Gentle giants

Hi guys! Yesterday we borrowed bikes at the hostel and rode up to the lighthouse at Cape Byron. The lighthouse has “the brightest light in the southern hemisphere” and the cape is “the easternmost point on the Australian mainland”, so we were experiencing two almost impressive records at once! What was genuinely impressive however were the herds of humpback whales making their way from Antarctica to their breeding grounds at the Great Barrier Reef.

They call it “the pacific highway”, and cape Byron is apparently that twist in the road, which all the sea creatures pass. Apart from the whales we also saw several pods of dolphins as we went along the cliff on our way to the lighthouse.

It was beautiful and sunny, and at least during the day Byron is a welcome change from “wintry” Sydney. The lighthouse itself with its pearly white and blue made me think of the villages on Crete.

We rode our bikes home again, browsing the shops, both of us interested in getting a pair of board shorts, and both of us unsuccessful. Despite the warmer climate, it is still winter, so the sun set at around 5, by which time we had to have the bikes back. We had planned to go running at the beach at sunset (barefoot, since I didn’t bring my running shoes) and even though we missed the sunset, the remaining light over the horizon behind the mountains at the western end of the bay was truly spectacular – I wish I had brought my camera!

In the evening we started by going to a free barbecue at the backpacker-club across the street, the Cheeky Monkey’s. We’d been there the day before without being too impressed, so after we’d eaten the free food we headed “downtown” – toward the beach. We’d talked to a couple of girls on the Greyhound the day before and met them again at Hotel Great Northern, playing an inordinate number of games of pool with them and a couple of friendly Aussies before heading home.

Today we got up early, checked out and jumped on the Greyhound (forgetting our food bag in the fridge at the hostel) and made our way to Brisbane. Unfortunately, the first hostel we had planned to sleep at turned out to be booked full. However, the next one we found was in Fortitude Valley the trendy part of Brisbane, a ways away from the CBD, so maybe a forced relocation wasn’t such a bad idea. Here we’ve checked in, eaten Chinese for dinner (in Chinatown, no less) and that’s about it for now. We have all day in Brisbane tomorrow before heading to Hervey Bay the day after, so we’ll see how we decide to spend the time. And seeing as how the net cafe closes in 3 minutes I might as well cut it short here. Greets from the curly-haired boy! :)

In Byron Bay

Hi folks! I’m writing this from a net cafe in Byron Bay – in other words my long awaited and oft delayed road trip has commenced!

First off, I’ve uploaded some shot’s from the lawn bowling and other activities at the (arguably premature) goodbye party last weekend. It’s so good to have a working camera again :)

Admittedly that was old new – what new stuff have I been up to? Well, since Felicity got sick, Blue Mountains was canned, and an impromptu attempt at going to Canberra also fell through, so I ended up going out with the housemates in the weekend. Most exciting of these was a burlesque show in Kings Cross – risquée! :) Oh yeah, in case you’re wondering, I’m back to being single.

I also spent some time figuring out how much my baggage weighs, and how much the excess would cost me on the flight back to Denmark at the end of the month. I get 20 kg checked and 7 kg hand baggage, and Cathay Pacific answered my email saying that the price is 108 dollars per kilo of baggage in excess of that! So, I’ll almost certainly ship the rest, since it’s 89 dollars for 5 kg that way. Good to know ahead of time, so it doesn’t sneak up on me on my last day in the country.

Hmm, what else? Well, I hit the gym, booked my travels (4WD on Fraser Island, sailing around the Whitsunday Islands) and checked the lost and found office at UTS for any trace of my driver’s license  – it didn’t turn up when I emptied my room, and sadly not at UTS either. I also went to Bondi for another surf lesson. That was relatively cold, although the water is slightly warmer than the air (22 degrees), but more seriously, my old strain-injury from the gym a couple months ago decided to rear its ugly head again. In other words the holding down and gripping onto a bucking surfboard proved too much for my left elbow, so I cut the lesson short and resigned myself to not doing any more surfing here in Oz. Oh, well…

Yesterday (Monday the 30th) Andi and I packed our stuff during the day and after a rather quick goodbye we caught the Greyhound bus at 9 PM heading North to Byron Bay. We slept rather lousily on the bus, in part due to the declined nature of the seat – it should be given honorable mention in some exercise manual somewhere; they have found the perfect angle where you are neither sitting nor lying, and as a consequence are constantly flexing your buttocks to keep from sliding down. Just as annoying are the frequent stops of the bus, which are probably the requirement of some law – it sounds very sensible in theory, but at 3:30 AM that will not be the first word that springs to mind if you’re asked to describe the phenomenon. All in all I’m not too impressed by the whole “sleeping on the bus” concept, but we may need to do it again – not to save money, but to save time and thus make the most of our relatively short trip (Andi flies back to Sydney on the 15th – I do so on the 17th).

Well, after arriving rather bleary-eyed in Byron Bay, we found a hostel (or rather let it find us; there were people with signs advertising hostels as we stepped off the bus), checked in, and went and bought breakfast. Then we went to the beach and walked quite some time there, content to take it slowly.

Back at the hostel we made a quick plan for the rest of our trip, and booked the Greyhound for the remaining journeys. Surprisingly, we actually have both accommodation and transport handled all the way to the 13th.  After that we may part ways, since I have a little more time than Andi, and would like to use it on something else than Cairns, since I’ve already been there before.

And well, that’s pretty much it. I didn’t bring my old laptop after all, as it would still be too good a thievery-target, and I don’t want to worry about it. So, I’m writing these updates from an internet cafe, which hopefully can keep me from making them much too long. Cheers!

Better late than never

So, I’ve neglected you, my faithful readers, for a month. I’d pretty much assume (or hope) that you’ve wandered off to do something else, but in case some of you are still hanging around, here is a recap of what I’ve done with my time. I’ll try to keep it brief, otherwise I’ll just scare both you guys and myself away from this blog forever :)

The first two weeks (May 26 to June 9) was spent frantically scrambling to complete one project after the other. I got an extension for my Recent Advances in Software Engineering, which is why this period didn’t end until the 9th of June.

It was rather stressful, but I managed to make a satisfactory result on all fronts. So while it might be wasted from a pragmatic standpoint (the grades don’t get transferred back to DTU), I guess I just had to do it to be true to myself and my work ethics. Must admit, it’s hard to tell the difference between perfectionism and OCD sometimes…

I did manage to squeeze in time to go to a birthday party for Andreas, at the Cargo on Darling Harbour. Also, on the last Saturday in that period (7th of June) I went to the Paddington Market with the same gang (Andreas, Julie and Nicola). It was like a slightly larger and more expensive version of the Glebe Market. However, I was somewhat frustrated that no matter how much cool hippie-clothes they sold, none of it was for guys. Well, even more frustrating was that my camera started to malfunction from one day to the next, for no apparent reason. All pictures came out like this:

And this was only shortly after I had bought an underwater camera housing for it – dagnammit! Well, I searched the web for similar problems, which turned out to be a very good idea; the issue is a well known one with certain Sony cameras from a specific period from 2002-2004, so Sony is offering a free repair even after the warranty period has expired. It took me a bit of time to find this out, contact Sony, and finally get redirected to a repair shop. But last Friday (the 20th) I got it back, fully functional again.

So, here we are today on the 25th of June. This is also a special day – for one thing I’m exactly half a year from being 25, and second, I’m leaving Oz in a month from now. The mind reels at the implications :)

My plans have changed much in the last couple weeks. First I was planning to drive up the East coast with the Danish gang mentioned above from this Monday. But in the end our expectation for when and how to travel, not to mention finding a car suitable for 4 people, turned out to make it too impractical.

Instead I agreed with Andi, one of the Austrians living at my house, that I would follow him up the East coast on the coming Monday (June 30th), riding the Greyhound buses. It’s nice to have someone to share the experiences with, and I think 2 is a more manageable number than 4. So our plan is to see Fraser Island and sail around the Whitsundays, and finally be in Cairns around the 16th – and just exploring at our leisure in between. I haven’t booked my flight back to Sydney yet (my flight to Denmark is from here), but I’ll do it today or tomorrow. I’d been thinking of getting the Advanced Open Water Diver certification while I’m in Cairns, but I’ve decided against it – for one it’s expensive, but more than that, I don’t want to try to recreate my experience from when I first was in Cairns. I think the memories have a certain beauty in their uniqueness, and should be allowed to stay that way, at least for now.

That still leaves the question of what I’m doing until the 30th. Well, I’d planned to go on a 5 day surf school/trip to Byron Bay, starting today, but the tour I booked turned out to be a ghost in the machine – a mistake in the ordering system made it look like a tour was going, when really it wasn’t. So I’m still hanging around Sydney – I handed over my room in Glebe on Monday (23rd), but so far I’ve just moved upstairs, sleeping on an inflated mattress in John and Planta’s room (in case I haven’t mentioned him before, Planta is our Brazilian housemate, who moved in after Chifley moved to Manly). I’ve been talking to Felicity about going hiking in the Blue Mountains in the weekend. That sounds like a great way to get out and see something while I’m here – if not that, then I’ll come up with some other way of getting out of the house, so I don’t abuse the hospitality of my current roommates too much.

Apart from all this planning, I’ve also found the time to see Henry and Belinda again, and have gone out with my housemates a number of times. For example, this weekend we went to Govinda’s – a vegetarian buffet followed by a movie (Lars and the real girl – highly recommended), and yesterday we went to a similar thing at Madame Fling Flong in Newtown. John is great at arranging these kinds of things – my stay in Sydney would have been a lot less fun if it hadn’t been for him. Also, I had a goodbye party in the weekend, where we went lawn bowling, and I cooked spinach-salmon-lasagne for dinner.

So, going forward, I hope to do more short, visually aided updates again, when I hit the road, same as I did when I first came to Oz. Of, course I shouldn’t make promises I might not keep, but watch this space anyway – I might just have something interesting to say :)

Update from a busy boy

Hi folks – hope your respective lives are going well :) In case you haven’t noticed, I’m hitting a double milestone today – this is my 50th blog post (!) and I’ll be back in Denmark in two months (!!!). On one hand two months sounds like frighteningly short time (out of 7 total), but if you think of it as a vacation, it’s actually quite a while – especially since I’ll have a month after that to acclimatize in Denmark before school starts again.

And what have I been up to? Well, as the heading suggests uni work is taking its toll on me at the moment. Tuesday I had the test in Interaction Design, where we went to the gaming arcade, Intencity, played games, and answered a bunch of usability questions about them (it was a written exam). That was quite an unusual experience, both because I haven’t been to such a place in ages, and because we’re looking at the games with a new perspective. Still, I enjoyed myself, answered all the questions (at least to my own satisfaction), played airhockey, a samurai game and Dance Dance Revolution Extreme :)

The next few days Adam and I worked on our game project – I’m glad that’s finally making some headway. Saturday was probably the busiest day yet. First I met up with two of the girls from my group in Interaction Design, so we could prepare our paper prototype (“cardboard, Bluetack, pencil and paper” prototype to be precise) and the scenarios that we would be testing it in. Then we went home to my place and did tests with the prototype on four of my housemates and friends. John was cooking seafood, and we were inviting a bunch of people over, so it was a kind of party, where we would kidnap people one by one and run experiments on them in my room :) Well, it wasn’t really that dramatic, we just wanted to see if they were able to complete a few simple (at least that’s what we thought they were) tasks on our prototype. Quite interesting although it is the second time I’ve tried doing such a test. In either case, it was quite exhausting work. Nevertheless, I ended up going out with Felicity afterwards, though it wasn’t long before I was so tired that I headed home again.

Sunday I slept in, then headed to uni to do some assignment work by myself. Later, I headed home, met with Felicity, played some guitar and then went to the cinema to see the new Indiana Jones movie along with Andi and Amy from the house – that was fun. I even resisted the urge to bring my own hat :)

Hmm, what else? Well, Sydney is still slightly too cold for comfort – I’m looking forward to going north. My plans are still sketchy though, since I’m too busy to plan out the details yet. So I’ll probably spend some time after the 6th of June (there the last assignment is due) recuperating and planning my remaining time in Oz, and then go travelling. No worries :)