Labyrinth

It's really difficult to explain our house to people - actually it's pretty hard to understand the layout for us! So I created this excellent diagram to help. I'm sure Mathias will be proud of my 2D computer drawing skills.

As you can see, there are 4 houses that are all connected by covered walk ways. The front doors are never used so we enter by the side street at gate 1 - there is a code on the gate for security.

Immediately to the right are 2 washers and a dryer than we can use free of charge (woop!) and to the left are the bins and washing lines. To enter the houses you need to go through another coded gate (number 2).

To get to our room we walk through the big kitchen, down the 2nd walk way and then through the door on the left and up the stairs. We use the big kitchen, which is house number 2 and 3's kitchens knocked into one, but if it is busy we can use the small kitchen too.

Gate 3 leads to the kitchen that was originally the kitchen of our house but it is not possible to access it anymore. Some of the students that live here get their meals included and I think that is where the woman does the cooking for those meals.

We have a bathroom just down the hall from us but if that is busy then we can use the ones in the kitchen or sometimes Mathias goes to one in another house.

On our floor there are 3 other bedrooms and downstairs there are another 2. The other houses are similar but house 1 has a living room where we an go and socialise (we don't :P) and there is a piano there that some of the students practise on.

So, as you can see it is a bit of a warren! But it works pretty well and we like it.

We can pay rent!

Just a week ago we weren't sure if we were going to have to head back to the UK because the work situation wasn't working out very well, but since then I've been hired at the zoo to do catering and Mathias got hired at a cafe!

Today is rent day and we can actually pay it! Woooop!!

Tomorrow it will be 3 months since we arrived in Australia. It has been really fun a lot of the time and really stressful a lot of the time but I guess that's all part of the adventure.

Here's hoping things go a little smoother from here...

Driving Down Under

It took us about 2 weeks to drive from Northern Queensland to Melbourne so I thought I'd talk about driving in Australia, seeing as it's nothing like any driving I've had to do before.

I've driven in the ass crack of nowhere in the US, where there are lots of boringly long, straight roads, but it's different here. First of all, you can't relax. Ever. There is always the potential for animals darting out in front of you here, so you have to be very alert the whole time. Just looking at the road ahead isn't good enough - you have to be scanning the sides of the road the whole time to look for kangaroos and emus that might be resting there.

And that's the thing about these bloody kangaroos - they stand at the side of the road until you're just within hitting distance and then they hop out in front of you! They are so dumb! They are their own worst enemy - they blend in to the colour of the grass around them, they like to hang out at the side of the road, and they panic when you get close, which is why they suddenly hop out. It would upset me if I hit a kangaroo but that isn't the only problem - kangaroos are HUGE. If you hit one of them you're going to cause some serious damage to your car. A lot of the people that live in the outback have special bars on their cars just in case.

This isn't a rare occurence. There are dead kangaroos all over the roads and I had to slow down for ones by the side of the road during every single trip. They are most active when the sun is coming up/going down because it's cooler, and it means that driving at night is particularly dangerous. Once the sun goes down at around 8pm the roads get very quiet because of this (we ended up driving in the dark once by accident. Never again!)

And the dead kangaroos are a hazard too! They are so big, if you hit some roadkill you're going to damage your car then too!

Other than kangaroos, we have seen all of the following in the middle of the road:
snake, goanna, sheep, cows, emus, various other birds, possum... possibly others that I've forgotten.

Luckily it was only the possum that didn't survive these meetings! :/

No chance of a wrong turn around here

Still never managed to get a picture of an actual kangaroo in the road because we're always concentrating too much on not hitting it!

There are a lot of unfenced cattle areas. Cows have the right of way around here!

Emus!

Emus and kangaroos often have friends around, so if you see one you have to watch out for others running out

Of course the biggest problem with driving out here is when your car has a tantrum!

Spotting kangaroos is a lot easier when your co-pilot helps out...

Fossicking

Whilst we were in Emerald we stopped by the local gem fields in Sapphire and Rubyvale (can you guess what kind of gems you can find there?) to try our hand at fossicking! Fossicking basically just means searching through dirt until you find something pretty. Here's how you do it:

First, you get a big bucket of dirt and empty some of it into a sieve

Then you shake it to get rid of the small pieces

You have to shake it a lot

Next, you have to wash it whilst shaking it

You have to wash it a lot. You do an up and down motion so that the "centrifugal force" (or some such nonsense) pushes the heavy pieces (the sapphires) into the centre and should make them easier to find

Then you carefully tip it out onto a table and search through all of it to find your gems

It's a lot of searching. You have to face the sun so that you can see if anything is shiny

Once you've repeated the process until you've been through the whole bucket you should come out with a bag full of lovely sapphires!

Then you get Alan from Stranraer to go through them with his sexy specs to verify which ones are genuine sapphires and which ones are lowly quartz

And then you do your "I OWN A BAG OF SAPPHIRES" dance

Emerald

During our trip down from Ayr to Melbourne we happened upon the town of Emerald. We hadn't planned to spend any time there but we found out that the rodeo was going to be on that weekend so we ended up camping for 2 nights! I can't say you'd ever find Emerald in a tourism guide but it is a lovely little town in the middle of nowhere and I would definitely go back again if I was in the area.

Emerald sits right on the Tropic of Capricorn!

There is even a Yellow Brick Road leading to Emerald City!

Here is the bridge that we slept under ;)

And here is the kids playground that we played on

Cows have right of way around here

The rodeo was cool! The horse riders were so skilled, I was really in awe. The bull riding and cow tackling wasn't really to my taste but then these people rely on the cows for their livelihood so I don't think they would do anything to really harm them. The atmosphere was really good and we had a fun time.

So these girls had to steer their horses around 3 of these drums as fast as they could. I couldn't believe the speeds they were going!

This man had just jumped off his horse, at speed, and grabbed this calf by the horns. The timer stops when he manages to flip the cow onto its back

And of course the junk food was great! This is called a Dagwood Dog - a hotdog dipped in batter and fried. The ketchup is to provide some vitamins.

The Birds!

Just as we crossed over the state border to Victoria we camped for the night in this seemingly idyllic spot by the river:

Little did we know, it was about to turn into a scene from my mum's favourite Hitchcock film.

At first we only put the inside layer of the tent up, because the flies are really annoying over here so if they get too bad you can escape to the tent but still have the benefit of the daylight and not getting too hot in there.

A lovely little bird came hopping over. I thought we had made a friend... and then he spied a loose thread on the tent and started pulling on it! Mathias wanted to shoo him away but I knew he was just doing it to build his nest so I told Mathias to leave him to it because "it's for the babies!!"

Tent Stealer, as I have now named that bird species, flew off with his new treasure and we continued sitting happily... until he came back and started pulling all the threads out of the tent! Soon we were going to have no tent left! So I finally gave in and let Mathias scare him away.

Here is Tent Stealer in action. You can't see it too well on the photo but he has a bunch of our tent in his beak:

We put the outer part of the tent on to stop any more tent stealing then set about making dinner (chips and beans! It was so good!) when we got two new friends. A different species of bird this time - it has a really beautiful voice but it is black and has red eyes so they are kind of freaky. They kept trying to sneak over to the stove to grab our food! Anyone that knows me understands that you do not mess with me when I am hungry! I was having none of this! I took over the bird scaring responsibilities whilst Mathias cooked. When we had shooed one of them away he immediately went and sat on the bonnet of the car and did a massive poo on it. I guess it's the birds' version of giving someone the middle finger. We ate in relative peace after that and then went to bed.

Fast forward to the next morning: we ate peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast and then started packing up the tent, leaving the car boot open so that we could put everything away. When we were distracted the birds hopped into the car and went straight for our food box - they must have been watching us have breakfast because they knew exactly where to find our loaf of bread! Mathias went to chase them out (after I'd taken a photo, of course. Priorities!) but one of them panicked and ended up going further into the car and kept smashing himself against the windows to try to get out! We opened a door and he finally escaped but, as I discovered a few days later, not before crapping all over the car.

Billabong Sanctuary

We had to head back to Townsville for a few days to get the car fixed. As we were bored of hanging around the petrol station car park that had become our home, we decided to spend a day at the Billabong Sanctuary that was just down the road.

BEST DECISION EVER!!!!

This one had a baby in it's pouch. Very odd watching it squirm around in there.

Meet Ray Charles! He's a blindo and he's lovely!

Once I got this kangaroo to stop eating a paper bag he munched on the seeds in my hand :)

Wombat! I want one.

Trying to stay cool.

*ovaries exploding*

My best fake smile!

You say "big wings, Billy!" and he does this!

Emu!

These are freshwater crocs. Apparently they won't eat you. I'm still not putting my foot in there.

Dingoes Ate My Baby (10 points to whoever correctly guesses that pop culture reference)

And finally, my arch nemesis, the saltwater crocodile

No. Just, no.

So, that was a few days ago and we've since driven about 600km south. We're in a little town called Emerald just now where we went "fossicking" for sapphires yesterday. We came out with a small bag of them! One of them was of "gem quality", meaning it was large enough and pure enough to be cut into a nice stone for jewellery. The shop assistants started trying to coerce Mathias into getting it put into a ring for me and we quickly left.

Tonight we are heading to a rodeo! Not sure what that entails exactly but apparently 95% of the town's population will be there, so it should be fun. YeeHa!!!