Sunday, September 05, 2004
Taken drugs and feel better
well, took lots of sudafed and rubbed vicks all over me and feel like i can communicate now. also missed the bus twice earlier when i was going to go home due to being at the wrong bus terminal. so came back to cafe.
so, well, where to begin??
i guess when we left townsville, which must be 5 weeks ago. Me and reg set off in his new aquisition, a nissan patrol 3.2 straight 6 turbo. nice bit of kit. no leaks anywhere, and he got it for 5k dollars. lucky bugger. its still working as well....
well, off we set, with a 9 or 10 thousand k's in front of us, plan was to go from townsville to darwin to see his army mate,lichfield national park, then to kunnunara, then through the kimberly to broome, then down the west coast to perth and then up the great central road through the (simpson?little?)desert to Uluru, then down to adelaide, melbourne and the great ocean road then finally back to sydney...
a big plan and six weeks to do it in. we could do it though. we set off in high spirits, and we made it through to darwin in 2.5 days from townsville, we were knackered after 2500k's.
i just realised i already wrote this stuff in another entry. cant be bothered to delete it though...err, so what had i left out...err.
one of the funniest things was when we crossed into WA at the border. This is going to be rude, so keep the kids away from the screen.
For whatever reason, reggie likes to write rude messages on things from time to time and the food box we had was no exception. It was the night of the whisky curse, when we drank 1.5 liters of whisky with his army mate (i ended up throwing up out side my tent). we were playing darts for forfeit shots of whisky and it soon began to get stupid as before long noone could hit anything and the downward spiral tightened fast. well, anyways....fast forward to the border crossing, a couple of days later, where there is a fruit and veg quarantine checkpoint.
The quarantine official asks if we have any fruit or veg, and we say, oh yeah, in the back. so we open up the boot and get the food box out and start giving him the fruit and veg we have left over from NT. He takes it all and then says,
"and i'll need the box too, as its a fruit box. i'll give you a replacement."
as reggie picks up the box and swings round to give it to the guy, the end that had been hidden against the rest of the crap in the back of the car sweeps by as he turns, revealing to me the legend
"fuck off you cunt face"
in big blue marker pen that reggie had written in his whisky haze.
well, i immediately started cracking up as reggie blankly looked at me as he handed it to the guy, and i just had to turn around and walk away and get in the car before i added insult to injury. the guy took it very well, cos there is no way he didnt see it. Reggie was completely oblivious to the whole thing until i told him afterwards.
so that was nice.
Some piccies...
well, here are some piccies from the past month.
we went to a parrot sanctuary in Kalbarri and, wow, the colour of some of the birds was just incredible. Its liuke some of them were electrically powered with neon lights. Funniest bit of the day was reggies recording a large parrot making noise and then playing it back to it, whereupon it proceeded to go mental!Took over 50 shots, but here are some samples
Some birds....
This is from Monkey Mia, a dolphin and dougong sanctuary that we visited. The dolphins were amazing, 6 showed up at one point just cruising along in front of us waiting to be fed. But along with the dolphins, there were some pelicans, i'd never seen one before but they have to be a good candidate for stupidist looking bird and fattest bird ever. If you have never seen one, they are huge, about 3 feet tall when standing up.
So here are some fat birds...
This kid hassled the pelican and it wasnt happy, tried to attack her...still, it made me laugh. The kid wasnt fazed, and came back 5 mins later to hassle them again but i'd put my camera down by then...
"Hello birdy...."
"Aaargh...run away!"
We went on a river cruise on the adelaide river up by Darwin to see the jumping crocs. These were the salty variety, and will quite happily eat you!I especially like the "Crocodiles may move undetected in this area..." on the sign....stealth crocs!
Some crocs...
Heres a movie of one of the smaller salties jumping for the meat....
Jumping croc...may take a while to download and is a quicktime file
In the Kimberley ranges is Winjana gorge, and there are hundreds of freshwater crocs(aparantly they are safe as long as you dont poke them with anything)there, swimming around and lazing on the banks. they arent as big as the salties, but i still chickened out of going swimming with them. I did however try and get up close to one, and the movie below is what happened. Scared the shit out of me!
MOVIE with sound....when crocs attack...i nearly shit my pants...this is a 3.3mb file so be patient...tis funny though!
My favourite sunset shots...as we were leaving winjana gorge on a dirt road, all the dust we were kicking up gave these fantastic shots of the setting sun...
shell beach, near monkey mia...10 meters deep and 110km long, all made of shells...amazing
dolphins at monkey mia
Perth
well, made it to perth. reggie has gone on to sydney, so am here on my own, although will meet up with some people i met on the way down from the north.
i feel like shit as have some sort of headcold / flu, and so am going back to my tent to have a sleep and drink orange juice by the gallon (not at the same time obviously...) until i feel better.
Met up with Nat and Paul, two friends of my brothers, and they seem to be loving it over here. Their first house has a swimming pool for crying out loud. its all good and i cant expect that im going to end up living in any other country except this one.
have had a great time coming down the west coast, again, i'll fill in the blanks at some stage but not today as my head feels like its in a vice.
it pissed it down last night and its freezing too, except during the day when its nice and warm. getting me ready for coming home i guess....except for the warm bit in the day.
well, later
kev
