Greetings. This is Shubs/shabs/shabby/shabnam/shubbarella (whichever one you know me as) writing up about our time in the Land of Oz. Firstly apologies for the delay in the lack of updates but new zealand has been so back to back mental that we haven't had time to write about our time in the land of oz! Get ready for a long read....

We were really sad to leave the hustle and bustle of beautiful south east Asia, but at the same time were looking forward to some kind of normality (or so we thought!). Again, thanks to Ravi and her gold emirates membership, we got upgraded to business class. The way it happened was brilliant- we sat down in economy, and a French snooty older couple came along and told us to get out of their seats. The seats had been double booked by emirates, and apparently our online boarding pass was only a piece of paper, and the snooty French lady's was an actual boarding pass, according to her. Has she never heard of online check in, muppet! Ravi and the lady went to sort it out with an air hostess, Ravi came back smiling, hi5ed me and said we had been upgraded to business class much to the frenchies annoyance- muhahaha! The Aussie guy next to me said I had a smile bigger than a cracked watermelon when I found out haha. So it was a great start to the trip, the whole flight we kept looking at each other and saying 'oh my god we are actually going to Australia!'. I was unbelievably excited as its been the main country I've ALWAYS wanted to visit, but also unbelievably scared at the prospect of encountering massive spiders :-| (cos we weren't going to f*ck em)

We started off in Sydney, having just missed the 45 degrees heatwave by a day (thank gawd!). It was nice having a cool breeze after the humidity of Asia, but it did feel ridiculously quiet compared to where we'd spent the past month. We loved Sydney but not as much as we thought we would- its no London, and was way smaller than we expected. Having said that we got up to so much including:

- meeting up with a mate from uni, Sanj, whose brain we picked to death- he helped us plan our itinerary ohhh so much, thanks Sanj!
- going on a ferry trip to Manly Beach, with beautiful views of the bridge and opera house on the way, and not to mention beautiful views of gorgeous men with 6 packs when we got there. The lifeguards made an announcement that there was a risk of being stung by nasty blue bottles if we got in the water, and that the sting is pretty painful for about an hour. After a while we decided to have a little dip. The MOMENT Ravi got in the water she saw something blue go over her feet and the lil b@stard had stung her. She put on a really brave face though and just waited it out, hardcore!
- visiting the famous Bondi Beach and gawping at the surfers, as well as the random Punjabi Singh in full kurta pajama (Indian clothes). He made our day, see photo on fbook.
- going to Opera Bar right next to Sydney Opera House to meet up with Ravi's mate Petrea, it was a great evening, with amazing views and it was so nice to meet Petrea.
- going for food and drinks in Surry Hills, a suburb of Sydney that I just LOVED, great bars and restaurants. Someone we met briefly in Vietnam randomly walked past us there - what are the odds?!
- having a gander around Darling Harbour
- visiting the Australian museum- disappointing :(
- deciding to watch Black Swan after telling Ravi it's meant to be really good. It was a pile of balls. They should call the film 'Crotch Grab' as it happened so frequently in the film- 5 times I counted. I don't care how many oscars it's won.
- experiencing the scariest moment of our lives when we woke up screaming to 4 other girls' blood curdling screams when the fan in one of our dorms set on fire.

It rained loads on our last day. We got the night bus to Byron Bay that night. It made a massive change from the night buses in Asia where you had sleepers you can lie down in, so that was a bit of an uncomfortable journey!

Byron Bay is a funky little beach town, we really loved that place and the beach is gorgeous, loads of people take surfing lessons there. I bottled it- don't like the thought of being swept under the water, eek! Although I've become more and more adventurous throughout our trip and I'd probably do it now. Highlights in Byron included:

- meeting some great people including Nicole from LA, Jeanine from Canada, Una from Ireland, Jordan from western Australia who had flown all the way to Byron to meet up with a guy he met on the internet. The poor guy was stood up, so we took him under our wing. We also met up with the lovely Nikki from Texas, who we met in Sydney.
- going out for a delicious anti valentines dinner with the girls
- discovering goon (this could be considered a lowlight), cheap boxed wine which is literally scraped from the bottom of the barrel, that all people travelling oz drink because its so cheap and gets you drunk quick. We managed to somehow avoid goon in Sydney. I actually quite liked the taste!
- whipping out the auto tune app on the iPod and rapping like lil Wayne and T pain.
- a major lowlight was my ghds exploding whilst I was using them, resulting in a very burnt fringe. It was pretty hilarious at the time, but I was crying inside wondering how I'd survive without them. (I bought some new ones, that's how).

A few days later we made our way up to Surfers Paradise, the party hub of the gold coast. This was strange for me because I have spent a lot of time in Surfers Paradise in my lifetime, being the sticky floored one that's located on the top floor of Walkabout in Wolverhampton. They were pretty different to each other. In surfers we:
- chilled out on possibly the most beautiful beach I've seen, the way the waves came in was beautiful, never seen anything like it! Ravi got stung by a jellyfish as soon as she entered the water, AGAIN! They love a bit of ravi thigh!
- managed to avoid debaucherous nights out, the place was full of 18 year olds on their gap yah, and we couldn't be arsed.
- met a chinese coffee shop owner who's shop had just closed. He said 'theres a really good coffee place around the corner' and proceeded to describe it and how nice the coffee is, so we're imagining a small little one off place, then he goes 'its round the corner, its called Starbucks' like it's some random coffee shop no ones heard of!! Hahahaha. Probably funnier if you were there but we found it hilarious.

Brisbane was our next very quick stop, we managed to avoid the floods by a few weeks so we were lucky. We encountered really friendly people before we even got to our hotel, everyone was really helpful there. And there were loads of Indian people there, wahey! There was no point in playing my fave game of spot the Singh cos there were so many of em! We had an early start the next morn for our visit to Australia Zoo, Steve Irwin's one. I have to say it was SUCH a great day. Saw so many animals, and they aren't cruelly caged, you're able to get properly amongst it as you'll see from the photos on fb. A massive highlight for both of us was getting to hold a Koala, they are unbelievably cute! But they are pretty smelly. I enjoyed having the opportunity to keep saying 'i smell of koala' something I'll probably never get to say again. Also, it kept weeing and pooing while we were holding it, lovely. Looking at the tributes to Steve Irwin was pretty emotional - there were absolutely loads. But that guy was crazy, risking his life every day, something horrible like that was bound to happen.

We had a quick overnight stop in Noosa before we made our way to Hervey Bay the next day, which is the main place to stay when you want to do the the Fraser Island trip. We found an Indian restaurant owned by Punjabis which excited us quite a lot considering Hervey Bay is such a tiny town. The food was pretty bland though- not spicy at all, just catering for the aussie's low spice threshold!

Fraser Island is a one of a kind place. Sculpted from wind, sand and surf with striking blue freshwater lakes, crystalline creeks and giant dunes, it's the only place in the world where rainforest grows on sand.

Me and ravi were pretty worried about the Fraser Island trip, we're not your typical campers, and the stories we heard about dingoes, spiders and sleeping conditions terrified us to the point we considered booking into a hotel instead. We decided not to bottle it and just go for it so we did. 5am start the next day and we got to meet the rest of the group as we had our briefing. Again, we met some great people on this trip and had such a laugh. The fraser island trip involves getting a ferry over, each group is given their own individual jeep to drive, WITHOUT a tour guide or tour driver- it's up to us in the car to take it in turns driving the car and following the line of jeeps in front of it. It involved some really rough driving over massive bumps and hills, but also some absolutely beautiful driving along the beach, driving through the waves coming in. I didn't want to put other peoples lives in my hands so decided not to drive, ravi drove for a bit though. We drove around the island for 2 days and saw some of the most beautiful views I've ever seen. We stopped at Lake Mckenzie, Lake Wabby, Eli Creek (where the water is so pure you can drink it) and Champagne Pools for some nice relaxing dips. What we DESPISED where the disgusting march flys that were constantly on us, they stung and were the worst thing about Fraser.

We were mortified when we got to the campsite and realised there were no showers or toilets (the woman who booked our tours completely lied, grrr). Our first night was spent sitting on the beach drinking after the yummy BBQ , the moon was RED and I have never seen so many stars in my entire life, lots of shooting ones too, absolutely breathtaking. The lovely Hazel and Tom pointed out the constellations to us, and I pretended I could see them. The second night was also spent BBQing followed by drinking games galore- I have so many to teach you all when I get back! We decided to invade the other campsite and had a massive dance off with them, they were all ridiculously drunk too, much fun was had. Sleeping in the tent was HORRIBLE. It stank of manure, and it was just so stuffy. It doesn't help when 8/9 dingoes come outside your tent in the middle of the night and howl loudly. Ravi slept with a dingo stick by her side to scare them off, the guide had kindly given to her. What wasn't kind of him was the stories he told us before we went to bed, including a girl waking up in her tent to find a dingo with it's head through the zip of her tent :-| Ravi slept with one eye open, dingo stick in one hand, torch in the other. She switched it on every time there was any noise, it was hilarious (but scary at the time!). Meanwhile the lads on the trip thought it was fun to go out and try and find dingoes to bash with their dingo sticks, silly billies. By the end of the trip we were all desperate to go back to our hotels and get a proper sleep- everyone was knackered. On the way to the ferry we happened to see dolphins jumping and flipping in the sea- loved it!

I'm realizing how long this blog post is getting so will be brief about the last few places on our whistle stop tour of the east coast.

The Whitsundays- are a load of islands off the central coast of queensland where you do a 2 night 3 day sailing trip. I thought it would be plain sailing (sorry, had to get a pun in) but wow, sailing a boat is hard work! It was completely sideways at one point, scary (but fun) stuff! There were about 20 of us in total and we had such a laugh. Our skipper was hilarious and he'd bust out a tune on his guitar randomly. The snorkelling was gorgeous - and so was the food! The trip involved lots of drinking and of course drinking games and is where we learnt the great game of flip cup. Again, great mates were made on the trip, we had farewell drinks when back at Airlie Beach where we were all a bit unsteady on our feet - it still felt like we were on a boat! Somehow we ended up in a childrens play area, and yet again I ended up in a swimming pool at stupid o clock (not fully clothed this time though, I actually had a bikini).

Cairns was the final stop before we headed back to Sydney where we arrived at the place we were staying to find a random stuffed meerkat hanging out of the AC unit (see fbook pics). The place is party town- we had some greats night out there where we witnessed jelly wrestling and bumped into our Fraser Island crew (who decided to dress up as girls for the night). We went on a snorkelling trip along the Great Barrier Reef which was truly amazing. Ravi had a slip down the boat stairs, shes definitely inherited my ability to fall over randomly.

We made sure we were back in Sydney for mardi gras and we're so glad we did. Absolutely wicked parade and such a great atmosphere amongst the thousands of people in the crowd, we had such a laugh. We reunited with a quarter of the Laos wolfpack for a crazy night out as well as some of the fraser crew and I managed to meet up with a school friend I haven't seen since I was 15. A great way to end our oz trip (although we are heading to melbourne for a week after NZ).

Oh, my nose is much darker than the rest of my face which ravi finds quite amusing. I have to colour it in with make up to match the rest of me every day. She says I look like the scarecrow from the wizard of oz (I do). Here's a pic of me: http://www.thepolitic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/scarecrow-wizard-of-oz.jpg

We really miss our beds and hate living out of a suitcase, its really frustrating. I'm pretty sick of my clothes too. But the sights we're seeing, the people we're meeting and the laughs we're having totally outweigh that. We're missing our friends and family loads and can't wait to see you. I'm looking at working in Melbourne so may be gone for longer than originally thought....

Currently waiting in Auckland airport for our flight out of NZ. We loved it here - will try and get the NZ blog up asap. Toodle oo for now! X