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