Aussie, aussie, aussie!

I'm sure you'll all be relieved to know that my holidays didn't end in Mexico. When I got to Australia I arrived in Cairns for my friend Lisa's wedding, also the next week was my birthday so I figured it'd just be silly to go back to work on my birthday so I stayed two weeks :)

Cairns is a beautiful place to be in the winter, 25-30 degrees with blue skies, sandy beaches and greenery everywhere... you just gotta watch out for the crocodiles. I'm quite lucky as a couple of my besties from high school live up there so I can mooch free accommodation from them when the Melbourne winters get cold and dreary.

The morning after I flew in was Lisa's hens day, we woke early for a bbq breakfast and early morning kayak at Palm Cove, but the weather was crappy so we missed out on the kayak :( The rest of the day was fun and relaxing, we went to one of the resorts, had a picnic on the beach and I had a sneaky jet-lagged nap in a hammock while the others did yoga.

The great thing about the wedding was I got to catch up with the whole gang as Krichelle, Anna, Casey, Fay, Hayden and I spent the next few days with Lisa and Andy helping prepare for the wedding which was at Lisa and Andy's home in Speewah. Speewah is up in the hills behind Cairns where they have a split level block surrounded by rainforest, the perfect place for a wedding.

The rest of my time in Cairns I spent at Krichelle's place in Kewarra Beach, the beach is walking distance from her house where we go for BBQ's and to the beach bar, but no swimming... the crocodiles remember ... and stingers when the water is warm.

You can walk along the beach from Kewarra up to Palm Cove where you can find excellent restaurants for breakfast. And we did a day trip up to Kuranda to the markets and visited the butterfly house.

There are lots of things to do in Cairns but I was being super lazy. In the past we've done an overnight hike in the rainforest, visited the Daintree national park, Green Island, Port Douglas, the Atherton tablelands, gone swimming up in the rivers, gone white water rafting, been diving on the Great Barrier Reef and I've watched Lisa bungee jumping because there's no way in hell I'm doing it.

When I finally got home to Melbourne I wasn't there long before work send me off to Sydney.

Sydney is another excellent place to get out of the cold. I spent a lot of winter weekends getting some
sunshine as I ran along the coast from Bondi to Coogee, it's a great walk, in the summer the crowds are ridiculous but in winter it's great.

I was lucky to be staying close to the botanic gardens so in the morning I would run there, down through picturesque gardens and manicured lawns to the water overlooking the harbour and the bridge and opera house.

I have a few friends in Sydney who have been kind enough to entertain me - thanks Erica & Sean, Lucy and Nat, and I had my friend Julie come hang out for a weekend where we went to the Japanese gardens, Vaucluse house for high tea and got a ferry over to Watson's Bay to test out the cocktails.

Through work I also had Wednesday night travellers dinners so got to explore the restaurants and one night went to the Sydney Seafood School - I felt like I was on MasterChef.

Way out west

Yeah I know a few of you are a bit confused over where and what the hell I'm up to.

Last year I got a new job and in the interviews there was a lot of 'so can you travel?', 'it could be for long periods' and 'it could be at quite short notice' and of course I was like 'no problems'.

They weren't exaggerating, one Saturday afternoon I got a message telling me to be in Sydney Monday and since starting I've spent 3 months in Sydney and 8 months in Perth.

Being back in Perth after more than ten years has been pretty cool. It's still the same small, slow paced city although the food and bars have definitely improved with some great places to eat like Apple Daily or for some solid pub grub The Grovenor was a two minute walk from my apartment.

At work the Perth office is small so you get to know everyone pretty well and it's fun hanging out, listening to music, writing some code and seeing how long before Sara eats all the Tim Tams or Jasmine says something hilarious that needs to be added to #shitjasminesays

On weekends I caught the train to Mandurah (an hour south of Perth) to hang out with my cuzzies and their kidlets and spent Sundays out in Thornlie playing gaelic footy or ferrying across the river to South Perth to hang out in the park playing volleyball.

The time difference, heat and bright early mornings meant I was wide awake for morning runs. My morning route was along the river with the city on one side and the wide quiet river on the other with only a few other people running or rowing.

Then I'd turn away from the river and run up to Queens Park, a small very green park with lots of well maintained flower-beds, a man-made lake arched by small wooden bridges and totally surrounded by trees and shrubs blocking out the city, a hidden gem right next to the WACA.

I'd run a couple laps, sharing the park with an old hobo on a bench watching the sun rise over the trees, an asian women under a big old oak doing tai chi and a muslim man on his way to work who would stop to watch the ducks, swans and other birds paddling about on the water.

On the weekends I'd do long runs in the other direction ending up in Kings Park, a large park with lots of native vegetation, a fantastic view over the city and a horrifically steep hill to get up there!

While in Perth I had some visitors with Andrea and Robina here for the Aus day long weekend and Mum came over for a weekend too.

Mum and I caught the train to Cottesloe and Fremantle and did one of the Fremantle prison tours, I've done them before but think they're great. The prison has a really interesting history with it's beginnings as a convict prison, then being turned into a federal prison before being closed in the 1990's.

We met Shayne and Kevin (my aunt and uncle) for lunch at Little Creatures, a brewery with some great beer and an excellent lunch menu, before they took us down to Mandurah for a Millariffic night of wine and laughs.

With Andrea and Robina we had a few days so got out of Perth with a road trip down south to Busselton. We spent some time on the beach, walked the jetty and visited the underwater conservatory.

The conservatory is at the end of the jetty, you walk down into it and look out the large windows into the water like a big reverse aquarium!  You can see lots of different fish swimming between the jetty pylons which are covered in a rainbow of corals and weeds like a bizarre other-worldly forest.

We did a day driving around Margaret River visiting the caves, wineries and a chocolate factory,
but one day definitely wasn't enough!

We also went to Rottnest Island only for me to be totally shocked to discover that my two friends don't know how to ride a bike!  They seemed to think this was an ordinary thing to say and couldn't understand why I was dumbfounded, but after a small discussion revolving around me asking them several times if they were having me on, they gave the bikes a try.

They soon got the hang of it so we had a slow ride around checking out a couple of beaches, doing some snorkelling and petting some quokkas.

Quokkas are friendly little furballs of the marsupial kind and endemic to Rottnest Island

Quokkas are well known for being total posers when they see a tourist with a camera

Now my Perth time is over, but news on that in my next post!