A belated 'hello' from Currumbin Valley

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Currumbin Valley is BLISS.

Ellie and I are well and truly settled into Currumbin Valley Eco-Village and absolutely loving the homestay with our host family. Ellie has a new bestfriend in five year old Pia (perhaps the other way round) and I am getting the garden well and truly in order.

The Eco-Village has a great community spirit and we are being made to feel very welcome. The garden has plenty going on (it was horrendously overgrown) and has plenty of banana trees which are producing bunch after bunch. The other day I took off 5 bunches and am currently the envy of the rest of the village as other gardens seem to be only yielding one or two every few months. I said to the owner here, Rob, that he should set up a stall outside his house selling them at a reduced rate due to the current banana drought in Australia. The last time I checked the banana price was still around $10 per kilo in the supermarket...ridiculous!

Anyway, Pia has really taken to us both and most days when she comes home from school, Ellie occupies her with arts and craft stuff and we also go on a lot of bike rides around the village. The village is so picturesque and it has only recently just stopped raining here. Apparently, it only stopped raining in May after 18 months of non-stop down pour! We are surrounded with beautiful green rolling hills, forests and kangaroos in the back garden.

Last weekend we went down to Gold Coast Seaworld and had a whale of a day...sorry, I couldn't help myself. Although, it is not as spectacular as the Florida one, the Aussies still manage to put on a good show and we went to see some Walruses pretending they were detectives, many dolphins performing various tricks and penguins being penguin-like (lots of waddling from side-to-side). The theme-park itself had a couple of high-speed rollercoasters which were pretty cool and didn't make Ellie feel too sick! Luckily, the park wasn't too busy so we walked around at a very leisurely pace and managed to see everything that we wanted to. One of the higlights for us both was the giant underwater viewing tunnel of the great white shark enclosure. We could have paid $70 each to have had a dive with them (in a steel cage) but I don't think we quite fancied it! They were HUGE.

We are thinking that this weekend we will have a day trip down to Byron Bay (lots of surfing goes on there) as it is not too far away in the car.

We have around 10 days left here and then my dad is coming over at which point we will be heading back up to Brisbane. Hopefully, we will take him on a few day trips to various places and see some more stuff up this way before we head down south to Melbourne. Oh, yeah - we are flying down to Melbourne on the 3rd October as we have heard that it is a great city that we will fall in love with and I think Ellie is looking forward to spending her birthday on the 4th with her friends down there. However, before we head down to Melbourne and after my dad goes - we are travelling up to Fraser Island to have 2 nights/3 days there where we will be camping, driving 4x4s and getting to grips with backpacker ways again. We have been spoilt here too much!

Also, more very exciting news is that Ellie's mum, Judith, is heading over for the festive period so we are both looking forward to that! It'll be realy great spending Christmas with her in the Aussie summer heat and also doing a bit of travelling around to show her and hopefully visit some new places!

Anyway, it's 'bye' from me for now. I'll update again soon!

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