Happy 100!

Captain Ron
Originally uploaded by bigquestionmarks.

Last night we thought for fun, we'd check the calendar and see how long we've been travelling. And we were both blown away by the fact that today is our 100th day! We would have a big party or something, but we happen to be spending it in a little town without a cinema, a convenience store, or even... GASP... a McDonalds! So instead, we did a bit of grocery shopping, applied for a (quasi) credit card, shared a really overpriced iced coffee, and I bought a cute $10 t-shirt. Who said we don't know how to party!
--------

In other news, yesterday a group of us set off into the mangroves in a teeny metal boat (think the ones you win on the Price is Right) in the heart of croc country. You know, craving a little danger. Well, it did get a little spooky when we almost got stuck in the mud (taking a few tree branches with us), but for the most part, I think we scared the crocs way more than they did us. We managed to spot two or three crocodiles, but couldn't get all that close. There's a lovely photo or two in our pics that you guys might mistake as a floating branch. Well, it's not! But the sunset cruise made for some nice scenery, and a whole bunch of new bugbites. Adrian showed off his new "humps" at karaoke later that night...







Indian Cow on Vimeo

The mystery has been solved!

Our little skittery friends from the beach have now been spotted-- and we have a positive ID. Read all about them here; apparently they can see 360 degrees, they eat flying bugs, and burrow at 45 degrees. We just love sitting on the Port Douglas beach and watching them making fields of "snowballs"... those crafty little devils.

Oh yeah...

Oops, just realized I wrote our postal code wrong... it's 4877 (NOT 4871). And check out our new pics on Flickr. (boy, we have a lot of spare time on our hands!)

Knock, knock... housekeeping!

We're very hard at work in our glamourous hosekeeping jobs... we've done 4 days now, and that's 4 days closer to getting that cool campervan. It's not the most fun, but there are perks, like watching March of the Penguins or music videos (on a pretty decent MTV-like channel) all day. Today we cleaned around a big green treefrog who was so lazy, he kept on sleeping while we windexed, vaccuumed, and mopped around him. He was even still around for a photoshoot, hours later when we were done our shift! (SOOO CUTE!)

We've also had a couple off-days- yesterday they didn't want to pay us a ton of money ($34 an hour) since it was Anzac Day, a public holiday, so we got the day off. Of course we spent it by the pool! There were festivities around our hostel, which was cool-- free BBQ, and then a bizarre gambling game called "Two-Up" which isn't much more complex than betting 10 bucks on heads or tails (see the photos in Flickr). Aussies love their gambling!

And Sunday we played tourists and hopped in a teeny rental car with French guys Martin and Stephane... we checked out the Tablelands- a big plateau with really different landscape than the coastal beach/jungle we're used to. We weren't as excited by some of it as our friends (ie. a bog that looked kinda like Algonquin Park, a lake that looked just like cottage country), so maybe we're a little spoiled for scenery in Canada. But some of it-- a giant, 500-year-old fig tree, huge
butterflies, a rainforest turkey, and even a brief glimpse of a platypus were pretty cool. (Our very-exciting platypus sighting consisted of roaming around a muddy creek at dusk, until we saw two slimy black rodent-like creatures splash out of the water and scurry under the roots of a giant tree. Maybe next time we'll try the zoo)

Bye for now- we're off to find some ant killer for our new roommates living above our tent... (they bite HARD and apparently you can make ice cream out of their hindquarters. ew!)

PS. Adrian is super-psyched about the new Flash CS3 beta and the Final Cut 6 release from Apple, but at the same time is sad because he can't tinker with any of it - it's the cruel duality of man and monster.

PSS. Adrian also started thinking in French because he's been hanging out with too many Francais' at Dougies.

The Big Tease

We just got off a sweltering, gorgeous couple of hours at the beach in Port Douglas. Workin' on our tans a little bit, playing with sand crabs, etc. It's all loads of fun until you think "Wow, it sure would be nice to go for a dip in that beautiful blue ocean a few metres away from our beach towel."

BUT YOU CAN'T.

Because the ocean up here is filled with tiny "marine stingers" that will hurt you really badly, or maybe even kill you if, in a lapse of judgment, you jump in. These little creatures are, most of the time, too small to see, and too transparent to really know if they're around. We're starting to wonder if the Aussies are just playing a big trick on the tourists...

But the countdown's on... the "locals" (which is another weird Port Douglas phenomenon-- nobody's REALLY, ACTUALLY from here originally) only a couple more weeks till we can go swimming, yay! In other good news, we got jobs without a problem; without even an interview... and worked our first day as housekeepers/porters at a gorgeous jungle-y hotel called Hibiscus Gardens. It was a lazy day of giving hoilday apartments the illusion of being clean and making some beds. Decent pay, and we made it to the beach by 3 p.m. Not bad! I think we could get used to this place. Except for waking up in a sauna of a tent today and wishing there was a store where we could buy a fan, that wasn't an hour away by car...
Missing you all, hope it's warming up back home :) xoxo, D&A

Welcome to our new "apartment"

we're now in Port Douglas (or port dooo-glass) and we thought we'd introduce you all to our new piece of property: under a palm tree, with big blue butterflies swooping around, lizards chirping and scurrying everywhere, and even some "brush turkeys" (like big rainforest chickens) wandering around. The climate's great and we'll just have to hope we don't get any creepy crawlies inside our 4-man tent (we had to get a 4-person for us and our overly large backpacks that are almost like 2 more people).

Now that we have a luxury apartment, it's time to find jobs. Fingers crossed. the beach is gorgeous and the climate is fantastic. we may stay longer than planned....

oh yeah, and if anyone wants to send us any mail (teehee) we're at:
Dougies Backpackers
111 Davidson Street
Port Douglas, QLD 4871
Australia

this is our beach -->

Party town USA-- er, Australia

So we've been in Cairns a day now and we've run out of things to do. It's a cute town but I think we've walked it about 30 times already. We're realizing more and more that we're big city people, definitely missing Melbourne's cosmopolitan vibe and cool neighbourhoods...though maybe not the weather.

How can I describe Cairns (or Cannes, as everyone here calls it, not to be confused with the French place)?? Well, it's a little bit Cancun-- plenty of Girls-Gone-Wild bars here, many Mexican restaurants (the one we hit up made a pretty decent margarita, though it also played Irish music :S ), palm trees, and teenyboppers in tiny skirts and fratboys in popped collars. It's definitely tropical- it's rained about 8 times already today, and not just a sprinkle, but a mean cats-and-dogs downpour. (Check out our video!) And then sun, and then more rain, and more sun, and so on....

No croc sightings yet but there was a kitty and a few geckos. Also, huge bats flying around everywhere after sunset! It's funny to be in a coastal town where there sort of is a beach, but YOU CAN'T GO THERE (stingers and sharks= how annoying!). In place, there's a lagoon (a big cold shallow swimming pool) by the ocean and people swim there instead. We dipped our feet in and took spy pics of people in speedos. They call people "blokes" here and many people don't wear shoes here (including in the mega-mall that's by our hostel and joined with the train station). There's a digeridoo shop on every corner, and all the souvenirs one could ever want. Around the town are these lush green mountains that look sort of out of Lost (REALLY miss that show!) and we're dying to explore them. Perhaps we'll rent a car/motorbike and check out something a little more interesting than wet t-shirt contests, ugh. But we heard Australia's east coast is kind of just a big party....

On the bright side, we moved to a really awesome hostel room (has a balcony with hammock! even a TV!), and indulged in brie and baguettes for breakfast. And we're absolutely hooked on TimTams, a yummy Aussie chocolate cookie. Actually, maybe it's about time to get off this computer and back to our room... to live the high life, eat some more TimTams and brie. Saturday night in Cairns, woohoo!
Love D & A xoxoxo

Just arrived on the party plane....

So we flew on Friday the 13th and we're still here. One big HAHAHAHA to all the suckers who pay more to fly on "luckier" days. Ha! We even got to sit in the VERY front row of the plane (the check-in chick said we had to be "able-bodied" to help people out of the plane if there was an emergency. And since we've seen Bruce Willis in The Guardian a bunch of times in the last few weeks, we thought we'd get into hero-mode as well. Luckily we didn't have to flex our lifesaver muscles...)

And we're in Cairns! It was 26 degrees today and rained in tropical spurts. We were surprised to see green mountains surrounding the town, and that there's no beach whatsoever (because you can't swim where there's crocs!). But it's pretty and we finally have a break from bunk beds in a cute hostel called Traveller's Oasis. We're learning again what it's like to be tourists, a pretty hard task after working our butts off the past 6 weeks in Echuca.

What else? We had a great few days (Wed, Thurs) in Melbourne, where we stayed with our pear-picking comrade, Andreas. He taught us more German words and we said "prost" many times. He lives in Fitzroy, our favourite Melbourne neighbourhood, and so we explored some pubs, found great shoe shopping (we both came out with wicked new pairs of Converse! Adrian got ones with tattoos, and I got ones with chairs all over them, though I almost bought the amazing rainbow ones you'll also see on the blog. but what backpacker travles with 7 pairs of shoes?? Sheesh!). And we ran into random Echuca people in downtown Melbourne... this world is getting smaller all the time! Virtually all memories of sorting tomatoes and picking pears are gone now (thank god), though I do admit it was shocking to see druggies begging for change, and to listen to good music at an endless selection of bars (they really liked Bryan Adams ans Scissor Sisters in Echuca). Hopefully we'll be shedding our country-bumpkin-ness soon!
We also saw some strange animals in a Melbourne park last night, with a drunk guy feeding them. They don't have raccoons here, but I'm guessing it was something along those lines (check the weird creatures on our photos!). Today in Cairns we passed a shop with a huge standing taxidermied kangaroo that seemed to stare at us no matter where we turned... eek! But it's just unbelievably great to be back on "vacation", even if just for a tiny bit, and to experience cities again. Fingers crossed now about the beach! (I think surfing will have to wait a few more months, when we head further down the coast in the hippie van we plan to buy!)

Hope all is well in Canada, and things are thawing out.... we're thawing a little here too from the chilly Melbourne temps as well. Hope everyone had a great easter weekend (we're still eating chocolate over here). Tell us what's new!
love, D & A xoxoxoxo
PS. A not-so-wise man once said, "When the wolf comes out, the wolf comes out..."

Gallis!

So lately, we've been learning heaps (yes, that's Aussie for lots) of new languages. Adrian's been practicing his French, I've been learning snippets of German, Danish, and Korean, and now we're learning to speak Scottish... which is apparently a language of its own!

Our Scottish friend Stuart (who you may know already from Adrian's pear-picking video) has enlightened us to so many new words that I must share. From now on, we can call each other "balloon" or "numpty", which are fun and playful ways call your pal an idiot. "Radge" means crappy (I think) and "trumpet" means dumbass. My all-time favourite is still "Gallis", which simply means "fantastic." Stu said you can make that "extra fantastic" by saying "dead gallis", or when something's extra super fantastic, it's "Pure Dead Gallis".

Which brings me to our update... we're leaving Echuca and our tomato hellholes for the Tropics! Less than a week till we hop on a bus to Melbourne (next Thursday, April 12) to hopefully go shoe shopping (our shoes are toast after tomato work!) and meet up with some of the cool people we met and miss from Echuca. Then, on the morning of Friday the 13th-- Adrian's idea-- we hop on a Virgin Blue flight up north to Cairns.... right by the Great Barrier Reef! It's getting to dry season there, so we plan to take a mini vacation (ie a few days) before heading an hour up the coast to a resort town called Port Douglas. It's described as "reef meets rainforest" and sounds like a dream! We're going on the suggestion of our French friend Stephane, who is already on his way there for the second time...he worked there last year and saved up lots of money working in hotels and bars for 3 months, so we plan to do the same. And on our days off we can go diving, sunbathing, or maybe rainforest exploring. Fingers crossed on getting an apartment so we can get out of the backpacker ghetto and get our Hello Kitty toaster already. Apologies if we begin getting overly bitter and cynical toward rich tourists. (er, more than before!)

Just heard about the tsunami that hit Queensland and hopefully that's the end of that. Otherwise, it's only the jellyfish, sharks, spiders, snakes and crocs we'll need to steer clear of... ah, we'll be fine. We're looking forward to a gallis adventure! Happy Easter, Love Dayle and Adrian