Hello all,

Ok so after we left Brisbane (sob!) we headed very briefly down the Gold Coast.

First stop was good old Surfers Paradise where we spent only the night as budget is quite tight now! It was a lovely day - we wandered around the tackyness of it all. To sum it up we would say it is a Magaluf kinda place where its nightclubs and horny teenagers everywhere. But even though we were only there for such a short time we actually loved it. Lovely restaurants and ice cream by the seaside - lush.
It was just so tacky you cant help but not hate it! Anyways we also found out that day we could not get any accommodation for Byron Bay our next stop, so had to end up sorting out Plan B!!

The replan...we headed into Byron Bay early morning and were allowed to store our bags for only half the day (brilliant) so we wandered around the beach, food places and trying to soak up the Byron Bay hippy loooove. But it wasnt really our place - everyone told us we would love it but we kinda didnt. It was a nice beachside place but that was it. This could however also be because we only spent about 20 hours there. You may have seen from our pics that we are sitting at a bus stop eating pizza. Yes. That was us waiting 7 hours for a Greyhound bus to do an all night journey into Sydney. Woop! So thats pretty much Gold Coast for us in a nutshell..a very small nutshell...

Once in Sydney it was a brief couple of nights before we booked our train to Melbourne to start the search for work....!! Brief stay in our fave hostel Bounce and a nap in our favourite spot. (Which we were woken up from by a guy who wanted us to walk on his back infront of a video camera for $20 each. Well we couldnt say no and that was our first earnings in Oz! - He said it was for 'art' Ha!) We also got to watch the cricket...aka Aussie smashing on the big screen down by the bridge, also had a Pimm O'Clock down by the Opera House bar in the sunshine...oh its a hard life!

Up ridiculously early to catch a train to Melbourne where we arrived on the Sat evening to begin the search for work... :(

So that lasted like a week... we got fed up going through all the agency tests and
decided we might as well do all that stressing at home - esp with the weather being so crap and us paying so much a night for accommodation - we saw it as a sign! So we decided to shrink the trip and make it FUN then do the work at home! Then the sun came out and what can we say...

The neighbours tour was done - which was surreal and tiny but just a typical english thing that HAD to be done! We met Janealle Timmens...she was ok, though I'm sure most of you reading this won't remember her!! But the weather was so lush you couldn't complain. We also got to see St Kilda which was a seaside town off the CBD which we travelled to by tram. While we were over there we also booked Uluru - WOOP!!!

Melbourne is like the king of coffee/chocolate shops so we obviously had to sample...LUSH! We also got to see the tennis at the Aussie Open, only the warm up games as they were free entry! Wandered about the outside of the MCG, we of course 'walked the crap out of Melbourne' in general too. Being in Melbourne also started a 'random thing' of the day. One was the Premier of Victoria Ted Baillieu landing by helicopter where we were sunbathing, Alex got asked out on a date by a random weird bloke (Jo thought it might be for Melbourne Streetmate!) and we went over to Glenhuntly house hunting!

Coming to the end of Melbourne now and about to get up at 4am for a flight to catch to head over to Alice Springs... TTFN!! :)