Australia

I was going to blog this past weekend about my Australia trip but I thought what better way than to continue punishing my body than to go to Chicago for St Patty's Day. As for St Patty's Day, as the kids say "you can't drink all day unless you start in the morning"...

Morning.

So now that I have changed timezones in the past month more times than I'd like to count, have slept less in a one month period than I think I've ever slept, and am bordering on exhaustion, (I'm back to taking daily naps to try to catch up) I just think it would be wise to blog before I go into unplanned hibernation.

And when you talk about unplanned hibernation it probably makes sense to talk about planned hibernation. I don't like taking medicine, advil, tylenol, whatever. So taking an Ambien for the first time was kind of a necessary evil, since the total flight time from Detroit to Sydney was a total of 22 hours. I don't know why but I thought I'd never wake up after taking the Ambien, either that or I'd pee my pants while sleeping, so just to be safe I didn't drink any water for the first couple hours of my flight. I woke up and all said, the flight over wasn't too bad.

SYDNEY
Here is the question, why don't I live in Sydney? Why don't we all live in Sydney? Seriously, what's our collective problem? Do we just not like cool places, with beautiful people, beautiful beaches, and an amazing nightlife? Do we hate ridiculously awesome weather? I don't know. I just don't know. Explain yourself. Two of my friends arrived two days before the rest of our crew and spent the days at Bondi Beach and out at clubs at night. Jetlag certainly slapped me silly the first couple of days but we plowed through...just barely. You really can't talk about Sydney without talking about Bondi Beach.

View of Bondi from Icebergs

Bondi

And that my friends is one of Sydney's famed saltwater swimming pools. The best thing about these saltwater pools is that in these saltwater pools there are not saltwater sharks. The prospect of getting eaten by sharks kind of stinks and while we were at Bondi there were shark attacks, but I was able to keep my limbs thankfully. If you're swimming at breakfast time or dinnertime there's a chance you will end up breakfast or dinner, but as long as you avoid dawn and dusk you really should be fine. Should be. Aside from Jaws and his buddies coming to hang out from time to time Bondi is arguably the best beach I've ever been to. The water is warm and clear, the waves are perfect, and gorgeous woman of all nationalities sit on the beach and go untethered into the throes. Combine that with a beach wide enough to have a serious catch with a football, body surf, and surf surf, surrounded by bars and restaurants and really I'm not sure what else you could possibly need. Of course there was that one day where the wind picked up and about 200 people got stung by jellyfish, but still, Bondi rocks. And while I'm talking Bondi here I just should give a quick thank you to my buddy Dan who not only made the wise choice of moving to Sydney and literally living across the street from the beach, but was an excellent host, and Sydney guru.

And if Bondi was the overall 1-seed in the tournament, then Manly Beach was also a 1-seed. At Manly, a soft crescent of sand that seemed to run for a mile or so, we surfed, and had another picture perfect day. The ferry to Manly also took us through the harbor which lent itself to some picturesque views of the city and sights...

Opera House
Manly Beach from up high

Manly might've been my favorite day. And another favorite aspect of Sydney has to be that you CANNOT walk two blocks without running into a thai restaurant. I was probably two more thai dishes of way from turning into a giant pad see ew. The bottom line here is that if I could bathe in coconut curry I would, and if there was ever a place to make this happen (aside from Thailand of course) I has to be Sydney. And with 66 US cents getting you 1 Australian dollar, well let's just say if you cut me open you would've found about 4,000 kaffir lime leaves.

So I'll spare you the day by day rundown of the next couple days, but after we exhausted ourselves in Sydney for five days it was time to go to Cairns (specifically Palm Cove) and check out the Great Barrier Reef.

CAIRNS

Let's just start by saying there is no ozone above Cairns, and I believe Cairns is one of the few places in the world where the ozone is depleted. I used no less than SPF 30 the entire trip. The sun was scary but not as scary as our rental house welcoming committee...
This spider was easily as big as my hand, and I say "was" because it shortly met an untimely death by running into the back of a telephone book at full speed (or something like that). As the locals say, there are all kinds of "nasties" in Australia...the black widow, the funnel spider...and since I was told to check under the toilet seat every time I went to the bathroom I did.

I spearheaded the effort to rent a house in Palm Cove and I did it all from Ann Arbor and there were 7 of us making the trip to Cairns and I was a little worried, but when we got to Palm Cove I was pleasantly surprised by the enormous house, the pool, and the one block walk to the beach. Unfortunately, from about October to May you can't really swim off the coast of Cairns. I mean, you can swim, but you risk getting stung by the killer box jellies. Again, just another local "nasty".

Our first full day we went to the Great Barrier Reef via catamaran, and we weren't just going, we were going to SCUBA. I don't know how to SCUBA and after our guide gave us a 30 minute brief on how to SCUBA I still didn't know how to SCUBA. It was a perfect day...

to get eaten by...
a God damn tiger shark (picture courtesy of our day at the Sydney Aquarium). Oh well. I put on my stinger suit (don't forget those killer box jellies) and posed for a final picture that would be sent to my family after I drowned/got eaten out there...

Dead Man...Scuba Diving.

The Great Barrier Reef, like few things do, actually lived up to the hype. And I got to pet a living giant clam that was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Now I know why people get addicted to scuba. I loved it, but I think I'll stick to basketball. Fewer sharks.

After kicking ass on sea we were ready to kick ass on land and the next couple days we ate great food and drank our favorite beer (Toohey's New) and acted like gluttonous Roman business school students. This was the lazy part of our trip and we spent healthy time chilling by the pool, got some hiking in, and fished the estuaries around Cairns (I caught a log, but the log had two crabs in it, so I technically caught two crabs, and also a little sea bream) , and just generally relaxed.

The Ugly Americans at The Woolshed

Me and my weak-ass moustache playing a game of "What Would Bear Grylls Do?"

One quick anecdote from Cairns. At the Woolshed (pictured above) we met these two German girls who were sheep shearers in New Zealand. Honest truth. They spoke some english, and we were talking about sheep shearing and such. They made $400 New Zealand bucks a month, which I imagine they spent beer and wool sweaters. They asked me if I worked, to which I replied that I am in school but I worked this past summer. One asked where I worked, and I said JPMorgan and she looked at me, scrunched her nose, shook her head, took a sip of my beer and said "JPMorgan? What is this place?". At that moment I wished I was a sheep shearer. Ignorance is bliss.

I was somewhat sad to leave Cairns because the weather was absolutely phenomenal and we had yet to die, and we were having a splendid time. Melbourne was calling though, and we hadn't seen any 'roos yet (although we'd eaten some....over-rated in my opinion), and we had our Great Ocean Road roadtrip ahead of us.

MELBOURNE AND THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD
Melbourne was a bit overcast when we got there, and we stayed local in St. Kilda, eating dinner down by the beach and grabbing a few drinks, but before we called it a night we had to take pictures (read: torment) of some wild, sleepy penguins. I just have to say that Happy Feet was more or less an inaccurate protrayal of how penguins are. Yeah, they chriped, but none sang, spoke like Chicanos, or danced. They kind of just looked at us as if to say "hey asshole, do I snap the flash when you are trying to sleep in your bed?"

The following morning we set out to drive the Great Ocean Road. The drive down the coast was the most scenic drive I've ever taken, and of course we stopped to take a million pictures. The only thing was that since the brushfires were still threatening, the ground was dry as a bone, and lightening was predicted, we couldn't stop too long because we could theoretically end up caught in deadly fires. So that puts us at Sharks, Jellies, spiders, and now brushfires. Continuing...we also saw wild koalas, porcupines, and yes mangy small kangaroos, which I'll have you all know do not wear boxing gloves. Some pics from the Great Ocean Road...


The night we stayed at Apollo Bay the entire strip lost power except for one spot, so we ended up living out our environmental protectionist fantasies by playing hours upon hours of Buck Hunter and shooting every creature in sight. It was lovely. We book-ended our roadie by a last night in Melbourne which was fun, but at this point I think we were all ready to head back to Sydney for more beach and nightlife.

The last three days we spent on Bondi and Coogee Beach. We actually ended up staying at the Coogee Bay Hotel, which really is a hotel/bar/OTB/nightclub/liquor distributor all in one. It was the closest to living in the fraternity house that I've done in years, and yes, it was a blast. Just a lot of beach, thai food, and gelato and just when we thought things were dying down it was Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney, and it just so happened that at my buddy's place we crashed at the last night (and also several nights on the front end...thank you Hedgybear) was right in the middle, smack dab, in the epicenter of the gay parade. There was a full on tranny party across the street, and we, along with a ton of the gay and straight Sydney community members, watched the parade which of course was led off by none other than the Dykes on Bikes. You really think I'm making this up? My buddy had people over, we bbq'd, hung out, and then went to Kings Cross where I believe had thirty more people shown up the entire continent would have caved in. Absolute madness. Not exactly the mellow, pre-flight evening we were looking for but oh well. We had our Toohey's New and we made the best of it.


The flight back was, let me put this nicely, fuck United Airlines. SYD to San Fran they lost my friend's bag. I of course packed two plus weeks into a backpack and gym bag. There would be no checking for me. And then upon arriving from our SFO to Denver leg, we found out that Denver to Detroit was cancelled due to weather. Weather my ass. We caught a late flight standby to Chicago, crashed at a friend's girlfriend's place for 4 hours, and then caught the Chi to Detroit the next morning at 6am. And a week later here I am. Australia was a great trip and I feel bad because I've only scratched the surface for you, but I have to go to class, and get on with my life. Six more weeks here, which is scary as hell. It's great to be back though. Enjoy St. Patty's.