Friday, August 06, 2004
Townsville..possibly the stupidest town name ever?
Townsville, meaning Town Town. brilliant.
actually, its named after a guy called Mr Towns. Fair enough, i guess.
well, whats happened then?
came down to townsville with Reggie on saturday, am staying with scotty. In the mean time, went skydiving from 12000ft (50 secs freefall) and wow, was it a biggy. absolutely awesome, dude. phenominal. Cant really explain the experience right now, but will flesh it out a bit later.
suffice to say the guy who i was strapped to was introduced to me as Animal and his speach so gravelly you could picture hundreds of tiny excavators digging for mineral wealth in his voicebox. He sounded like he should do film trailers, and was lightly dozing as we ascended the 12000 ft ( a la Hicks in the drop plane in Aliens). The few words he did say as we went up were in response to me saying that (trying to keep my fears down) this should be the safest id ever felt in an aeroplane given the fact i had a parachute. his response was that
"who's got the parachute? I think you'll find its me."
which if course did wonders.
anyways, the reason i have no time now is that im getting on a boat to go to the reef for 3 days diving. have spent the last 2 days in the pool learning, and now the boat leaves in 2 hours. it is going to be unbelievably mindblowing. We can dive to 28 meters to one of the worlds top ten dive sites, the SS Yongala.
After freaking out badly in the pool yesterday after having failed to clear the water from my mask, and then inhaling through my nose, and choking, and not being able to stop choking and then freaking badly, blindly panicking and rising to the surface, i was worried that i wasnt going to be able to do the dive course or go diving again. However, after giving myself a good kicking last night, today was completely different, and i was taking my mask off, swimming around, and generally clearing any nasty H2O out of my vision with malicious impunity. marvellous.
Im so exicited i fear i may explode, and the crew im going diving with all seem cool. there's a couple of amusing characters, but havent got time to describe them at the moment.
err, a few other things to report, like the opera singing taxi driver in Alice that id forgotten about, which was promted by a singing taxi driver the other day, who was shocking. but ill have to do that later, as i have to go and buy some beer and drink a few before the boat leaves.
ok, all aboard!!
laters good people
kev
