Blogs from Botany Bay, New South Wales, Australia, Oceania

After 3 days of not having dived, it was time to get in the water again. I went diving Thursday and Friday and both days were spectacular, the best diving I've had so far in Sydney. Thursday I went to a place I hadn't been to before: Kurnell, specifically to the location which is part of the Botany Bay National Park. Kurnell is where James Cook first set foot in Australia and is considered "the birthplace of modern Australia" and there's quite a few good diving spots there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurnell,_New_South_Wales. I went withCraig, a person I had dived with before and a few more people from the dive shop I had also dived with previously. I did the first two dives with Craig and the conditions were excellent: not much water movement and about 15 meters of ... read more

Gangs of cockatoos fill the air. Rainbow lorikeets cavort amongst the trees. But in the distance, planes take off and land from six to midnight. An assortment of cranes across the bay mar the view of Sydney Tower and the city and an oil tanker lies where the Endeavour once anchored. Much has changed since Captain James Cook first arrived here 240 years ago. Me? I came here back in 1991. Nine months of hell. A sulphur-crested cockatoo has just landed on the araucaria that shades me. It stares. It glares. It shrieks. Just as I mention its presence to my travel buddy Rune, it lifts its tail and craps a mere metre from my feet then flies away. A seemingly perfect upper middle-class suburban existence flawed by the Anglo-Saxon school system. Geeks and goons. Nerds ... read more