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Published: November 13th 2008
Sexiest women in the world!
Its not a great look is it!Welcome back bloggers!
As you may have realised i have been unable to get access to a computer since i left Melbourne a week ago.
Right now i am in Byron Bay in one of the coolest backpacking places on the planet! But before i describe this place to you i must of course rewind 7 days and share the weired and wonderful experience that has been the last week.
I left Melbourne and flew to Cairns last Thursday ( i think, i lose track of time here!) and found my way to the Holiday in. I had already booked the accomodation for the next three nights with Trailfinders prior to leaving the UK and boy was a pleased! The hotel was right on the Esplanade in Cairns and my balconay overlooked the ocean! That afternoon i headed out and grabbed some lunch at a great fish restaurant on the esplanade in the eveing checked out some of the local shops and bars.
I ended up in the only Gay bar in the village.....it soon became clear i was the only Gay IN the village! After that i headed back to the hotel early as i had an early start in
the morning and after speaking to my dad on the phone popped into a shop to buy a beach towel for the diving course. Due to space issues in my backpack i had not carried my own towel but in this case it was obviously essential! After arriving back at my hotel i realised my phone wad missing. Well, what followed was 3 hours of panic. I knew it hadnt fallen out of my bag and i have been very very careful with all my things ALL the time so came to the conclusion i had left it on the counter at the towel shop. i ran (it was quite a few block away and i am really unfit right now!) back to the shop in question to find it had shut. So i went across the street to their sister shop to ecplain the problem and see if they could help me. Till theni had remained relatively calm however when the girl in the shop asked me for the contact details of the person i was traveling with, reality hit me and i burst into tears!! The poor sales girl in the shop wondered what on earth she had
said to upset me so much and all i could come out with was....'im all alone!!" It was decided that i had to wait till the morning when the shop opened to find out if it was in fact there. i moped back to my hotel and sat on my balcony and cried for about 2 hours. This coming from the girl who has found it almost impossible to cry for such a long time! I cried for everything that had happened this year, and for the first time felt totally alone. After half a bottle of wine from the mini bar i started to wonder what this lesson was meant to teach me. Wasit to take better care of me things? well i know i had been over careful in that sense so i came to the conclusion that someone up there was telling me "you came away to be alone.......but you have had available contact with everyone you love the whole time. Now you are on your own kiddo"
It makes you realise just how reliant we have become on modern day communication methods, on instant gratification, on blackberry's and email, blogs and txt messages. Remember the days
before mobile phones? when people who set off to travel the world for 3 to 12 months called home once a month? i took comfort in the fact that even if i have lost the phone completely, it was ok to be out of contact and that this is really what its all about. isnt it?
After the Titanic tears situation i slept, for the first time in a long time, right through the night.
The following morning i was collected by Pro Dive and taken to my first day at diving school. As i jumped on the mini bus i sat next to a girl from Bournemouth, Jen. We became instant friends and subsequently dive buddies.
The first day at dive school was great. we spent the first half of the day in the classroom learning about the art of diving, introduced to some of the equipment and the all important safety lectures! There were 13 of us in total and a bit of a mixed bunch. Our group consisted of 2 couples from sweeden, two lads from England, 3 german girls, an Irish guy, a girl from belgium, Jen and myself. There was a clear division early on
in the group with one half of the room (my half) being over 27 and the other half being under 25. This worked well with the boys attaching themselves to the rather cute young german girls on day one!
Then came the medical which i passed no problem and the fitness test. We swam a number of lengths of the popol and then had to tread water for 10 minutes. To make the time pass our instructor Matt asked us a number of questions allowing us to share our answers with the group. One of the questions was "What made you sing up for this course?" Now at this point it is worth me telling you about my rather strange phobia. I am petrified of Jellyfish. Some of you may laugh, others who know me well know the extent of this phobia and although joke with me about it know that it is in some situations debilitating. For example, i cant eat jelly, i cant look at parachutes, i struggle to handle mushrooms, lava lamps kill me! But more importantly, i find it almost impossible to swim in the sea. I will paddle if its hot, and i will generally
grill the locals for infomation on the last time they saw a Jelly before i enter into the ocean. Even then i spend the first 10 minutes (if i stay in that long) on edge looking out for potential "baddies"! Some of you may ask "what on earth posessed you to pay for the privilage of swimming in one of the most jellyfish infested waters in the world?" And trust me, on a number of occasions i asked myself the same question! I chose to do this because despite my phobia, i have always wanted to swin under water and this has been the only thing stopping me. SO......in the usual Lucy style, i decide to literally throw myself in at the deep and and try to tackle the problem head on. in short.......you CANNOT go to the great barrier reef and just snorkle!
Getting back to the story, i had chosen up till that point not to mentiopn to anyone about this little issue till i was aksed why i was taking the course. My answer was, "i have a phobia of Jellyfish and for the last 10 years have found it almost impossible to swim in the sea".
Well, the look on my instructors face said it all! i bet he thought "what the hell have i been lumbered with here! she has a fear of swimming in the ocean and has signed up for a diving course!! On completion of the first day at school he asked if i was ok to continue, i told him that under no circumstance was he to take any crap from me and if at any point i hesitated to jump off that boat he had my full permission to kick me over the edge!
That afternoon after setting up and breaking down our equipment numerous times, we entered the pool to start the process of learning to survive under water. For anyone that has ever been diving before you will understand what i mean when i say that the first time you sink under the water and breath through your mouthpiece, has to be one of the wierdest sensations on the planet! However you soon become used to it and start the mental process of trying to remain calm at all times! This is quite difficult when, instinctively, you want to gulp for every breath and bite down on that
Giant Clam
bad shot i know but i was still learning! mouthpiece like its the last breath you may ever take!
Thankfully the shop had my phone and on collection i had 10 missed calls!!! Wow i thought, see what you miss when you lose your phone? Then i realised all the missed calls were from me......calling the phone from various locations to check it was still working! That pissed on my campfire!
That evening i had arranged to meet Rachel's sister amanda who live a few streets from the dive school. We had dinner at her place and spent the night chatting about pretty much everything! She was fantastic and it was great to meet her.
The next day was a LONG day with a full 10 hours at dive school followed by 2 hours at Marine Biology school in the evening. The latter proved to be exremely beneficial because rather than trying to tell your dive group that you saw a pretty purple and pick fish down there, you could say "hey, did you see the Parrot Fish?" With the newly aquired knowledge of the creatures of the deep (and the not so deep) it made the whole experience ten times better. The lecture included a 10 minute
section on jellyfish complimented by a HUGE picture of a Box Jelly on the projector. As i got up and left the room to head for the bathroom i can tell you that this was one of those questionable moments i mentioned earlier. But by now it was too late and we were settin goff on the boat the next morning so i calmly entered the room again when she had moved onto Sharks.
Jen and i had dinner that evening and were so shattered we could hardly talk! The next morning we boarded the boat for our 3 hour trip out to the reef. Joining us were a number of experienced diver and some taking their advanced diving course. This included a couple from Epping! my home town! Its a small world.
Once we anchored out in the reef and after everyone had turned green from sea sickness we set up out gear for the first dive.
Did i pause before i jumped in? Absolutely! I wont print what i said to myself as it would contain too many ****** so i jumoped in and started the decsent down to the bottom of the ocean.
It is quite possibly
Coral
i was trying to get the fish swimming above it one of the most breath taking experiences of my life. The visibility was 25 meters! and not a jelly in site! in fact i didnt see a single one throughtout any of the 9 dives i completed over 3 days. Fabulous!
The staff on the boat really made th trip and were all nuts! The first dive went without a hitch and we performed all our exercises under water perfectly. When i say exercises i mean thing liske, taking your mouth piece out and throwing it over your shoulder. remaining calm, finding it again and placing it back in your mouth so you can conitinue breathing. Other include Matt turing your air off. when your air runs out you have to fidn your buddy make various hand signals to them telling them you are out of air and begin breating from their spare mouth piece. All sounds pretty simple....till you are 12 meters under the ocean!.
One of the exercises we had to do was to remove our masks from our face and put them back on again and clear the mask of water by blowing air through your nose into the mask.. this rarely works first time and caused
me a lot of stress. When i attempted this aweful trick my mask flooded and i accidently breathed in through my nose......i choked and blew water back into my air supply resulting in me not being able to breathe........this lasted for what seemed like ages and i tried to make an emergancy ascent to the surface but Matt stopped me and got me breathing again. When we surfaced i was a bit of a mess....to be frank, it had scared the life out of me. Having calmed down i was unsure if i wanted to get back in again and this being the last dive of the day i crawled into warm clothes and tried to get my head round it all. Matt then informed me that due to not completing this particular exercise i couldnt count the dive and had to repeat the whole dive AGAIN! right away!
Well they say get back on the horse, so i squelched back into my cold wetsuit and got on with it. i completed it successfully and surfaced with a smile!
The rest of the dives went without drama and on Monday afternoon i became a certified open water diver!
Not wanting
it to end there i signed up for the adventure diver certification and completed a further 3 dives including, a deep 30 meter dive where we all got Narcked under water (drunk on the nitrogen narcosis our bodies were experiencing due to the depth), a navigation dive and the under water photography dive. The latter was my favourite and i now know that i want to take photos under water ALL the time! My dive buddie Jen had not chosen to further the dive certification so i aquired a new dive buddy Marina, one of the German girls. During the photograpy dive one of her air tubed burst and she had to make an emergancy ascent to the surface, it was pretty scary but i was right behind her the whole way and hailed the speed boat and we got her back safely. Without the intense training on safety and resuce we had endured i doubt she would have had such a lucky escape, it just goes to show how good their training was!
After passing as an adventure diver we all docked back at carines and headed out for dinner. Quite a few drinks later i crawled back
to Amandas for the night and jumped on a plane to Brisbane the next morning.
I inteded on hiring a winnibago to make the drive from Brisbane to Sydney however their wasnt one availabe so i hired a car instead and drive into the city.
One of my families ancestors is John Oxley the explorer who mapped most of NSW over 150 years ago and much of Brisbane is named in his honnor. I wanted to find out more about him so having had lunch at Oxleys on the River restaurant i went to the state library to read up on his adventures.
I then set off down the coast to Sancturary Cove, an exclusive collection of islands housing some of Astralia's most exclusive properties. I have some friends there, Rob and Nicky, and Nicky took me to dinner where i was treated to Crystal Champagne darlings! I spent the night in luxury and after a similarly decadent breakfast drove down the gold coast to Byron Bay.
Teh brach here is STUNNING! please google it, my oictures will probably do it no justice. Talking of pictures i cannot upload from my camera here hence the only photos being from
the cd Pro dive gave me of my underwater shots. in fact there are many more of these featuring turtles and sting rays however they will follow in a day or two. Byron bay ROCKS! Its surfer cool with barefoot surfer dudes adorning every street, cafe and spiritual retreat. I am staying at thr Art Centre lodge wich is a backpacking village of giant Teepees, hammocks, pool tables, juice bars and everything you could want! Hanging out really is the main objective here with people hanging in hammocks, from trees, off each other....! They have spiritual classes, dousing, dreadlocks and guitars...all in 5 acres of tropical gardens...i only wish i was staying longer! Tomorrow i hope to attend circus school to learn the trapeeze somthing i have always wanted to do. The weather here is boiling one minute with heavy rain the next and i think tomorrow may rain again so i will spend that time doing a little hanging myself!
i will then set off down to Port Maquarie wherei will spend the night before driving the last few hours down to Sydney.
Hiring the car was the best decision and has given me soooo much feedom! It even
has my name on it! the number plate is 04 LCY!
So folks i am heading of to hang with the pot heads in hammocks and bid you fare well till Sydney!
From the underwater adventurer.......
Good night x
ps. sorry about any spelling errors, i dont have time to go over the blog again as my net time is running out!! Rach heeelp!
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Emmie
non-member comment
Oxley-ville
Got your text the other morning at 4am!!! Cheers for that cuz!! Sounds amazing and i'm so jealous, but reading your stuff its like im back there too. Sydney is awesome, climb the bridge if you get a chance and get the ferry to Manley - a bit like an old English seaside town! Glad you loved the scuba diving, it really is amazing! did you meet Elvis the massive fish?? i saw the giant clam thing too! Stay safe hunny, love you lots. Call us on Sunday lunch, we're all gonna be at Twinkie's for a roast! xxxx