Alex

A few idiots... )

Happy Easter!
Here in Tully everyone’s been enjoying a 4 day weekend, which was kicked off with a retro-theme night in the bar. I had a fantastic time, dressed in shiny silver trousers, a hand-knitted woollen vest and headband dancing along with punks, hippies and the far from plain old strangely dressed! The bar was packed and everyone was in a hilarious mood, the drunken pictures passed around the next day gave half the hostel very red faces!
The rest of the weekend has been quiet and relaxing, save Saturday night which was Monty’s birthday – and as he’s a big tequila fan we of course celebrated it outrageously!
Last weekend me and a few guys and girls from the hostel went white-water rafting, which was fantastic!
I was with a great group of people (7 to a boat) nicknamed ‘the Wierdos’ and we were roaring with laughter as much as we were screaming with fear and excitement. Macca our guide was really good and sat back enjoying us panic when he took us ‘surfing’ a couple of times, where the boat is side on at the bottom of a big rapid, it fills with water and bounces all over the place bit is kept there by the current!
The scenery was stunning, we floated (flew, dropped, swam and bounced) our way through beautiful gorges covered in 180 million year old rainforest which looked exactly as I had imagined true jungle would. There were several hundred foot waterfalls trickling down rippling and broken cliff faces, tarzan-style vines

Yeeha!

hanging from ancient trees leaning over the river full of coloured fish, eels and turtles…. However there was only time to appreciate this occasionally as there were 45 grade 4 to 5 rapids on the 15km course, and we were hurled down small waterfalls, slalomed through jutting rocks and sent spinning backwards down seriously fast moving water! Me and ‘Tony’ my Korean room-mate went swimming every chance we got to cool down and jumped off two 6 meter rocks. One of the best bits was free floating down an awesome series of rapids – you were scared to breathe as you had no idea when the next wall of water would hit, then if you dared to open your eyes you were staring at a curve of water the shape of a skateboard half-pipe! )

A glimpse of the amazing jungle

The weather has been terrible the last week, we had some flash flooding and torrential rain so bad on Thursday that the rows between the banana trees that we had walked down in the morning were knee-deep in water by the afternoon! Also me and Roman had another accident with the 4×4… we were casually driving down a row trying to kill the last hour or so after finishing the paddock when the whole front end of the truck dropped. We’d driven the front end off a mini gully so that the two front wheels were free-wheeling! We only had 20 minutes to go until the end of work so we walked back to the shed and a tractor pulled us out the next day! )
I hope you all have a happy Easter, until next time, take care x      

p,s. Just come back from the best day at work ever – Me and Evan drove around 50km today throwing out rat poison, but we racked up a good portion of that amount taking very large detours to get from place to place, being sure to choose the longest and most interesting route. We saw these wallabies on the 6km drive/off-road race to the swim-spot before lunch.    )

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Wallabies!

Hello everyone,

Well alls well here down under, although the weather has changed to being cold in the mornings and blue-sky-roasting during the day – which makes working hard but now I’m as brown as a nut!

Apart from being really hot work is fine, my supervisor is off tomorrow so we have to make one paddock last all day… Im sure that wont be hard! I also saw my first snake in the field today, it was a 4 meter (!) Amethystine Python sat sunning itself on a log – Romay had stopped in the 4×4 so I pulled along side him on the quad and turned to see it about 3 feet away! Of course today happened to be the only day in weeks that I left my camera at home… oh well.

A hard climb, but worth it...

The other weekend me and Linda my roommate climbed Mt. Tyson, a huge jungle covered mountain beside Tully which was really hard work – I assumed that the guide of 4-5 hours was because the path snaked its way up and around, but no – you had to scramble up using two hands in many places! The view at the top was fantastic though, and we also saw a snake that had recently eaten a rabbit or something huge sat right on the path, as well as a spider bigger than the one pictured in the last post.

Evan (my work partner) managed to arrange a trip to Murrey Falls last weekend too which was fantastic – there were some great pools to swim in and rocks to slide about on, and I dived off an 8 meter rock into a huge pool which was actually really scary – if it wasn’t for 6 cameras pointed at me I probably would have bailed! (Photo to follow)

The crew at Murrey Falls

Then the view from the top of the falls was breathtaking although unfortunately my camera couldn’t quite capture the scene very well, but I got an ok one using colour accent.

Also through a bit of a communication problem with my Korean roommate Tony I’m going rafting this Sunday, which should be great fun.

Overall life is good – its getting harder and harder to get up in the morning, friday nights are getting better and better, work is enjoyable and there is a great crowd at the hostel – the only problem is that my bank balance doesn’t seem to be growing at all! )

xx

Atop the mighty waterfall...

P.s. On Friday me and Romay had a hell of a day at work… we did probably about 3 hours of actual work, spent about 3 driving around as the manager kept changing his mind and we were working 4km away from the farm, and then we managed to get both our vehicles stuck in the mud! For two hours!We were throwing out rat poison when I got my quad stuck, walked around a kilometre to find Romay and then we got the 4×4 stuck. We managed to manhandle the quad out, and then got it stuck about 10 meters from the 4×4! We were too far away from the shed to call a tractor on the radio, and we missed the free barbecue by an hour and a half before we freed them by digging trenches in knee-deep mud…. Oh well, we had a laugh about it… )