Wow, so much to tell you and so little time to do it- $1 per 15 minutes is expensive! Ok so yesterday, on the excellent advice of a few people I got a grip and actually did something. I had a new roomate called Cerise from Normandy in France who has been travelling since around April and is really lovely. We went for a walk down the Esplanade yesterday and found a few pebbly beaches. We paddled in the shallow waters and the water was actualyl hot! Not just tepid but really really warm!!! I didn't go in any further- the locals tell you not to because of box jellyfish around at this time of year. What else did we do?... Hmmm, we sat on a bench for 2 hours just chatting and watching the wildlife, some colourful lorikeets and a kite were circling around us. It was lovely.

Back at the hostel i had a quick nap and when i woke up, i was standing up asking cerise in a panicked voice where i was! For some reason i thought i was in Thailand, and scared the poor girl who doesn't know me half to death! I've never slept walked before (although i didn't really walk, i just jumped up and turned around) but it was funny in the end after all the confusion.

Yesterday evening, cerise and I walked down to Mindil Beach, and it was possibly the closet i've been to paradise in a long time. Every thursday and sunday there is a 'sunset market'. with stalls selling digeridoos, jewellry, holistic therapies, every kind of take away you can imagine, healthy drinks, anything you can imagine. And there was a guy playing 4 digeridoos at once. He was AMAZING! I've got video footage i'll put up at some point. Cerise and I got a chinese and sat on the beach to watch the sunset. there must have been easily 500 people on the beach, each watching the sunset and taking pictures. It was pretty perfect. Then we wandered round and sat on the beach some more in the dark, watching the stars come out. It was as if each one was switched on by a switch.

This morning I was up at 5:45am to get an early bus to Kakadu National Park. Before I came over here I had wanted to do a tour over a few days but the heat here is immense, i didn't really want to spend 2 days trekking 5km when it's near 40 degrees. So this was a day trip and it was cool. Took a while to get there (i still don't understand how big australia is) and we started off looking at Aboriginee Rock Art, that was at least 500 years old. We walked to a look out point and I could see for miles, everywhere was green and the hills were beautiful. At some points during the walk, the noisefrom the insects in the trees was deafening. The non-Aboriginees over here have 2 seasons- wet season which will start in a month or so, and the dry season, which we are coming to the end of now. Park rangers over here actually have 'cool fires' here in the bush because the controlled fires rejuvinate the soil and everything grows green again. Cool huh? Aboriginees have been doing it for thousands of years. From what I saw today, the Aboriginee culture is on the whole treated with respect and care. We weren't allowed to go to certain places because they were sacred.

After a buffet lunch we headed to a billabong where we went crocodile watching. Sat in a boat we sailed down South Alligator River, we saw loads of crocs, all sat chilling out in the water, they didn't mind us going right up to them, apparently they're used to it. We also saw wild horses, black stallions, eagles with wing spans bigger than me, a tiny kingfisher and (my new favourite) Jaberoos. They are black necked stalks with very long pink legs. The females have yellow eyes and the males have black eyes. They are shy so everytime we saw them they walked off.

So now I can say I've been to Kakadu National Park, it's about 20,00 square kilometres so obviously I didn't do it all! Tomorrow there's a deckchair cinema in the evening which sounds like a lot of fun, hopefully me, Cerise and Leanne, a girl on the trip with me today, are going to have a picnic there and check it out.

To Miss Thompson-Rogers class, thanks for reading it, i hope you lot are behaving yourself now!

To everyone else who's been emailing and texting me, thank you so much, it's nice to know you're all still thinking of me.

I promise to get the pictures up as soon as i can- it'll be on my list of things to do tomorrow or wednesday.

Speak to you all soon

xxxxxx