And so I shall say my final G'day to you from oz. I have reached cairns my final destination and what's more my liver has survived the trip! Although my bank account may not have done... Still a job worth doing is worth doing well and if your gonna drink, do it till you fall over a log and if your going to spend what little money you have, spend it on a $100 bikini :p and so, my australian odessy was lived by those very rules :p
It has been however a very sad few days because oz coming to an end means not only am I one step closer to the dreary delights of home but also that I had to say goodbye to soph, who over the last month has just been fantastic, every step of the way! And being with her has kind of reminded me why I'm going home at all, having her travel oz with me has definitly been a very bright highlight of my whole trip so far :)
So as I was saying, Monday was sophies last day and unfortuantly most of it was spent on the bus getting back to cairns, however we were lucky enough on the way to get to stop off at the local crocodile farm for some last minute shananigans involving dangerous animals :p within 5 minutes of getting there i had already held a baby crocodile, a big snake, some kind of spiky dragon thing and a giant black bird sit on my shoulder for a while (ps I would make a great pirate!) unfortuantly the bird did happen to s*** down one blokes back but, not on me for once so yay! :p the crocodile feeding was pretty damn cool too, basically a guy had sone meat and a stick and poked the absolutly massive crocs till they got a bit pissed off then made them jump for the food! Crocs can jump! Did u know that? I sure didn't!! Tres cool indeed! Next up was feeding the hundreds of kanagroos they had there, which I've done before but I still really loved coz they are just so damn soft and cuddly!! If I was friends with skipper I'm pretty sure all the people he saved would have died because he wouldn't have been able to raise the alarm since I would be hugging and cuddling and smooshing my face into his cutesie little faceywacey all the time... Yeah I probably shouldn't be allowed near them any more... So swiftly moving on next stop was the dingos! No more were we required by saftey standards to cross our arms and back away, oh no, they dingos were tamed kind of, so they were just big dogs that could rip your throat out any minute - naturally we could pick them up and have pictures and poke them a bit... Why not right? I mean what's the worst that can happen?! :p
After a couple hours there and some great pics we headed on to cairns, stopping in Tully briefly to witness a giant boot statue that for some reason they had felt the need to build and by early evening we had arrived at our hostel in the city :) we had decided to stay a little way out of the main square on the recommendation of some of alices friends and personally I think they were bang on - it was quieter but with a free bus to town every half hour and the hostel itself was really really lovely - a great homely atmosphere. Plus it had a bar called Zanzibar which was quite funny since we had spent the last few days almost constantly singing a certain tenacious D song involving a certain takeaway restaurant called Zanzibar :p
A couple hours later we were at a backpacker bar called the woolshed in town gobbling up our free dinners and slamming as many free drinks as possible before me and Sophie headed back relativly early ready for our 4am trip to the airport and another melodramatic but extra meaningful goodbye. And that my friends was Monday.
Tuesday morning didn't really happen for me since I got back from the airport around half five and then slept till midday but the afternoon was highly productive :p I walked around the whole city, getting the lay of the land as it were in the process managed to find this glorious little French bakery cafe (one of my many talents to sniff out the nearest cake :p) called Coco Amoure and oh my god it was immense! I actually walked past it the first time becuase I couldn't bare to let myself loose inside but then it was lunchtime and I had my book with me and just HAD to sample the goods! It was more for alices benefit than mine to be honest since I knew she was arriving that evening (she had spent an extra night in mission beach after magnetic island) and I knew for a fact she would appriciate the knowldge of the whereabouts of such cakey wonders just as much as I did :p so I went in and I had the best cranberry chicken and Camembert toasted sandwich on Funny italiany bread I have ever had!! No thats right friends, I did NOT have cake! I thought i would save that experience for when Alice got here... Given walking out without cake and having to go past the room where they actually make it with all the wonderful smells and chocolaty goodness streaming from the open doors was possibly one of the most stressful and restrained acts of my entire adult existance, but I did it! And I knew I would be back tomorrow anyway :p
As I cleverly predicted Alice arrived that evening and we quickly, along with Maddy Ellie and Anna, proceeded to the woolshed once more to blag a free dinner (although we wernt actually meant to get another one tonight... Oops :p) blag more free drinks and get thoroughly gazeeboed within an hour or two :p the rest of that night mainly involved dancing on the tables cheeky monkey style, gold fish racing (like the world cup but more exciting) where I got to race the Canadian one coz I shouted out 'i'm dating a Canadian does that count' when asked if there were any canadians in the room (well they wernt the exact words I used bit I edited it for the parents sake :p) but I tried to take a picture of it and I think I blinded it with the flash so we didn't do very well :( sorry Canada, and then of course I had to hunt down the guy who murdered my hawian ley that I was wearing (it was hawian night after all :p)! Basically he was trying to pull me to the dancefloor, grabbed the ley and murdered it! I'm talking petals strewn all over the floor! I was emotionally destraught, even when Alice tried to pick up all the pieces :( it was gone :) and he still thought I was going to dance with him!! More like find something he loved and rip it apart! Ha! So as you might guess the rest of the night was something of a blur but I know for a fact that whenever alice and me are out on the town three things will Be involved, a lot of giggling, some form of embarrassing or disgusting behaviour ( this time it involved ringing mum at work seeing if she wanted to skype with her piss head daughter) and finally pictoiral evidence of our pure entertainment from the stupidest things - past objects include our own fingers, a dog, a giant leaf and soneone elses shirt. God I love that girl, she brings out the best in me :p.
Wednesday was a shopping day. A shopping day that involved barely any purchases with the exception of some pajama bottoms, some inexplicably expensive hair products, a pair of jeans, some jewellry... Ok there were a lot of purchases but we found a great massive shopping centre! What do you expect!! Of course before undertaking such exhausting activites we HAD to venture into Coco Amoure again to sample the delights of thier desserts (I was right, Alice did truely appriciate them) and we HAD to explore every local bookshop (we are both giant book sluts and we're ok with that) but then after that shopping was the only thing left to do!! Well except of course for pissing about in a photo booth, violating a ronald mcdonald statue whilst taking picture evidence and then staying till all the shops had shut for a late night viewing of the new nightmare on elmstreet remake... Actually it was an incredibly productive day :p and if that wasn't enough, whilst waiting for the bus back to the hostel we were completly blown away by the pure unadulturated joy that comes from 'nerds'. Now incase you don't remember, nerds are really really sweet and sour candies that are atrociously bad for you but come in very bright colours so you have to buy them! As a kid I loved them, as an adult I completly forgot thier existance - until now. Suffice to say we spent most of the evening repeating 'oh how very nerdy of you' in stupid accents whilst experimenting with the different amounts of nerd clam that can be created in the palm of your hand by holding them too long and then wiping it over each over...
See I told you it was a productive day! :p
Xxx