Ha ha ha! Thanks for all the guesses by text and email!
Here are the guesses so far:
* clip's 30th birthday (very very popular guess this one - she says "piss off")
* clip is "up the duff", "preggers", "up the stick", "sprog-farming", "hanging a doughnut"
* we're going into the outback and there will be no shops for her
* the world will collide with Mars
* the official start to Australia's birthday
* we're moving to a new country
* clip has decided she's had enough and wants to come back to UK for good
* North Korea launches it's first wave of nuclear attack
* the first successful hybrid of the killer bee & the opossum is accidentally released into the Australian bush and starts its revenge
* Mr S Parker suddenly acknowledges your letter, that he was wrong all along, pleads for mercy, supplies you with double your costs and offers you his wife
* the second coming
* the world will be destroyed by a meteor shower
* we will miss the Leeds/Reading festival
* we get engaged/married/divorced/baptised
* we adopt an orphaned duck-billed platypus, and calling it Annabel, try to get her into a different country with a doctored passport, using the Chernobyl disaster as a cover story for the bill & tail
* survive a day of sobriety
* actually sell the "teapot"
* agree to coming back to work for Abbott
* sell the publishing rights to your adventures to J.K.Rowling
Heh heh, very funny thanks everyone.. but NO! They're all wrong! Keep trying. Here's some clues:
The traumatic period started four days ago
The traumatic period ends on 2nd September.
We're having to sleep in the tent.
We've lost our carefully-cultivated image as totally uber-cool backpackers.
On to another subject: while we were in Brisbane we went to the Singapore Airlines office to try and get clip's flights reinstated. Marina, the lady behind the desk, told us we had broken the ticket rules and she couldn't help us. She recommended we complain to the travel agent who had failed to explain the rules to us when we arranged clip's flights home to England. We pointed out that it was a Singapore Airlines telephone ticket agent who had failed to explain the rules to us, so Marina went to get her supervisor.
My jaw slackened as her supervisor gave the following explanation for their agent's failure to explain the rules to us: when we told the agent that clip was going back to England and returning to Australia to complete the remaining sectors of her trip, the agent apparently probably thought we meant that clip was coming back in a couple of years time with a new set of tickets.
I asked why the ticket rules exist. The supervisor said they are to stop people buying Round The World tickets in order to get cheaper return flights to expensive countries. When I pointed out that we clearly hadn't done that the supervisor went to consult her Sales Manager. The Sales Manager, who remained hidden behind a partition the whole time, sent the message back that he thought we had had our money's worth from the RTW ticket already.
They also refused to reinstate clip's tickets because the RTW ticket was issued by Virgin Atlantic, and Singapore Airlines would have to try and claim reimbursement (probably unsuccessfully) for the cost of any reinstated flights from Virgin Atlantic. But as we have already paid Virgin Atlantic, who have already paid Singapore Airlines, for the flights clip has not even used yet, this is one of the most stupid and shit excuses I have ever heard.
13 August 2003
04 August 2003
Rain aside, we didn't really like Cairns; seafront over-development has replaced any nice sandy beach with grotty mud and the local council has had to provide a big swimming pool on the esplanade instead. The city centre itself is a lurid retina-scarring patchwork of adverts for commercial 'adventures' and signs for the hundreds of independent tourist information bureaux who only offer information related to them earning commission on a tour booking.
Being the middle of winter, when the temperature drops marginally below unbearably hot for a while, the whole region was crawling with tourists, and all the campsites were full of Australian couples and their screaming children. Despite the rampant intrusive hordes we eventually found a great place to stay, near a creek on the side of a hill. We saw a blue and black Ulysses butterfly. We fed bread to some freshwater turtles. We fed vindaloo curry to a water rat.
One thing that Cairns did have in abundance was shops, and clip decided she needed to buy herself some new clothes. Having been deprived of her favourite pastime for many months, it was with some anxiety that I let her loose with a credit card and fifty dollars in cash. She tightened her rucksack straps, set her lips purposefully and marched away with a demented gleam in her eye. An hour of worry later I was relieved to find that my angst had been unjustified, she only spent $15!
The intermittent rain and sweltering heat certainly gave an air of authenticity to our walks through the swathes of rainforest covering the surrounding mountainsides. We visited waterfalls, mangroves, rivers, gorges, pools, beaches, unusual rocks and impressive trees. The mosquitoes were a complete pain in the arse. We visited Port Douglas, Mossman and Daintree, spent a last night in Cairns, and headed south past Bellenden National Park through endless sugar cane plantations.
We called in at Mission Beach to look for cassowarys (aka lethal tooled-up Roadrunners with attitude) but, after several tense hours in the rainforests, sweating, stumbling into cobwebs, being stabbed by spiky plants and tripping over lianas, we gave up and continued to Ingham where we camped near a sausage tree. The rain finally stopped and the sun came out again. Yey!
At Townsville we looked across at Magnetic Island from the top of Castle Hill and got an 'en suite' campsite (we had our own little toilet and shower block) for 2 pounds each. As we approach the populated areas of Australia more and more of the people at caravan parks are permanent residents; they live there in their 'weathered' caravans. Judging by all the satellite dishes and expensive cars, this is clearly a lucrative way to live. We handfed a chicken carcass to a possum.
Next stop was Airlie Beach, a travellers' mecca in the Whitsundays National Park. The seventy-four Whitsunday Islands lie just offshore in the Coral Sea, flanked by the Great Barrier Reef.
We sailed across to Hayman Island on a big red catamaran and spent the day sunbathing on a coral beach (very much like lying on a million warm chicken bones with swimming trunks on) and snorkelling the fringing reef in Blue Pearl Bay. The fish were bigger and more numerous than in Fiji. The water clarity was superb and we found ourselves swimming amidst shoals of hundreds of brightly-coloured fish, dived to and touched a giant clam and saw big fluorescent wrasses.
We visited Shute Harbour and climbed up Mt. Rooper and, after a few more days of getting sunburned on the beach, headed inland via Mt. Ossa (narrowly avoiding running over a huge brown shiny snake on the way - a Water Python?) to a bush camp in Eungella National Park, supposedly a great place to see Duck-billed Platypuses in the wild.
Eungella is 650m above sea level and it was too cold to sleep. In the morning my thermometer, which showed -2C, was frozen to my chair, and there was ice in our saucepan. The cold didn't seem to affect the rats though; they spent most of the night noisily scattering the contents of our rubbish bag across the campsite.
We did lots of walking in the park. We saw Brush Fowls, Pita birds, a Red-legged Pademelon, a drunk Rose-crowned Fruit Dove that kept falling out of a tree (it had been eating fermented nectar) and... two Duck-billed Platypuses! The first from the public viewing platform at Broken River bridge (along with a crowd of other people) and the second at a deserted spot three miles upstream. We sat alone together in the rainforest and watched it swimming and diving for over half an hour. They were smaller than I had expected but very cute.
On the second night we built a campfire and fed pasta to a rat with a white tail.
The next day, desperate for warmth, we took a shortcut down through Homebush and across the sugar cane plantations back to the seaside. We got held up over and over again by the same mindbogglingly long, trundling sugar cane train as it criss-crossed the road, and finally reached Sarina in the afternoon.
By lucky hap we had arrived during Sarina Breastfeeding Week. I was somewhat disappointed to find that the event was not as overt as it could have been.
It was also Sarina Show and Rodeo! Sadly, we missed the sugar cane judging but we did make it in time to watch a bearded geriatric fashion an eggcup on a pedal-lathe, see some blacksmiths struggle to shoe a frisky horse, wander through the Poultry and Waterfowl shed (imagine the racket from six hundred closely-caged farmyard birds, most of which were cockerels with poor timekeeping skills) and watch a heat of the 'Silver Spike' where regional gangs of well-muscled strutting railway workers in designer eyewear and matching sweatbands race to lay 13m of regulation track and drive a little train along it. The safety rules dictate that they are not allowed to run but they may "walk quickly" - the resulting combination of brutal hammering and frenzied, slow-motion mincing was absolutely hilarious.
In the evening we filled an old lemonade bottle with cheap red wine and went to watch the open bullriding competition. These bulls were enormous and the riders' concentrations can't have been helped by the generator repeatedly breaking down, plunging the arena into silent semi-darkness each time it did so. Most of the cowboys got bucked off before the eight second ride-qualifying whistle. Several then got trampled or tossed or both. One got knocked out. Another was flung powerfully to the ground, trampled, then tossed incredibly hard into the air and thrown against a metal fence; he had to be carried to an ambulance with a neck brace on. Then there was a firework display.
Being the middle of winter, when the temperature drops marginally below unbearably hot for a while, the whole region was crawling with tourists, and all the campsites were full of Australian couples and their screaming children. Despite the rampant intrusive hordes we eventually found a great place to stay, near a creek on the side of a hill. We saw a blue and black Ulysses butterfly. We fed bread to some freshwater turtles. We fed vindaloo curry to a water rat.
One thing that Cairns did have in abundance was shops, and clip decided she needed to buy herself some new clothes. Having been deprived of her favourite pastime for many months, it was with some anxiety that I let her loose with a credit card and fifty dollars in cash. She tightened her rucksack straps, set her lips purposefully and marched away with a demented gleam in her eye. An hour of worry later I was relieved to find that my angst had been unjustified, she only spent $15!
The intermittent rain and sweltering heat certainly gave an air of authenticity to our walks through the swathes of rainforest covering the surrounding mountainsides. We visited waterfalls, mangroves, rivers, gorges, pools, beaches, unusual rocks and impressive trees. The mosquitoes were a complete pain in the arse. We visited Port Douglas, Mossman and Daintree, spent a last night in Cairns, and headed south past Bellenden National Park through endless sugar cane plantations.
We called in at Mission Beach to look for cassowarys (aka lethal tooled-up Roadrunners with attitude) but, after several tense hours in the rainforests, sweating, stumbling into cobwebs, being stabbed by spiky plants and tripping over lianas, we gave up and continued to Ingham where we camped near a sausage tree. The rain finally stopped and the sun came out again. Yey!
At Townsville we looked across at Magnetic Island from the top of Castle Hill and got an 'en suite' campsite (we had our own little toilet and shower block) for 2 pounds each. As we approach the populated areas of Australia more and more of the people at caravan parks are permanent residents; they live there in their 'weathered' caravans. Judging by all the satellite dishes and expensive cars, this is clearly a lucrative way to live. We handfed a chicken carcass to a possum.
Next stop was Airlie Beach, a travellers' mecca in the Whitsundays National Park. The seventy-four Whitsunday Islands lie just offshore in the Coral Sea, flanked by the Great Barrier Reef.
We sailed across to Hayman Island on a big red catamaran and spent the day sunbathing on a coral beach (very much like lying on a million warm chicken bones with swimming trunks on) and snorkelling the fringing reef in Blue Pearl Bay. The fish were bigger and more numerous than in Fiji. The water clarity was superb and we found ourselves swimming amidst shoals of hundreds of brightly-coloured fish, dived to and touched a giant clam and saw big fluorescent wrasses.
We visited Shute Harbour and climbed up Mt. Rooper and, after a few more days of getting sunburned on the beach, headed inland via Mt. Ossa (narrowly avoiding running over a huge brown shiny snake on the way - a Water Python?) to a bush camp in Eungella National Park, supposedly a great place to see Duck-billed Platypuses in the wild.
Eungella is 650m above sea level and it was too cold to sleep. In the morning my thermometer, which showed -2C, was frozen to my chair, and there was ice in our saucepan. The cold didn't seem to affect the rats though; they spent most of the night noisily scattering the contents of our rubbish bag across the campsite.
We did lots of walking in the park. We saw Brush Fowls, Pita birds, a Red-legged Pademelon, a drunk Rose-crowned Fruit Dove that kept falling out of a tree (it had been eating fermented nectar) and... two Duck-billed Platypuses! The first from the public viewing platform at Broken River bridge (along with a crowd of other people) and the second at a deserted spot three miles upstream. We sat alone together in the rainforest and watched it swimming and diving for over half an hour. They were smaller than I had expected but very cute.
On the second night we built a campfire and fed pasta to a rat with a white tail.
The next day, desperate for warmth, we took a shortcut down through Homebush and across the sugar cane plantations back to the seaside. We got held up over and over again by the same mindbogglingly long, trundling sugar cane train as it criss-crossed the road, and finally reached Sarina in the afternoon.
By lucky hap we had arrived during Sarina Breastfeeding Week. I was somewhat disappointed to find that the event was not as overt as it could have been.
It was also Sarina Show and Rodeo! Sadly, we missed the sugar cane judging but we did make it in time to watch a bearded geriatric fashion an eggcup on a pedal-lathe, see some blacksmiths struggle to shoe a frisky horse, wander through the Poultry and Waterfowl shed (imagine the racket from six hundred closely-caged farmyard birds, most of which were cockerels with poor timekeeping skills) and watch a heat of the 'Silver Spike' where regional gangs of well-muscled strutting railway workers in designer eyewear and matching sweatbands race to lay 13m of regulation track and drive a little train along it. The safety rules dictate that they are not allowed to run but they may "walk quickly" - the resulting combination of brutal hammering and frenzied, slow-motion mincing was absolutely hilarious.
In the evening we filled an old lemonade bottle with cheap red wine and went to watch the open bullriding competition. These bulls were enormous and the riders' concentrations can't have been helped by the generator repeatedly breaking down, plunging the arena into silent semi-darkness each time it did so. Most of the cowboys got bucked off before the eight second ride-qualifying whistle. Several then got trampled or tossed or both. One got knocked out. Another was flung powerfully to the ground, trampled, then tossed incredibly hard into the air and thrown against a metal fence; he had to be carried to an ambulance with a neck brace on. Then there was a firework display.
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