hello, I'm in Australia!!!

Left Christchurch at 4.30pm yesterday and flew to Auckland then to Cairns so it was a big day and is always exhausting getting into a new city. Luckily the people here have been so helpful and I got a shuttle to the hostel at midnight and (thanks to some help from dad calling the hostel) someone waited up to check me in.

I totally crashed out last night, have got 2 really friendly Italien guys in my room but they're English isn't brilliant so its a bit tricky. I think they were trying to ask me to travel down to melbourne with them in their car but I politely refused imagining the next 40 days of translating each other ahhhhhh!!

Instead I've been a busy little bee and have organised all sorts of things for myself today. I woke up this morning and immediately felt the temperature difference compared with NZ, its about 27C here and feels really hot. i therefore went to explore the city and bought myself a couple of pairs of boardshorts (I've been looking for these since I left so I'm chuffed).

Then got myself a very large breakfast (with smoothie) and read by the pool until after lunch. this started to feel a bit too much like a holiday though so I took myself down to the travel booking place. The guy was fantastic and helped me book my greyhound pass which is a hop on hop off bus all the way down the East Coast.

He also booked a trip to Cape Tribulation for me which I go on tommorrow and get to see rainforrest and wildlife which should be good.

Vicki wrote me a day by day itinerary of things to do while I'm out here so I'm trying to stick to that so I have time to fit everything in.

I'm loving cairns at the moment, its such a nice clean beachy sort of place, would be cool to have an apartment here and its nice to be somewhere that has a few more people than New Zealand. Havn't yet had a chance to meet many people though, but hopefully there will be some opportunities later tonight.

Got a very good first impression of Oz!!!