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Hey everyone, hope all is well and its always gd hearing from everyone gunna try and get the east coast blog done by the time i leave NZ (haha yeah that didnt happen as i´m now in santiago!). where i've been the last week and a bit, rather unplanned but has been awesome fun! this blog may get very long as to try and cram everything in that happened could take a while! but here goes.
- i left emmas on around 13th may and flew to melbourne. spent a couple of nights there and had one full day to properly look round before i flew to cairns. its pretty crazy that oz is so big u cant fly direct from perth to all the major cities cairns and brisbane u have to stop somewhere like melbourne or alice springs. but it meant i could fit in melbourne on my east coast stint. melbourne turned out to be one of my fravorite cites in oz and have to say better than sydney. it just has a cool feel about it. on my day looking about i checked out the MCG as its hard to miss in the centre. its huge,
opera house
It wouldnt be a trip to Oz with out the obligatory opera house photos! holding over a 100 000 and its all on top of the ground. being able to watch a match there would be quite something, also got to put my feet on the ¨hallowed turf¨ during a tour by an extremely jerryatric old dude but who was a gd crack with his old school jokes.
- i arrived in cairns after 2 nights in melbourne. at the airport i chatted to an ozzy guy who was back to visit some friends in port jackson where he used to live. he offered to show me around PJ, 40 mins north of cairns, which i thought y not. he ended up getting a car from his old boss and driving me about then taking me for a bbq with his friends and getting me a couch to sleep on at his old bosses. it was a really cool to see somewhere i prob wouldnt have gone to and meet some locals which on the EC doent happen a lot.
- i would have hung around a bit longer but joeler turned up in cairns the next day unexpectedly, so headed back to go have a few drinks. a few drinks is
what a view!
Brisbane river and bridge prob slight under-exageration but was a awesome to see a gd friend from home on the other side of the world. the rest of my time in cairns was spent having a few more drinks and doing 3 dives on the barrier reef. they with out doubt the best dives i´ve ever done!! just mind blowing the amount of colour and crazy look stuff down there. saw a shark resting in the distance, some sort of tuna, shit load of coral and gd old nemo! i ended up staying a day longer after missing my bus after my plan of staying up all night to catch the really early bus after a few drinks back fired and ended up sleeping through!
- from cairns it was a 12 hour bus ride to the next big stop on the EC trail, airlie beach, still less than halfway down queensland!! from here i did a sailing trip on an old maxi ocean racing yauht round the whitsunday islands. there was about 15 of us crusing round doing snorkelling seeing the classic whitehaven beach and unleashing the sails of the yauht. it was a gd laugh and everyone on the boat was
ahh byron!!
me, gareth and lee cool, which made it gd fun.
-in arilie beach i finally managed to get hold of stampy another mate from home who just happened to be in hervey bay a little further south. so i jumped of the coach earlier than planed to catch up. it happened to be his bday too when i was there, so the evening was spent celebrating. theres not too much to see in hervey bay unless ur going to go do a tour of fraiser island which i wasnt so when stampy left i got on the next bus to noosa, where i was going to be able to get my first waves as the barrier reef protects most of the coast of queensland.
-noosa is a beautiful place, to get the gd waves u have to walk at least 20 mins through the national park to isolated bays. the waves when i was out were pretty awesome and the surroundings couldnt have been much better. it was just a shame that due to it being busy and it being a point break, u had to fight with the locals to get any waves! it was also a shame that when i was in noosa a tail end of some cyclone was in town so it pretty much pissed it down the whole 3 days i was there and screwed up the waves. noosa was also where i bumped in to 2 guys from brighton called lee and gareth, who i travelled down to brisbane with due to the rain leaving not much to do in noosa. everyone in the hostel resorting to playing goon pong which involved goon, the backpacker alcohol of choice, and a ping pong ball in a kinda upscaled twiddlywinks.
- i wasnt holding out much hope for brisbane due to all the negative comments i´d got from everyone but i actually really liked it. to be fair it wasnt much of a tourist town with little to see, though u could tell it´d be a nice city to live in. the first night we went round a friend of lee and gareths who had a flat overlooking the bridge for a few drinks. and what a flat, for the price he was paying, 160 quid a month. he got 2 balconies one overlooking the bridge and the other the valley area on the 32nd floor, membership to the gym and sauna on the 1st floor and a doorman! it was crazy how cheap it was. after a pretty heavy night we spent the day checking out the free musems and looking about the shops. after the 2nd night we headed down to byron bay.
- what can i say about byron other than hands down the best place in oz. it was awesome, we finally had out run the rain and the sun was very much out. byron is and awesome little town with a great atmosphere, amazing beach, surfable waves and stunning cliff back drop. i ended up spending 5 days 100m from the beach trotting to the beach board in arm surfing with out a suit on and partying in the evenings. gareth and lee were great crack too and helped pass the time with banter that only the irish and britsh seem to have. after 5 days was very sad to leave but i had a flight to catch in 2 days and sydney still to see.
- sydney is actually a real cool big city. there so much nice stuff to see in a city as busy as london. it has the bridge and harbour, opera house, bondi and much more which with only a couple of days i didnt get to see it all. but i still think i prefered the atmosphere of melbourne even though it has less flashy in ur face stuff to see. it was a gd couple of days checking out the sights before my 2 flights to samoa.
all in all the EC was great fun. theres so much to do and so many people about that its hard not to have a gd time. again due to my slackness sorry its only a brief(ish) bulletpoint of each place. hope everyone is well and i might even get the samoa blog done before bed( but dont hold me to that :D)
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