, Zuula, showed me around UB which largely consisted in a walk from the house to the Projects Abroad office down the very long Peace Av. (apparently th equivalent of Oxford St not that youd have thought it) to see the State Department Store (set up in 1921 as the first Department Store in Mongolia but somewhat hindered by the Communist era), Sukhbaatar Square with its government building (UB's Whitehouse. I'm sure Barack would say the same) and toweing statue of Genghis Khan. We changed my money along the way into one of the most ridiculous currencies I've ever seen- 1 pound is roughly 2,200 tigruk so I walked out with a wad of cash big enough to use as a pillow.
Having come straight from Hong Kong one of the first things I noticed was the lack of people on the streets. I had briefly considered running before dusk in HK (I know, you can tell Ems and Jack and they can laugh) until the logistics hit home and I realised I'd spent most of my time jogging on one spot the streets are so congested. Everything in HK is pint sized- the tiny people have tiny clothes (the size Christine could fit in after her NYE corset...) and tiny shops so small they dont have fitting rooms. I feldt like I'd done a Gulliver and landed in Lilliput. Here though the streets are empty, even by London standards, are pockmarked with manholes, piles of bricks and rubble and half built walls and scaffolding. The driving is mental- I had thought Paris was bad but here, as one of the other volunteers said, they dont slow down they even do a 'cheeky' speed up. I dont know whether theyr playing Hit The Westerner, but they seem to be doing a very good job of it. I may have to rethink my traffic strategy- its too much paperwork for them to hit me- which I employed back home much to Eliot's fear.
I managed to disappear last night by meeting up with the other volunteers for drinks (an Irish pub if you remember the last one we went to back in those heady days in Paris) which turned into several drinks as we moved onto Xanadu Art Gallery. There were few things more surreal than standing in an art gallery drinking Chinggis (the local beer) as a room full of ex-pats sang along to Mr Brightside played on the acoustic guitar by a somewhat destroyed Australian. A little later, when it was my round, the Australian volunteer next to me expressed (for the umpteenth time) his burning desire for vodka shots. Which led of course to the purchase of a bottle of Borol and 5 glasses. The whole bottle was gone within minutes and it didnt take much to for the devils on my shoulder to conclude that clubbing was the next step forward. I think it was at this point that the girl opposite asked how long I'd been in Mongolia: under 24 hours.
In an attempt not to wake up my very kind host family at 3:30am, it was generally decided that staying at a friends house was preferable which is where I woke up this morning for a crisp winter walk back to the house aong Peace Av. When Narya saw me, far from being annoyed, she cooked me breakfast (eggs and sausages and bread again. The pregnancy comment might not be far off), sent me to shower and bed and cooked me lunch to heat up when I woke up. I just found myself a Mongolian mum.
Anyway babes, I should start getting ready- Im meeting the other volunteers for dinner in a couple of hours. Bed lottery anyone?
Miss you like a bird misses humming
Much love your mistress, conscience and spiritual guide xxx
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Friday, April 29, 2011
...the tough shop, get massages, eat dumplings and go clubbing
Cher Adrien,
Oh Im so glad youve been enjoying my various travels, misdemeanours and pickles. The latest set, naturally, crown the scarecrow king but I like to feel I've been working up to them in the last 18 years.
I left Oz with very little trouble, not even a hangover because it happened to be Good Friday the night before I left and everything from bottle shops, bars and clubs closed at ten. I even managed to go the whole journey unscathed as one of the boys on the sailing trip was catching a flight 15 minutes before me from the same terminal. So he carried my bags, filled in my immigration form, took me to excess baggage and retrieved my laptop when I almost left it at security. I think I've managed to prove the exception to the rule that Gap years mature, develop and hone a person's perception of the world. I may even have gotten worse.
This of course would be proven by my entire stay in HK- my entire family met me at the HK airport (though the boys looked slightly shifty at this unnaturally familial event) and I wasnt really let loose for a while. Probably a good thing because every time I was I managed to lose something- there went two pairs of sunglasses and my Octopus card (like an Oyster card but can also be used to buy things in shops. which is frankly incedible and I think is catching on in England. I kept using it to buy lemon tea and mango juice which I was getting strangely addicted to after my withdrawal symptons from Bundaberg Ginger Beer in Oz.) The best family moment that we may ever have had was in a restaurant one night where we decided that it wasnt enough to order a few dishes but 19 would be enough between the five of us. The look on the waiters' faces when we just kept adding more was priceless, but it hurt too much to laugh. We all felt physically ill afterwards. My mother was horrified.
The Visa complications (which to my credit I discovered rather than anyone else although feel free to point out that I discovered this three days before my flight on Easter Sunday when no courier services were working rather a couple of months before) that I could enter Mongolia as an American citizen but not as a British citizen (unless I had jumped through several hoops and/or reentered Mongolia after a weekend trip to Beijing at some point) led to the fantastic sequence of events bringing my Yankee passport here. The Mongolian embassy in HK, unknown to Mongolia, had shut down. Awkward you might say. We had brought a map in case the taxi driver couldnt find the embassy though ironically his taxi skills would have been impressive if he had found it. We might, however, have ended up in China. Thus Duffy (angel that he is) brought it from the house to Heathrow and stood next to terminal five so that a guy could pick it up. He left it with the concierge in a hotel in Istanbul where the next morning another guy took it to Hong Kong, via Frankfurt. I then picked it up (and as Emily pointed out wearing the kind of clothes that are acceptable on a beach in Oz [no, not a nudist beach you filthy minded boy!] but hardly in an office in HK. Still, another banker found it so hilarious he asked us to dinner to regale his family with 'the drop'. And thus for a space of about 9 hours I had two passports.
On Thursday I got to make another trip to an embassy- checking my cindered passport through security in a tupperware raised some glances but not as much as the woman behind the counter when I explained how it had happened. Then I think she realised no one would make up that story. No one is THAT stupid. Still there was nothing they could do so it became a matter of turning up as early as possible in the airport and going through teh same rigmarole at Immigrations. Again the bemused looks and scarcely repressed giggles as the cover fell off in a pile of ash on the counter adn when they tried to stamp it it crinkled and fell apart. The tupperware is getting fuller by the trip.
Things were also impeded as we tried to explain that although my dad is a HK resident and I had entered on an English passport and left on an American one I was not travelling to London but UB and then Beijing. Oh and my dad was flying to China. Immigration's worst nightmare? Trust me, therell be somehing spectacular on the way back to england!
Anyhow, thats my drastic fantastic story of woe and idiocy . Otherwise HK was great- I had to spend most of my time shopping for clothes as I discovered that I was expected to look 'professional' for certain events in UB. This required clothing that covered shoulders, knees and midriff. Needless to say, my wardrobe contains very little in that brief. I was also simultaneously packing for a Mongolian winter/spring/summer and gear which would be suitable for sheep shearing, ger repairing, manure farming and horse riding. A recent yet crucial realisation is how little clothing can be worn in a boardroom and on a camel. Logisitcs ensued.
I shall update asap on Mongolia though I can tell you the people are lovely, the weather is most certainly here (Its getting to that crux where I decided cold outweighs embarrassment and I put on the hat with ears. Im close. Ever so close.) and Im ultra excited about all the mayhem which will doubtless ensue.
Over and out xx
Oh Im so glad youve been enjoying my various travels, misdemeanours and pickles. The latest set, naturally, crown the scarecrow king but I like to feel I've been working up to them in the last 18 years.
I left Oz with very little trouble, not even a hangover because it happened to be Good Friday the night before I left and everything from bottle shops, bars and clubs closed at ten. I even managed to go the whole journey unscathed as one of the boys on the sailing trip was catching a flight 15 minutes before me from the same terminal. So he carried my bags, filled in my immigration form, took me to excess baggage and retrieved my laptop when I almost left it at security. I think I've managed to prove the exception to the rule that Gap years mature, develop and hone a person's perception of the world. I may even have gotten worse.
This of course would be proven by my entire stay in HK- my entire family met me at the HK airport (though the boys looked slightly shifty at this unnaturally familial event) and I wasnt really let loose for a while. Probably a good thing because every time I was I managed to lose something- there went two pairs of sunglasses and my Octopus card (like an Oyster card but can also be used to buy things in shops. which is frankly incedible and I think is catching on in England. I kept using it to buy lemon tea and mango juice which I was getting strangely addicted to after my withdrawal symptons from Bundaberg Ginger Beer in Oz.) The best family moment that we may ever have had was in a restaurant one night where we decided that it wasnt enough to order a few dishes but 19 would be enough between the five of us. The look on the waiters' faces when we just kept adding more was priceless, but it hurt too much to laugh. We all felt physically ill afterwards. My mother was horrified.
The Visa complications (which to my credit I discovered rather than anyone else although feel free to point out that I discovered this three days before my flight on Easter Sunday when no courier services were working rather a couple of months before) that I could enter Mongolia as an American citizen but not as a British citizen (unless I had jumped through several hoops and/or reentered Mongolia after a weekend trip to Beijing at some point) led to the fantastic sequence of events bringing my Yankee passport here. The Mongolian embassy in HK, unknown to Mongolia, had shut down. Awkward you might say. We had brought a map in case the taxi driver couldnt find the embassy though ironically his taxi skills would have been impressive if he had found it. We might, however, have ended up in China. Thus Duffy (angel that he is) brought it from the house to Heathrow and stood next to terminal five so that a guy could pick it up. He left it with the concierge in a hotel in Istanbul where the next morning another guy took it to Hong Kong, via Frankfurt. I then picked it up (and as Emily pointed out wearing the kind of clothes that are acceptable on a beach in Oz [no, not a nudist beach you filthy minded boy!] but hardly in an office in HK. Still, another banker found it so hilarious he asked us to dinner to regale his family with 'the drop'. And thus for a space of about 9 hours I had two passports.
On Thursday I got to make another trip to an embassy- checking my cindered passport through security in a tupperware raised some glances but not as much as the woman behind the counter when I explained how it had happened. Then I think she realised no one would make up that story. No one is THAT stupid. Still there was nothing they could do so it became a matter of turning up as early as possible in the airport and going through teh same rigmarole at Immigrations. Again the bemused looks and scarcely repressed giggles as the cover fell off in a pile of ash on the counter adn when they tried to stamp it it crinkled and fell apart. The tupperware is getting fuller by the trip.
Things were also impeded as we tried to explain that although my dad is a HK resident and I had entered on an English passport and left on an American one I was not travelling to London but UB and then Beijing. Oh and my dad was flying to China. Immigration's worst nightmare? Trust me, therell be somehing spectacular on the way back to england!
Anyhow, thats my drastic fantastic story of woe and idiocy . Otherwise HK was great- I had to spend most of my time shopping for clothes as I discovered that I was expected to look 'professional' for certain events in UB. This required clothing that covered shoulders, knees and midriff. Needless to say, my wardrobe contains very little in that brief. I was also simultaneously packing for a Mongolian winter/spring/summer and gear which would be suitable for sheep shearing, ger repairing, manure farming and horse riding. A recent yet crucial realisation is how little clothing can be worn in a boardroom and on a camel. Logisitcs ensued.
I shall update asap on Mongolia though I can tell you the people are lovely, the weather is most certainly here (Its getting to that crux where I decided cold outweighs embarrassment and I put on the hat with ears. Im close. Ever so close.) and Im ultra excited about all the mayhem which will doubtless ensue.
Over and out xx
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Dearest Duffy love,
Sorry I've been so shocking on the contact front but please believe when I say a postcard is winging its way towards you as we speak. Well. Almost. But I dont think Ill get much internet next month and none at all in June so Skypage is out and facebook will gradually disappear I believe. Sorry dearest, I shall have to try and savour and ration some phone calls..
I will try and excuse myself with the fact that I have been offshore for four of the last five weeks and during that one week onshore the yachtmaster theory was so unnecessarily knackering that I barely had the energy to go clubbing never mind skyping etc.
The sailing has been such a blast- there have been two weeks of offshore training, doing things like boat handling etc and then it all came together in the last two weeks of our mile builder. Of all the sailing that was the most epic- twelve days on a 55 foot yacht with an all female crew and our much enduring skipper.
We were very undermanned (quite literally) which meant that although we had loads of excess space to stretch out in, we had to make do in a boat that usually took around 10 people to crew with half of that. On the upside it was great practice for doing singlehanded reefing and de-reefing or sail hoists and drops and tacks etc, but it meant we had really conservative sail plans and and wouldnt go quire as fast as I would have liked. Speed demon that I am... Especially since we had basically no wind for those two weeks we ended up motoring up and down the east coast- by the end of it we had stopped going into ports and were just traversing around imaginary waypoints which was, quite frankly, soul destroying. After motoring around for 120 hours in what was essentially a glorified water taxi, we had all had enough and threw the towel in as soon as we had covered the necessary miles. Other than that though, the whole trip was spectacular.
Because they were so few of us we worked on watches of two with two hours off/two hours on. Knackering as it was, when there were very few nights of decent sleep, we turned into a floating WI and really looked after each other. Do you remember the skintight shiny black thermals you helped me pack? Im became horribly attached to them to the point of living in them and within days it had got nicknamed my ninja suit. After that we went in a downhill spiral of silliness- Team Ninja all had ninja suits and we came up with a ridiculous ninja laws; referring to each other by ninja names (Captain Ninja, Optimistic, Casual, Scottish and yours truly, Proto), to dolphins as sea monsters, storms as sea dragons etc. Our second law was to never wake someone up off watch without offering them food or drink or sustenance of some kind- it became routine to hear 'Proto, Proto, ten minutes till watches. Would you like tea or coffee? Your cake is on the fridge'. When we told the boys they totally took the piss, but our skipper was mighty glad he'd got our boat. Not to mention there was superb cooking all round- the mark of a good meal was whether it 'sent someone into the bilges' which meant that they were so full they werent capable of standing up and would have to lie down even though this meant they would have their heads on the hygienically questionable and indubitably manky bilges under the floorboards. Of course half of the problem with food was that we ate out of dog bowls (Im not kidding. We decided we had been reduced to the level of animals- sleep, wake up and sail/play, eat until we got sick out of dog bowls and occasionally get fed treats) and then quantities were very difficult to judge. By the seventh day when I was trying to cook Bolognaise in a kitchen where the hobs swung around, the boiling pans were tipping almost vertically and everything moved all the time, including yourself we concluded that no one could call themselves a real chef until they had cooked in a kitchen that moved and tried to make food in dog bowls look appealing. Eat your hearts out Jamie and Gordon!
To get practice as skipper we each had to lead and skipper a passage and whilst most people had fairly uneventful days I managed to take charge on a couple of days where literally everything that could have gone wrong attempted to- the boom broke as we were sailing and about to tack, lobster pots got caught around the keel at 3am and a little while the engine failed whilst we were in so little wind sailing would have been impossible. The most exciting was at 4am one morning my watchmate was on the helm whilst I attempted to bake a cake for the next watch and when I came up on deck she announced we were being chased. The obvious conclusion to this was we were blatantly being chased by pirates so we knocked the engine on and tried to outrun them. Shortly after we realised we were being chased by the Harbourmaster- water police- and sheepishly slowed down to get 'pulled over'. They hadnt appreciated being called pirates at all.
Thus by the end of about 12 days what little sanity and maturity I had arrived with disappeared. The practical jokes had escalated from dropping cookies into the skipper's cabin through a hatch and arranging fruit in amusing shapes on his bunk to hoisting wellies and shorts up the mast by the halyard. Embarrassingly for us when we hoisted his shorts up the backstay like a set of highly unoriginal American teenagers, we hadnt considered how to get down again. Eventually he (with minimal amusement) strapped me into a harness chair and had the others winch me up as I clambered over the boom to grab his shorts with a boathook. Awkwardly as I was halfway up a boat full of teenage girls drifted past to the sight of me halfway up a boat reaching for some shorts as an unamused and immature set of adults below gazed on. It wasnt our finest hour.
Im sorry my dearest to confuse and bore you with all these nautical things. Its been bizarrely my life for the last three months and so jokes like when hoisting the mainsail
'You keep going till you get it up'
'I can't! I've tried and I cant get it up any higher'
'Alright I'll grind if its stiffer than usual'
...somehow arent quite as usual.
miss you like gingers miss ninjas
your mistress xxxxx
Sorry I've been so shocking on the contact front but please believe when I say a postcard is winging its way towards you as we speak. Well. Almost. But I dont think Ill get much internet next month and none at all in June so Skypage is out and facebook will gradually disappear I believe. Sorry dearest, I shall have to try and savour and ration some phone calls..
I will try and excuse myself with the fact that I have been offshore for four of the last five weeks and during that one week onshore the yachtmaster theory was so unnecessarily knackering that I barely had the energy to go clubbing never mind skyping etc.
The sailing has been such a blast- there have been two weeks of offshore training, doing things like boat handling etc and then it all came together in the last two weeks of our mile builder. Of all the sailing that was the most epic- twelve days on a 55 foot yacht with an all female crew and our much enduring skipper.
We were very undermanned (quite literally) which meant that although we had loads of excess space to stretch out in, we had to make do in a boat that usually took around 10 people to crew with half of that. On the upside it was great practice for doing singlehanded reefing and de-reefing or sail hoists and drops and tacks etc, but it meant we had really conservative sail plans and and wouldnt go quire as fast as I would have liked. Speed demon that I am... Especially since we had basically no wind for those two weeks we ended up motoring up and down the east coast- by the end of it we had stopped going into ports and were just traversing around imaginary waypoints which was, quite frankly, soul destroying. After motoring around for 120 hours in what was essentially a glorified water taxi, we had all had enough and threw the towel in as soon as we had covered the necessary miles. Other than that though, the whole trip was spectacular.
Because they were so few of us we worked on watches of two with two hours off/two hours on. Knackering as it was, when there were very few nights of decent sleep, we turned into a floating WI and really looked after each other. Do you remember the skintight shiny black thermals you helped me pack? Im became horribly attached to them to the point of living in them and within days it had got nicknamed my ninja suit. After that we went in a downhill spiral of silliness- Team Ninja all had ninja suits and we came up with a ridiculous ninja laws; referring to each other by ninja names (Captain Ninja, Optimistic, Casual, Scottish and yours truly, Proto), to dolphins as sea monsters, storms as sea dragons etc. Our second law was to never wake someone up off watch without offering them food or drink or sustenance of some kind- it became routine to hear 'Proto, Proto, ten minutes till watches. Would you like tea or coffee? Your cake is on the fridge'. When we told the boys they totally took the piss, but our skipper was mighty glad he'd got our boat. Not to mention there was superb cooking all round- the mark of a good meal was whether it 'sent someone into the bilges' which meant that they were so full they werent capable of standing up and would have to lie down even though this meant they would have their heads on the hygienically questionable and indubitably manky bilges under the floorboards. Of course half of the problem with food was that we ate out of dog bowls (Im not kidding. We decided we had been reduced to the level of animals- sleep, wake up and sail/play, eat until we got sick out of dog bowls and occasionally get fed treats) and then quantities were very difficult to judge. By the seventh day when I was trying to cook Bolognaise in a kitchen where the hobs swung around, the boiling pans were tipping almost vertically and everything moved all the time, including yourself we concluded that no one could call themselves a real chef until they had cooked in a kitchen that moved and tried to make food in dog bowls look appealing. Eat your hearts out Jamie and Gordon!
To get practice as skipper we each had to lead and skipper a passage and whilst most people had fairly uneventful days I managed to take charge on a couple of days where literally everything that could have gone wrong attempted to- the boom broke as we were sailing and about to tack, lobster pots got caught around the keel at 3am and a little while the engine failed whilst we were in so little wind sailing would have been impossible. The most exciting was at 4am one morning my watchmate was on the helm whilst I attempted to bake a cake for the next watch and when I came up on deck she announced we were being chased. The obvious conclusion to this was we were blatantly being chased by pirates so we knocked the engine on and tried to outrun them. Shortly after we realised we were being chased by the Harbourmaster- water police- and sheepishly slowed down to get 'pulled over'. They hadnt appreciated being called pirates at all.
Thus by the end of about 12 days what little sanity and maturity I had arrived with disappeared. The practical jokes had escalated from dropping cookies into the skipper's cabin through a hatch and arranging fruit in amusing shapes on his bunk to hoisting wellies and shorts up the mast by the halyard. Embarrassingly for us when we hoisted his shorts up the backstay like a set of highly unoriginal American teenagers, we hadnt considered how to get down again. Eventually he (with minimal amusement) strapped me into a harness chair and had the others winch me up as I clambered over the boom to grab his shorts with a boathook. Awkwardly as I was halfway up a boat full of teenage girls drifted past to the sight of me halfway up a boat reaching for some shorts as an unamused and immature set of adults below gazed on. It wasnt our finest hour.
Im sorry my dearest to confuse and bore you with all these nautical things. Its been bizarrely my life for the last three months and so jokes like when hoisting the mainsail
'You keep going till you get it up'
'I can't! I've tried and I cant get it up any higher'
'Alright I'll grind if its stiffer than usual'
...somehow arent quite as usual.
miss you like gingers miss ninjas
your mistress xxxxx
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Cause I like Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain...
Dearest daughter Gecca,
Sorry for the horrible delay in writing its all been manic jumping off planes and ferries and yachts and beds. Just kidding, but you get the principle. I last wrote when I was in Lizard Island in the gap in my gap year so Im tapping out at least three letters today whilst I still have internet access before the steppes of Mongolia...
Lizard Island was incredible- it had been so long since I'd dived for pleasure rather than training because everything I was doing in Sydney was for my Divemasters. I spent an entire day being a victim (which was actually faintly amusing as three very built rescue divers spent an afternoon hoiting me onto their shoulders in varying degrees of discomfort. Then I had to try and lift them to a lesser level of success). But here it was all for giggles and everything was brilliant; little reef sharks flitting in and out, clownfish in their anenomes (when you stroke them the tentacle things sting you but the underside is soft like underwater silk) and mermaid holes and caves. There are cods there the size of Jack (one of which I managed to hitchhike. Im just saying, that definitely beats my last hitchhike of two very stoned dudes in a pick up truck.)
What was mental was the fish feeding though- chuck anything over off the back and the Queensland groupers (the size of bull sharks but still basically fish) would barge the reef sharks out of the way and leap 5 foot into the air...
Well now Im a little embarrassed. I just waxed lyrical over fish for a decent sized paragraph. What I should have mentioned were the evenings- I completely took advantage of the bar and went mental making up cocktails. Duffy had given me the idea months ago when he described a bar in Manchester where a bored bartender spent hours making them strawberry cheesecake and Mars bar cocktails. The poor deprived Aussie didnt know Mars bars particularly well but did a wonder with stawberry cheesecake. We then moved on to Terry's Chocolate orange, chocolate tiramisu (garnished with a ferrero Rocher) and eventually "the kind of drink a smurf would have". I thought of you then. It would totally match your skin colour. So that was me making friends with the bartenders of the East coast- I went to Malanda as well (I cant say I'd recommend it. It was tiny. There was a dairy museum and at 9:0 another somewhat bored bartender turned to me to say 'Everyone awake in this town is in this room'. I looked over my shoulder to see 7 dudes playing snooker. Thank god for London.) I did a wine tasting briefly to sell the whole thing as a learning curve to my dad but, as ever, after the fourth glass everyhting starts to taste merely of red or white. Did Wine Society teach me nothing? Fuzzy wouldnt be surprised.
After Lizard Island we had gone back to Cairns and into the jungle to check out some of the incredible waterfalls, which was when we had ended up at Malanda, and spent the car ride trying to avoid bandycoots and possums (which really look like overgrown rats with curly tails and move like rabbits).
I had broken this and my next mini adventure with a weekend back in Manly because it was when half our group was leaving on their respective travels so I absolutely couldnt miss it for the world. I spent those days doing dive training and had been crashing on the couch of a friend cause he lived closer to the dive centre and I was gaining a towering reputation for laziness and finding places to sleep that werent my own bed. Hilariously this was a very different reputation from one of the other girls- it had nothing to do with anything scandalous and more about my ability to sleep on fridges, under stools, three people to a hammock or on a beach. Anyway, when I got back to his house I managed to find three complete strangers and everyone else a little surprised that Id been sleeping on a sofa when our house was only 10 minutes walk up the hill. Awkwards.
But that was Reggae Night and Reggae Night is strictly forbidden from awkwardness so we were out 'jammin' (Jesus Bob Marley needs to be given a rest. [Worst jokes ever: How does Bob Marley like his donuts? Jammin. How does his friends like their donuts? He hopes they like jammin too...)] till some horrible hour of the morning.
I didnt want to get to the end of my trip having spent 3 months living in Manly (a beach suburb of Sydney) and never having seen anywhere else in Oz and so far I had only covered a brief few days in Cairns and the Barrier Reef, discluding the random ports we had visited up and down the coast (which are judged solely on the quality of their showers [Eden had two minutes of hot water with a thirty second delay so was least favourite especially compared with the walk in pressure showers in Port Stephens with mirrors] and the proximity of supermarkets and coffee shops. So Ciara (a now qualified dinghy instructor on my sailing course) and I went to Uluru in central Oz. I freaking loved the whole thing, and at least half of that was the tour not just the awesomeness of Uluru. Uluru and Kata Tjuta are these monolithic structures rising out of the ground and are the basis for many of the religious beliefs of the Aborigines. The best was Kings Canyon, the whole trek and the watering hole at the end (the guides called it Heart Attack Hill. Wimps).
The guides were pretty cool though we managed to completely flummox them. Referring to each other as love and darling and saying the food was scrumptious just to see the looks on their poor Kiwi faces. Somehow we also ended up being the ones cooking and cleaning every mealtime which gave English girls an excellent reputation for being housetrained. Ho hum. Still, at least we managed to round off with a very mature dosage of foam fighting whilst the genuine adults on the trip looked on with a little confusion. They named us the weirdest people theyd ever had on a trip. Nothing changes, eh?
Thats me out, Ill be back shortly with the next update. I have another 5 weeks or so to fill in so it might be very condensed...
love you dearest and hope all is well back in the hometown. Happy belated birthday as well xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sorry for the horrible delay in writing its all been manic jumping off planes and ferries and yachts and beds. Just kidding, but you get the principle. I last wrote when I was in Lizard Island in the gap in my gap year so Im tapping out at least three letters today whilst I still have internet access before the steppes of Mongolia...
Lizard Island was incredible- it had been so long since I'd dived for pleasure rather than training because everything I was doing in Sydney was for my Divemasters. I spent an entire day being a victim (which was actually faintly amusing as three very built rescue divers spent an afternoon hoiting me onto their shoulders in varying degrees of discomfort. Then I had to try and lift them to a lesser level of success). But here it was all for giggles and everything was brilliant; little reef sharks flitting in and out, clownfish in their anenomes (when you stroke them the tentacle things sting you but the underside is soft like underwater silk) and mermaid holes and caves. There are cods there the size of Jack (one of which I managed to hitchhike. Im just saying, that definitely beats my last hitchhike of two very stoned dudes in a pick up truck.)
What was mental was the fish feeding though- chuck anything over off the back and the Queensland groupers (the size of bull sharks but still basically fish) would barge the reef sharks out of the way and leap 5 foot into the air...
Well now Im a little embarrassed. I just waxed lyrical over fish for a decent sized paragraph. What I should have mentioned were the evenings- I completely took advantage of the bar and went mental making up cocktails. Duffy had given me the idea months ago when he described a bar in Manchester where a bored bartender spent hours making them strawberry cheesecake and Mars bar cocktails. The poor deprived Aussie didnt know Mars bars particularly well but did a wonder with stawberry cheesecake. We then moved on to Terry's Chocolate orange, chocolate tiramisu (garnished with a ferrero Rocher) and eventually "the kind of drink a smurf would have". I thought of you then. It would totally match your skin colour. So that was me making friends with the bartenders of the East coast- I went to Malanda as well (I cant say I'd recommend it. It was tiny. There was a dairy museum and at 9:0 another somewhat bored bartender turned to me to say 'Everyone awake in this town is in this room'. I looked over my shoulder to see 7 dudes playing snooker. Thank god for London.) I did a wine tasting briefly to sell the whole thing as a learning curve to my dad but, as ever, after the fourth glass everyhting starts to taste merely of red or white. Did Wine Society teach me nothing? Fuzzy wouldnt be surprised.
After Lizard Island we had gone back to Cairns and into the jungle to check out some of the incredible waterfalls, which was when we had ended up at Malanda, and spent the car ride trying to avoid bandycoots and possums (which really look like overgrown rats with curly tails and move like rabbits).
I had broken this and my next mini adventure with a weekend back in Manly because it was when half our group was leaving on their respective travels so I absolutely couldnt miss it for the world. I spent those days doing dive training and had been crashing on the couch of a friend cause he lived closer to the dive centre and I was gaining a towering reputation for laziness and finding places to sleep that werent my own bed. Hilariously this was a very different reputation from one of the other girls- it had nothing to do with anything scandalous and more about my ability to sleep on fridges, under stools, three people to a hammock or on a beach. Anyway, when I got back to his house I managed to find three complete strangers and everyone else a little surprised that Id been sleeping on a sofa when our house was only 10 minutes walk up the hill. Awkwards.
But that was Reggae Night and Reggae Night is strictly forbidden from awkwardness so we were out 'jammin' (Jesus Bob Marley needs to be given a rest. [Worst jokes ever: How does Bob Marley like his donuts? Jammin. How does his friends like their donuts? He hopes they like jammin too...)] till some horrible hour of the morning.
The guides were pretty cool though we managed to completely flummox them. Referring to each other as love and darling and saying the food was scrumptious just to see the looks on their poor Kiwi faces. Somehow we also ended up being the ones cooking and cleaning every mealtime which gave English girls an excellent reputation for being housetrained. Ho hum. Still, at least we managed to round off with a very mature dosage of foam fighting whilst the genuine adults on the trip looked on with a little confusion. They named us the weirdest people theyd ever had on a trip. Nothing changes, eh?
Thats me out, Ill be back shortly with the next update. I have another 5 weeks or so to fill in so it might be very condensed...
love you dearest and hope all is well back in the hometown. Happy belated birthday as well xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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