Australia day and the adventures outside of Sydney

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I guess it has been a while since my last update. I have been out of internet contact for sometime.

I met up with my friend Dave on the 24th and we spent the day catching up on my recent travel, his through Europe and then went out drinking with people from the hostel. Dave and I found a free museum and spent several hours walking through it looking at everythign from modern art to chinese and Australian aboriginal art. The 25th was Australia Day which was a great deal of fun. We spent the day around the Botanical Gardens and a large portion of Sydney's streets were closed for festivals and lined with vintage cars. These vintage cars were quite different than those I am used to here which was really cool to see even more differences on such a wide scale. I had an Aussie hot dog which is piled up with onions and tomato sauce (not Ketchup). They call the sausages here 'snags' and eat a great deal of BBQ'd food like rissoles (mince meat with herb), steaks and snags. We met up with others from the hostel on Aussie day and hung out walking around enjoying the sights and the sounds. We BBQ'd some kangaroo meat which was really tender and very delicious and ox heart that a german fellow we met was eating and it was a rather good steak as well though quite tough and fibrous. We saw sailboat races, a pirate ship race, several military excercises, and a jet fly over.

We stayed in Sydney for one more night then headed south the following day to check out the University of Wollongong where we will be spending the next 4 months. It is a nice small city but the campus is absolutely georgeous. We sat around in quad for an hour learning how to play crib before meeting up with our friend James who we have spent the last few days with.

He put us up in his beach house in Callala (pronounced kow-alla) and we have been spending our days relaxing on the beach, snorkelling and BBQ'ing. We have eaten steak, snags, rissoles, potatoes and sweet potato, all BBQ'd since we got here. We are eating only green food for dinner tonight which will be a pleasant change. Since coming here we have gone snorkelling and saw sting rays, various fish, and those nasty looking urchins that are black and look like a giant ball of needles. Tomorrow we are going out on James boat with his dad and we have very good odds of swimming with dolphins, snorkeling around ship wrecks to see sharks and eels, maybe even try our hand at spear fishing. I will explain that more once I have some good stories. We went and saw some blow holes along the coast, did some cliff jumping by a very large cave about 7-9m up, played 9 holes of golf today and the coarse was littered with kangaroos! There were joeys, large kangaroos, kookaburas, cockatoos, various other beautifuyl birds and very noisy insects around the corase but it all was so laid back and no one paid any heed to these animals.

The first time we went in the ocean down here we have to run out after about 5 minutes because jelly fish were starting to blow in. There was a football sized jelly about a meter away from me and my friend Dave luckily warned me about it in time to get away from it. I didn't actually see it because I gave my diving mask to our Aussie buddy James to take a look at it and we got out of the water rather quickly after that. The ocean still scares me, especially when I can't see the bottom but it is so warm and lovely that I get over my fear rather quickly.

We are leaving Callala in two days to head down the coast to Melbourne. We are going to try our luck hitch-hiking to Eden or a small town around there, then either hitching a bus depending on the heat or hitch hike over to Melbourne the following day. With any luck we shall arive in Melbourne around the 5tgh. They are in the middle of a heat wave and are sitting at a cozy 45 degrees during the days. It will be hot... We are meeting up with more Aussie friends there and I am greatly looking forwards to Melbourne because everyone I have talked to claims it to be their favorite city in Australia. I have to go because we are leaving to make dinner, I will load pictures up when I get a chance and give you another update that will hopefully not take as long to post as this one.

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