South Island Walkabout...

After meeting up with my folks in Sydney it was on to Christchurch, to pick up our Motorhome and begin our travels around New Zealand. So far the scenery has been absolutely stunning, especially on the West Coast of the island, where in most places you have mountains on one side of you and beautiful turquoise ocean on the other side.

Highlights of our South Island tour so far include:

• Learning to manuevre the 20+ft motorhome around some interesting mountain roads…




• Sheep




• Getting frozen in Dunedin – which is so much like Scotland, it even has the weather!




• More sheep




• Taking a boat trip around Milford Sound and feeling tiny against the sides of the fjord that are almost a mile high. Being taken almost under the largest waterfall, where they promise that the spray on your face helps you lose ten years!! I splashed it on a few times and am hoping to start high school when I get back to the states!




• A few more sheep




• Staying in the lovely lakeside town of Wanaka – for the brits, this also gave us a bit of a chuckle and an excuse to shout ‘ Are you from Wanaka?’ to any bad drivers on the road!




• Yet more sheep




• Taking the cable car up 1500ft to see the magnificent views over Queenstown and then screeching back down like a maniac in the luge ride.




• Making my first bungy jump at the location of the first ever bungy jump, just outside queenstown. It was awesome.




• Taking a helicopter ride over the Franz Josef and Fox glaciers and around Mt Cook and Mt Tasman, then landing in the snow, once the pilot finished eating his sandwich!




• Bathing in the thermal springs at Hanmer Springs – phew what a smell…




• More sheep




• Whale watching (or whale waving as my mum liked to call it) in Kaikoura – and this time I actually saw whales, dolphins and seals.




• Quite a few cows too




• Visiting the Isabel winery in the Marlborough wine region




• Driving in to the ferry terminal in Picton, where with a loud bang, the two 75 litre water tanks dropped off our motorhome ! Lucky we weren’t on one of those mountain roads… all we could do was laugh and wait for the engineer to arrive!
  

With a fixed motorhome, it’s on to the North Island for more adventures and hopefully a skydive…

Meandering in Melbourne...

My last destination in Australia, before heading back to Sydney and on to NZ was Melbourne. Still full of cold and a touch of bronchitis, I was very lucky to be welcomed by Lisa, Daryl, Sally and the bump in, to their home. I was extremely well looked after, even stopping off at the medical centre on the way home from the airport. With 4 years since we had last seen eachother, it was great to just pick up where we left off and catch up with all the gossip of the last 4 years! Lisa did a great job of showing me the sights in Melbourne, hitting the markets, neighbourhood restaurants, downtown shopping and even fitting in a bbq at home. I had a lovely time and also managed to completely recover.

Tasmanian devils...

My trip to Tasmania (Tassie as the locals call it) has been a bit of a blur. I picked up a nasty cold on the plane down from Cairns which hasn’t been helped by the significant drop in temperature (it’s approx 20˚C colder in Tassie). A lot of my time has been spent trying to stay warm and ditch the cold, but highlights from my active times include:

Taking a red double-decker bus tour around Hobart.
I stayed Macquarie Manor in Hobart, which I probably wouldn’t recommend – I had a very strange room, where the shower tray was in the bedroom, not a separate bathroom, and the toilet was in a cubicle – much like a public toilet – it wouldn’t have been a great room to share with anyone – no matter how well you knew them!
Visiting the convict station at Port Arthur, taking a walking tour and a boat tour and hearing about some of the truly horrific conditions the convicts were subjected to
I stayed at the Norfolk Convict Station – the actual building that housed the convict station. It was a very interesting place to stay and the owner was very friendly - lighting a fire to keep my warm in my Rudolph-nosed state!
Heading up the coast to Swansea and visiting Freycinet National Park – climbing the 600ish stairs to the Wineglass Bay Lookout – I figured it would be kill or cure. I’m still here, but I’m not cured! The view was absolutely spectacular
I stayed at the Redcliffe Colonial B&B which was lovely – clean, comfortable and for sale if anyone’s interested!
Making a final stop in Richmond – which is a lovely little town – but not much going on…

Next stop is Melbourne to visit my friend Lisa – I’m so excited to see her – we haven’t seen each other for years.

Scuba central...

Straight off the boat on Saturday evening and after a quick dinner with Kim, I picked up the overnight Greyhound bus from Airlie Beach to Cairns to embark on my learn to dive course. It would have been an 11 hour bus trip, if a lorry(semi) hadn’t jack-knifed across the road approx 3 hrs outside of Cairns – we had to wait 2 hrs for it to get light so that the bus driver could take an alternate route… the road was too narrow to attempt in the dark!

After dropping my bags off at the hotel, I was determined not to repeat my Sydney hotel lobby experience, so I headed straight out to find something to do for the day. I found the tourist information center and booked myself a day trip to Kuranda – traveling out by cable-car over the top of the rainforest and back down by scenic railway. The rainforest scenery was beautiful and couldn’t have been more of a contrast to my last few days in the ocean. I had a lot of fun trying to perfect self-portraits with my camera while I was traveling over the top of the rainforest in the cable car – hope no one saw me! Once in Kuranda I visited the Koala Sanctuary and hugged a Koala!

Monday saw the start of my diving course with Pro-Dive in Cairns – 2 days of pool and class-room based learning, followed by 3 days/2 nights on a boat out at the Great Barrier Reef. I have to admit to being more than a little bit nervous about learning to dive – I had heard so many good things about it, but I still couldn’t quite fathom how anyone would deliberately put themselves in a place where they could so easily drown and if not drown – come away with one of the many different diving related injuries we learned so much about in the first couple of days of the course!… By the time we got out on the boat, my nerves weren’t exactly dispelled!

The Pro-Dive course was great – very professionally run – my group of 8 was taught by 2 instructors and 2 assistants whenever we were in the water. I was with another great group of people – everyone passed the written exams and pool-based exercises and on Wednesday we headed out for our adventures on the boat. At this point our group joined other Pro-Dive groups – there were a total of 32 divers on the boat, with 7 crew.

Highlights of the dive trip included:

- Giving myself a serious talking to on the way down to the first dive in order to make myself continue
- Surfacing alive after my first dive!
- Going back for more
- Completing all the skills necessary to become a certified open-water diver
- Screwing up the underwater mask-flood exercise every time - pulling my mask off, snorting in water and finally calming myself enough to clear my mask and continue
- Completing my first unguided dive with my buddy Elise – getting completely lost and surfacing nowhere near the boat … a long swim back! We found Nemo though!
- My confidence in the water growing and deciding to go for it and take the adventure diver certification including completing a night dive and a 30m deep dive
- Completing my first (and best!!) night dive – guided by SpiderPig – where we saw Bryan the turtle, who is the size of a dining table, swimming around. We also saw three 2m Whaler sharks – the experience of which was heightened by the crew playing the Jaws theme tune as we got in to the water for our dive!
- Being branded ‘Team Turquoise’ because all of my nice new dive gear matches!
- Completing my deep water dive, where we saw a lion fish and sting rays and experienced how colours change with depth. I also managed to mess up the counting to 20 test!
- Taking a camera on dive 8 and getting some pretty good amateur shots - including one of Nemo!
- Returning to Cairns and partying the night away with cast and crew
- Recovering from my hangover to do it again…. And then catch my 6am flight to Tasmania…

Wandering the Whitsundays…

After a very comfortable night in the Brisbane Hilton, it was time to move on to Airlie Beach ready to embark on a trip to the Whitsundays. I flew up to Prosperine Airport which serves the Whitsunday area, and arrived on a Monday afternoon, without any onward plans – hoping to be able to get a live-aboard sailing trip within a few days time. As it turned out, Monday and Tuesday are fairly quiet days for sailing tours, but according to the specials posted at my hostel (ugh!) – there was a 3 day 3 night cruise which went around the Whitsundays and out to the Outer reef on Wednesday – perfect. That gave me a couple of days of down time to hang-out, explore Airlie Beach (took about 30 mins!) and to plan the rest of my trip.

Our boat was the Pacific Star, there were 19 passengers and 4 crew and we had a blast. The conditions were perfect – sunny blue skies, calm seas and a great bunch of people on board. I shared a cabin with David, Chris and Amanda – conditions were v cosy – the room was about 6’ by 7’ with two bunks on either side, and a v narrow passage between the two sets. I considered myself to be very lucky – at 5’4” I could stretch out and just touch the end of my bunk – David on the other hand was about 6’2 and his feet hung-out over the end!

We cruised around the Whitsundays, which were absolutely stunning and then headed out, traveling through the night thanks to skipper Shane so that we could reach the Outer edges of the Great Barrier reef – visiting Whitsunday Island, Bay Reef, Net Reef, Club 21 Reef, Elizabeth Reef and Hayman Island – highlights of the trip included:

- Finally being among a mixed age group and not feeling totally ancient

- Seeing stunningly beautiful clear waters and catching my first glimpse of the Great Barrier Reef

- Snorkelling over the reef, seeing so many fish (no nemo!) and swimming right next to a shark

- Getting completely freaked out about jelly fish and getting back on to the boat!

- Lazy evenings sat on top of the boat – trying to get the perfect shot of the sunset (thank goodness for digital cameras!)

- 1 min showers to conserve fresh water – the skipper kindly offered you an extra few minutes if you wanted to shower with him ;)

- Stopping off on the way back in from our trip to just jump off the boat for a swim in the middle of nowhere… that was great fun until a shark came jumping up out of the water… just a small one – but I was more concerned about what he was jumping to get away from!

Chatting, hanging out, playing cards and drinking wine (thanks to Michael and Michaela) with a great bunch of people

Coming back to land was a real challenge – life was good on the open seas!

4WD Fun in Fraser Island

Fraser Island is the world's largest sand island - it's a gigantic sandbar measuring 120km by 15km. It allegedly contains more sand than the Sahara and is covered in a combination of rainforest, 200 lakes and sand dunes. There are no paved roads on Fraser Island, so a 4WD is necessary. You basically have 3 choices - Drive yourself (usually in a group with other self-drivers), take a small 4x4 organized tour or take a large 4WD bus tour. I knew I didn't fancy the self drive option - having heard a number of horror stories of overturned vehicle (1 per week) and lots of people getting stuck. I decided to take an organized tour - opting for a smaller group version. Being a little north of 30, I thought I would avoid the 'party safari bus'... I arrived at my pick-up location and discovered that my tour buddies all ranged from 18-20.... way to make me feel old!

Taking the ferry from Rainbow beach to Fraser, we arrived at high tide which meant taking a track across the middle of the Island to our camp site. Within 15 mins on the island we were brought to a halt, because a car ahead of us had burst in to flames - we had to wait until the petrol tank had exploded, so that it would be safe to pass!!!

At that point I was pretty glad I didn't opt for the self-drive option :)

Highlights from Fraser included:

• Visiting Lake Wabby, which is accessed via a climb up an enormous sand dune. The bonus being that once you had climbed up one side of the sand dune, you could roll down the other side into the water. The downside being that when you roll down a slope - apparently you look like a dead and accessible meal for the local dingoes! We all had to spend a little extra time in the lake waiting for the dingo to decide he was bored of waiting for us to reemerge!



• Visiting Indian Head and finally seeing whales breaching in the ocean



• Seeing the wreck of the Maheno, which was a passenger liner blown ashore in 1935 in a cyclone and actually sits on the shore



• Swimming in Lake McKenzie - the largest and most famous of Fraser's 200 lakes. The water is stunningly clear and the sand is white



• Helping to dig out and push numerous stuck cars - the funniest of which being the one that moved quicker than I did after we started pushing and me ending up face down, flat in the sand!



• Seeing a car pulling a car pulling a car pulling a car pulling a boat - after getting stuck in the sand



• Best not to mention the camping and the huntsman spiders...



• Returning to a night of luxury in the Brisbane Hilton - hot showers and a real bed...

No surfing in paradise... no bloody whales either :)

First stop on my travel up the East coast was a day in Surfer's Paradise - unfortunately the weather didn't really cooperate to make it very paradise-like. Somehow I didn't make the connection between it being too rough in the sea to swim and the fact that a whale-watching trip might be little choppy...

On the one hand - luckily I had taken some sea-sickness prevention meds on the other hand, unfortunately none of my fellow passengers had had the foresight... we weren't even out of the harbour before the first victim ran to the bathroom! By the end of the trip it was only me and the crew still standing - people were lying on the floor, on benches, hanging over the side... all looking pretty miserable. To add insult to injury the whales decided not to put in an appearance. Apparently they had been breaching right next to the boat the day before ... I have to admit I did wonder how many times they use that story (what a cynic)

Back on dry land - i found my way to the local train station and took a train to Brisbane, ready to start my next adventure - a 3 day camping(yes camping!) tour to Fraser Island.

Still sleepless in Sydney...

After several sleepless nights in Singapore, it probably wasn't my smartest ever move to spend the entire flight from Singapore to Sydney drinking red wine and chatting with my row-mates... the in-seat entertainment system was faulty in our row though. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!

The most challenging part of the trip was trying to appear sober when passing through immigration and customs when we arrived at about 6am - oops - hic...

On arrival at my hotel in Darling Harbour at approx 7am -surprisingly enough, my room wasn't ready, so I promptly fell asleep in the hotel lobby - my first decent sleep in days!

My time in Sydney was fairly uneventful - really just a quick stop to plan out the rest of my trip, knowing that I'm coming back to Sydney at the end of my Oz stop. I picked up an Australian mobile phone +61 (0) 415 119 616.

Thanks to Craig and Anthea for some great info and suggestions on what to do with my time in Oz - my tentative plan is Surfers Paradise, Brisbane, Fraser Island, Airlie Beach (Whitsundays), Great Barrier Reef and then back South (not sure on exact route yet).

Sleepless in Singapore!

For some reason, the travel from Europe to Singapore caused me to experience severe jetlag - doesn't make much sense to me, especially given that it's a very similar time/timezone change as traveling from LA to London... anyway I managed to finish quite a few books in my wide awake night-time state - even trying large quantities of bacardi for medicinal purposes of course, didn't work.

Highlights from my 4 day trip to Singapore include:

• Use of the first class lounge at heathrow (thanks to airline status, not my ticket type I hasten to add) - great facilities and pink champagne!


• A 2-hour delay at heathrow - not due to the normal weather, traffic etc but this time because a passenger from a different flight but with the same name as someone on our flight managed to board the plane and then surprisingly couldn't find a seat!!! Not only did he board the plane, but so did his luggage... so much for increased security measures :)


• Wandering round Chinatown - somehow I managed to get off the track of the suggested walking tour - I'm sure the book must have been wrong - nothing to do with my inability to follow instructions...


• Snapping up some great bargains in Chinatown - and then finding a post office to be able to ship my 'excess' baggage straight home


• Stopping off in Little India for a great curry


• Taking a trip to the night safari next to Singapore zoo and traveling around in the darkness trying to spot the various animals and then taking lots of black photos because no flash was allowed!


• Taking the cable car over to Sentosa island and taking a wander through Singapore's equivalent of Disneyland


• Drooling at all the shops on Orchard Road - but maintaining control... if I buy it I have to carry it!

Next it's on to Sydney and the start of my Australian Adventure...

European Vacation...

OK - so how American have I become... when I rent a car in Spain - only to be shocked that it's as small as a rollerskate and has a manual transmission.... doh!

My last couple of weeks have been spent relaxing in Spain with my folks and taking a quick trip to Belgium to catch up with my good friends Marij, David and Samuel. Having spent most of the time relaxing I have very little to report - highlights included:

• My folks picking me up at the airport and seeing the Jeep in its new home in Spain - it fits in pretty nicely - after completing its transatlantic crossing at the beginning of the Summer!
• Buying a great pair of jeans for 12euro - ~$15 - I know Amanda will not approve ;)
• Preparing and painting all of the garden walls at my folks' villa - including trying to put my spanish to use buying the paint, brushes, filler etc - all of which is not generally contained in the basic spanish class vocab!
• Having several 'menu del dia' lunches for 10euro or less - including 3 courses, drinks and coffee - what a bargain.
• Working out a running trail through the local rambla and learning all the 'interesting' words to the rap music on my ipod courtesy of Jenny - and then accidentally singing them in company!
• Creating my own 'tri-althon' - running, swimming and the hot-tub!
• England beating Australia in the Rugby Word Cup quarter finals - I wish I'd had a bet on that one!
• Meeting Samuel who is 3 now and was only a few weeks old when I last saw him. He is a great little guy. I was a little worried about how I would communicate with him since he speaks Dutch and French - but it was no problem - he quickly corrected me when I was making the wrong noise to imitate his toy frog - 'ribbitt, ribbitt"!
• A quick shopping trip to Antwerp and the next day just catching my flight in Brussels after getting a little caught up in all the new airport shops... (i think there's a pattern here)

Next it's on to Singapore for a few days ... I hear it's a shopper's paradise...I can hear my amex card squeaking already :)

Notes from a Romanian Bathroom...

The Blue-Bag Mystery

My trip to Romania didn´t get off to the best start when all of my carefully planned and packed baggage got lost ´somewhere around Barcelona´on the way to Bucharest. It was unfortunate that the bag containing the really important stuff for my Habitat for humanity build got lost. Much to the amusement of my team mates it included things such as:

• Duct tape
  
• Mosquito nets


• Water purification tablets


• Needles and syringes (on the guidance of the travel clinic - not something I needed for a hidden drug habit!)


• All-important sheet sleeping bag (those of you who have traveled with me for work, understand how important that is for me!)

More importantly it included my work clothes and boots and my extensive stash of soon to be needed over the counter drugs. Luckily for me - and once again to the amusement of the habitat team - the brit-girl had a mary-poppins-esque carry-on bag which included a couple of changes of clothes, toiletries and Romanian style work-boots, otherwise know as flip-flops!

Unfortunately it took several days for my bag to finally show up - which meant a quick trip to the local store to buy some more appropriate work footwear, given that the main activity for our build was going to be laying the foundation for a new house and a lot of mixing and pouring concrete.

Meeting the team in Bucharest

After a bit of an initial hiccup - I was glad to meet up with the habitat team in Bucharest - everyone was very friendly and ready to work hard for the families we were there to support. Our first night was spent in Bucharest in the Ambassador hotel - perfectly located for access to local amenities - casino, sex shop, hookers, ínternet cafe... very much like the hotels I stay in for work really ;) I didn´t get to test out the full range of facilities, but it was good to note that the hotel offered both 2 and 3 star accommodations along with a non-stop restaurant, massage and body building!

From our first team dinner that night through to the end of the trip, I thoroughly enjoyed the company of my team mates - a truly great bunch of people. I was very happy to be paired up with my room-mate Christine - we had a blast - and a lot of late night laughter!

The Habitat Experience

As much fun as I had with the team, it was important to remember the reason we were in Romania. On the second day we travelled to Craiova, our home for the majority of the trip. There, our objective was to help move forward the construction of two two-bed houses for a couple of extremely deserving families. Romania as a whole is a country in transition - something that is going to take a lot more time. Currently many people are living in buildings designed and constructed under the communist regime, that are now in desperate need of modernization and repair. As part of the visit we were able to see the current conditions the habitat partner families live in - which was extremely moving. The 2 families (each 2 adults and 2 children) live in cramped (one room) and run down conditions - one of the families shares a bathroom with 8 other families and a kitchen with 16 other families.

Our work onsite was focused on building the foundations for the new homes - plenty of manual labor and use of pretty rudimentary tools. The main aspects of the work included mixing, moving and pouring a lot of concrete along with constructing the iron rebar. At the end of the trip, the team felt we had accomplished a significant amount, leaving the families now ready to starting building the walls of their new homes.

A couple of funnies that will stick with me include:

• Cipy the 17 year old brother of one of the partner families deliberately injuring his fingers each day so that Christine would administer first aid and the all important 'Hello Kitty' band-aids


• Jerry accidentally injuring his finger and saying 'I don't want one of those pussy band-aids!'


• Christine donning a workers mask and spraying the inside of it with sweet-smelling sun-screen so that she could venture in to the onsite bathroom (otherwise known as a hole in the ground)


• The looks of amazement on most of the partner family-men's faces when the women on the team lifted bags of cement, shovelled sand and wheeled barrows full of concrete without assistance!
  

A couple of new phrases I learnt:

Squeeze me - Romanian for "excuse me"

Attention Attenion - Romanian for "you're about to stand on a nail"

How did I ever find time to work?

At the beginning of my sabbatical I was wondering how I might find things to fill my days - 6 months seems an awfully long time, until you start making a list of all the things you want to get done!

I set out with a couple of primary objectives (I can´t shake the consulting thing):

• To spend the Summer in Chicago and actually be there for more than 48hrs at a time
• To travel around the world with an outline itinerary of Europe > Asia > Australia > New Zealand

The Summer in Chicago has flown by - it has been so much fun to be in Chicago, actually pretending that I live here. Highlights of my 2 months include:

• Daily 5am workouts with JJ, with many half-finished/half-forgotten conversations on the evil stairmaster
• Refreshing my Spanish skills (hoping no-one would notice me hiding behind my book in a class room of 4!)
• A visit from my sister Annabel and reintroducing myself to the tourist sites of Chicago
• Getting patio furniture and a pool on my roof deck (doesn´t sound so good when you explain it´s an inflatable kids paddling pool)
• Starring (ok being an extra in the back of a bar scene) in the new batman movie
• Losing almost 30lbs thanks to some serious support from my friends and a regular arse-kicking from my trainer Heide
• Taking bags and bags of clothes which are now too big to the Salvation Army
• Training to be a volunteer for the Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago
• Being in Chicago and being able to go out on school-nights!
• Planning and booking my travels for the rest of my sabbatical which include - Spain, Romania(habitat for humanity), Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii
• Getting my shots for the rest of my travels (not really a highlight - but the service at the Northwestern Hospital Travel Clinic really deserves a mention - they were fantastic, even though they couldn´t find a hospital they would recommend to me in the whole of Romania!
• Not going to O´Hare once
• Not knowing what day it is and not caring!