Whitsundays Islands!

So after yet another short work week, (this one is an all-time record of one-day.. Thursday). However, to my credit, I was on my deathbed Monday and Tuesday, and well Wednesday, I got a little over anxious with my health and tried to get up and going, only to find out that after breakfast, I was ready to pass out for another 6 hours. So since my last marathon post, I've been feeling better, still a little cough here or there, but definitely a major improvement. Per the reccomendation of my girlfriend and parents, I did go to the doctor to find out that I had a Upper Respiratory Tract Infection, which I think is a fancy word for moderate cold. Regardless, I was put on some medication for a while, but I am like new now.

So Thursday I had a very productive day in the office, which I should have considering it was my only 7 hours of work of last week. But it didn't last long since we left on Friday for Proserpine, Qld, which is where the Whitsundays Coast Airport is located. This past weekend trip was trip 3 of 3 for our small group package. The other trips included Fraser Island and Noosa River Everglades. But this trip was by far the grand prize of them all, a 2 day 2 night sailing trip to the Whitsundays Islands and the inner Great Barrier Reef. So we arrived on Thursday afternoon without much incident, and checked into our hostel.

We met up with a friend of ours from the program named Jason who was stationed up in Townsville for the summer. So the group grew to 4. Grabbed a drink in Airlie Beach, which is nortiously backpacker-ly, and apparently backpackers are supposed to like wet-t-shirt contests, because we were asked to go to at least 4, luckily, it isn't really the type of thing that we were into, so we opted to go to the local bar, grab a drink, and just relax without the added entertainment.

The next morning, we had time to get a proper breakfast (opposed to the last two weekends where our tour left around 7am or something earlier), so we took advantage of this , and I found some french toast and bacon which was absolutely spectacular. This is the first hot breakfast I'd had since I left the US as far as I remember. Wow, it was amazing.

After the breakfast, we checked in and commenced our boating trip.

So here you can see our ship, a 19-m "pocket maxi" boat which apparently had won quite a few races. It was a nice-yet-modest vessel. No such thing as private cabins on this thing, we all had beds that lined the lower deck, mine was about 1.5 feet wide by 7 feet long, and was an arm's length from the food-service bar and about two leg's length from the bathroom door. not exactly spacious, especially for the 22 people that would be on board.

But the four of us made the best of it! As you can see, we are drinking our classy boxed wine. To our credit, it was a Shiraz, which is a specialty of Australia! So back to more about the boat, there were only two main areas, the top deck, as seen below, which served as our living room during most of the day and into the evening. And the lower deck, where we slept, used the bathrooms, and got our food. I should also note that there was a shower, but none of us used it for the duration of the trip. I just got my first shower in the past 4 days about 40 minutes ago. It felt fabulous.

So its' quite amazing how fast time goes by when you're on a ship and not moving very fast (there wasn't much wind), but over the course of the 2 days 2 nights, we can sum up the trip in that we laidout on the deck and caught some sun, went to Whithaven beach, and went snorkeling to see some of the reef, but that's about it. Yet, those activities were all amazing in their own right, but I guess I am just trying to say the time went by soooo fast. The water and the wildlife were really awesome though, I think we were quite lucky. Even without the snorkeling, we were able to see dolphins, humpback whales, huge jellyfish, sea turtles, schools of tuna, and other fish in the water. While snorkeling, we saw all kinds of exotic fish and even hung out with a turtle for a little while.

The others on the boat were all of a good bunch, the usual suspects however. A majority of peoeple from the UK, a pair of Canadian couples (who played frisbee), a spainard, and a handful of german guys. We all got along just fine though.

Here's a shot from the beach where we set anchor on the 2nd night, we were able to see a very nice sunset over the waters.


I had to put up this shot just for kicks. Our flight today was 2 hours late getting into Proserpine, which was really annoying since I was supposed to have a frisbee game at 8:15pm (that's a little difficult when your plane gets to the gate in Brisbane at 6:45pm).... but regardless, this photo is a picture of the "waiting room" at Proserpine Airport, now I'm used to a small-town airport operation, but their "baggage claim" was a carport where they drive the lugage carts through, like a drive-in, and then you just pick your bag straight off the luggage cart. The waiting room is just as it looks, an outdoor courtyard with your typical airport seating. Hilarious.

And we're back! Noosa, Sickness, and things that comlplicate sickness

So after a few days down for the count, I am about 85% back on the money, but that is well enough to at least update the ole blog for the week. This writing will pretty much be the peak of my intellectual energy since last Thursday. Just as an aside, it's pretty amazing how much you can learn when you have free time on your hands, like all day, for two straight days.

So going back to the story, our past weekend was spent at the Noosa Everglades
which is about a 2.5 hour train ride north of Brisbane. Before hopping on the train, I had a fairly relaxed day. Went to the office in the morning, came back did our grocery shopping, and then we were off to the train station. After hopping on our 3:50pm train, I felt a bit tired, but no worries, I napped a bit on the train ride up, and we made it to Noosa (after an hour delay in some random town) around 8:00pm. Our hostel was at a YHA right next to the bus stop (we had to take the bus from the train station, that took about an hour), but since it was dark, and it was Australia and nothing is ever open, it took us to actually locate it's whereabouts. After that, it was then around 8:30pm. Trying to find a meal after 8:30pm in Australia is about as easy as trying to find a person bank teller that is open until midnight. It doesn't happen here. Unless you're a super-expensive-trendy-resort town restaurant. Such like the one we ended up going to and paying quite a bit for an undercooked pizza. But it was a filling meal. No complaints, Australia has been good to me so far, so I should help propel their dominate tourism economy a little bit.

After dinner, we decided to call it an early night, and turn in around 11pm. The rooms we were staying in were true "queenslanders", if I haven't explained this idea to you yet, just imagine sleeping in a screened in porch with no wind. Well when the temperatures drop to 40 at night, it's not the warmest of places, but luckily I had my sleeping bag, so as long as I didnt' have to stand outside, i'd be alright. Well at 4:50am or so, my chance to go stand outside came when the fire alarm went off.

When I was living at Woodruff Dorm when I was at at Georgia Tech, I actually used to like fire alarms, because it was the only chance to see my other dorm mates, I hardly got to see them otherwise... funny

About an hour and a half later, we started getting up so we could be downstairs and ready to go by 7:45am. We were picked up by a nice fella, probably in his early 40s driving a little mini-bus type of thing with a trailer, we threw our stuff in and met the other 9 people who would be at our trip. We stopped at a second hostel and met them all there. Quite a varied group, 2 girls from Ireland, a guy from Scotland, guy and gal from Germany, two from France, and a couple from Canada. All really nice and it made for a good group to travel.

For the trip itself, I'm going to shorten the story into a experience part and sickness part, because the longer I write definitely doesn't make the quality any better.

So from day one, we set off across a large lake, which the name escapes me. But the waters are crystal clear and very still, which makes it mirror almost everything around it. We took a ferry over this body of water to a floating station where we would mount up and load our canoes. From here, we would set off on our approximately 36km over 3 days canoe trip. The canoes were standard, reminding of my midwestern canoe days, but the scenery was pretty remarkable. The Noosa everglades are supposed to be similar to the Australian rainforest, the plant like definately resembles that, we saw some pretty wild looking plants. In terms of animals, I can't say that I saw that many, but I did see a few pelicans, which were enormous. When I say these things are enormous, I mean when I saw a few of them on land, I mistaken them for people. We made camp our first night and then made rest for our second portion of our journey the next day.

Day two pretty much encompassed another 13 km roundtrip, but with a 15km-round trip hike in the middle uphill to the "sand patch" which is a huge sand patch, probably the size of 20 football fields on top of this forested hill in the rainforest. We got up there for some spectacular views of the Noosa valley on one side, and the Pacific Ocean on the other.
I should make note that during all of our canoe time, the views on the river are pretty magnificant, the water is really still, so it is almost eerie passing over it on a canoe, because you can't tell it's distance because it's mirroring so much. I'm not sure if that makes sense. It basically looked like other canoes were floating because the water was so still.

Day three was our trip back. we had to leave the campsite rather early because we needed to make it back to the station by 10am. During our 1.5 hr canoe trip back, it started raining a bit, and continued for about 30 minutes, luckily not a downpour though. At the ranger station, we dried off our stuff, and hopped back in the Ferry where our van and a hot box of chips (fries) awaited us.

So from the sickness point of view. Before I tell this side, I just want to preface, I understand there are plenty of things worse that could have happened, and I should already be thankful of my health, but I thought this would still be an amusing thing to write. On Friday morning, I was feeling a bit rough almost like on the verge of some kind of illness. So, the 4am fire drill and standing outside wasn't the best of help. Then on the way to the floating station, we needed to wade through the lake to reach our ferry boat, and also bring all of the supplies from land to the boat. This was all happening with the notion in my head, if i'm getting sick, this is probably not the best option of ways to spend my weekend. wading in rivers, canoeing, and camping. So day one, I made it ok, after the first 2.5 hours of canoeing, we stopped for lunch and I had a quick pass-out nap (not power nap, because I literally passed out), then we canoed for another hour up to our campsite, where I also turned in for an early night. Day two, I felt a little bit worse, but not deathly, but I was convinced, "I am already up here, might as well make the most of it", plus, there honestly isn't that much to do at a campsite for 12 hours. So I decided against sleeping in the tent all day, and instead making the 12km canoe trip and 12 km hike to the sand patch, where again, I had a pass-out nap on the sand dunes.
So that night, I had every piece of clothing I owned on my body, and was getting up every hour to cough unmentionables. But, during that portion of the night, most of the stress that had come over me, was just that I'd have to wake up the next morning, canoe some more, and then spend another 6 hours in transit before making it to bed.

Well the next morning came, and I wasn't woken by sunlight, but instead my raindrops hitting the tent. Fantastic. By this point, I had acquired the suck it up attitude, which of course while camping is already after the "no bathing", "sand is on everything", and "you smell horrible" attitudes are already in effect.

But we broke camp, and steadily made it into the canoe. At this point, my illness (which I believed to be strep throat) had probably reached near its peak. So I was thinking to myself, what the hell am i doing with this sickness, canoeing on a river, in wet clothes, in the rain. But in due time, I knew I would at least be in the safety and warmth of a warm bus or train to take me to a bed to rest it off.

Well we eventually made it back to Noosa, grabbed a quick lunch and boarded the bus. The ride went pretty smoothly, and then getting on the train went smoothly as well. At this point in the day, my throat was giving me all kinds of problems, so I was trying not to talk too much, which on public transportation is typically pretty easy right?? Well, of course the one person that would like to sit down by me was a well-intoxicated Kiwi. (to her credit, she was very nice), but she didn't comprehend the words "sick", "ill", or "not feeling well" no matter what order I put them in. She continued to ask me questions, sometimes repeating questions if there were any silent moments where I was trying to regain my energy from the previous question. I just thought, the irony of it all. Luckily, that only lasted about 25 minutes, but probably the most draining portion of the travel home.

Finally made it back to Indooroopilly around 6pm on Sunday night and then slept for approximately the next 24 hours. Today, I ventured to the grocery store and am a bit more on my feet, but still not 100%. Hopefully by the end of the week things will be back to normal. But I am much better so thanks for those who had asked about me!, I spoke with my parents and girlfriend back at home and they gave me encouraging words, and Cat even sent me some get well flowers today, so that was fantastic, nothing like people who care about ya to make you feel better.

By the way, if you're ever traveling abroad, you should get an HostellingInternational card, their medical insurance people are awesome!

sick....

I am sick and have been sleeping for the last 24 hours. Once I'm better, I'm fairly sure I can make an entertaining post out of this one.

Feel free to send care packages :-)

Best wishes,
Paul

Pre-Weekend Post

Well it's only Wednesday night, but we'll be on the road yet again tomorrow. This weekend, we'll be doing a 3 day 2 night canoe trip of the Noosa Everglades. I'm really excited about it, with the slight exception that I have no idea how the two aspects of floating around on water, and sub-freezing temperatures will mix. Hopefully, they will not mix very much, but one still wonders. Since my last post, things have been fairly slow here in Brisbane. I arrived back early monday morning from the overnight bus from Hervey Bay. I spent half the morning in bed, and rolled into the office around 1pm. That night, I played my weekly frisbee game for the Chimmichungas (spelling?) over in Yeronga. It's about a 25 minute bike ride from here, but since the quality of my bicycle is hovering near zero, it felt like it was nearly twice that. But the ride is fairly scenic, taking me through St. Lucia, through campus and over a nice cable-stayed bridge


The other side of the river is a little less scenic, which takes me past a fairly creepy-by-night cemetery then an approximately another 2 miles until the Yeronga Football Club where we play ultimate. The game started around 8:15pm, and we played for about an hour and some. Our team was pretty dominate, and we won by at least 10. The games are great fun and everyone on the team is really friendly. I'll have some pictures for next time.

So on the way back, my bike got a flat tire, and it happened about 3 miles from Indooroopilly... great, so since I have so much money wrapped up in the investment, I thought it would be ok to ride the flat tire all the way back over the hills and through the woods back to the lodge. Obviously, if you know about flat tires, and trying to ride/drive on them,... it basically is the worst thing ever. But at the time, I was willing to make the sacrifice. So yesterday, I went to the local K-Mart (they do much better here than in the states) and picked up a new tube, and instead of heading to campus, I decided to do most of my work over at the State Library of Queensland on the river, fabulous place, really great facility, if you're ever in Brizzy, you should check it out. Then I took a quick lunch break and then finished up over at the Brisbane City Council Library before heading home.

Today was spent most in the office, and I won't pain you with the details of sitting and reading documents about brisbane transportation aside. However, I did mange to pull up a 1965 Wilbur Smith document that specifically recommends to the city of Brisbane to rid itself of all trams and trolleys in favor of Diesel buses and to commence building multi-level highways alongside the river front....lovely. Well Brisbane at least knew better for half of that plan.

Tomorrow, we'll be on our way to Noosa and leaving around 4:30pm. So I may not have a chance to write until Monday. So until then, hope you all have a great weekend!

The Weekend & Fraser Island

So for those playing along at home, I haven't even gotten a chance to show you my room yet! Well actually, since I've been in Brisbane (Brisneyland, Brisvegas), I have actually had three rooms, my first in the City Backpackers Hostel downtown, and then two rooms here in the Indooroopilly Lodge. I had a nice place upstairs, but for some reason, they decided to move me downstairs (which is a worse room basically), claiming that someone needed my room upstairs, but strangely enough, I have yet to see anyone move in up there. hmmm.. At any rate, here is my place. As you can see, I've filled it up pretty nicely. I am typing this very blog sitting in a 70s -era lawn chair that I scavaged from outside my room. It's not the best of quality of accomodation, but it works.
So let's go ahead and move on and talk about the weekend! So much has happened and I've seen so much in the past couple of days , but I'll try to sum it up as quickly as possible, for your benefit, and because I am getting really tired.

Well we left Brisbane on Thursday on a 2pm bus headed north to Hervey Bay. The bus was like any other you could imagine., similar to a greyhound experience in the US. We made plenty of stops on the way up, and the entire bus trip took approximately 6 hours. Of course they played a few movies on the way up to Hervey Bay, but naturally, they are about the most non-offensive yet, IQ dropping movies that are out there. (daddy day care and legally blonde 2). Actually they threw in Cheaper by the Dozen, and I actually appeal to that one because of my midwestern roots :-).

So we arrived in Hervey Bay in darkness around 9pm. Check into our hostel, and since it's still relatively early, we (My friend Oli and Rob) decide to go explore the town. As many of you know Australia as a country, tends to replicate the business hours of my hometown of Gibson City, nearly everything is closed by 6pm, and if you're lucky, you'll find a grocery store that stays open until 11pm. So we had a rather exciting trip in search of the town's only event going on , the local grocery store. After that, we tried to get a drink, but were turned away from the first bar since they close d at 10pm... luckily, we were able to convince a local hostel that we were guests, and they served us at their on-site bar. But it was an early night, we needed to be up by 6am the next morning for our pre-departure briefing.


So Friday morning, 6:50AM, this raspy -voiced Aussies walks in , and looks like he's done this about 100 times too many, starts speaking to us. "Hey guys, I'm gonna put in this DVD, it's got two parts, so when the first part finishes, go ahead and someone get up and start the second part", then he walks off. ... hmmm, good start. Well the DVD is quite informative about how to drive in sand and not kill yourself and your group, the second part was all about how not to anger a dingo (which we never saw btw), and camping tips. After this meager breifing, we got assigned to a group for our Land Cruiser (which we fit 11 people into, as opposed to the original 9 which we were told), but we had a fantastic group including myself, and four other guy friends, 2 scottish girls, 2 british girls, and an older couple from barcelona.

Just a brief on what Fraser Island is, it's the largest sand island in the world. We had booked a 3 day - 2 night camping trip which included a 4x4 rental, and a bunch of camping stuff.


These first two pictures are actually on the 3rd day on the island when I woke up to see the sunrise (6:40am), It's pretty cold during the night and into the morning, hence the gloves and woollie hat. But by 10am, it warms up to about 70 degrees.


Here's a photo of Lake Wabbie, this place was RIDICILIOUS!, I've never seen anything like it in my entire life. To the left, you see all of that sand, it was a complete desert., then on the lower right, you can see the small lake, which has of course the clearest water you could ever imagine. This is one of the two lakes which we visited on the island (Lake Mackenzie and Lake Wabby), both were absolutely pristine and had fantastic beaches.


Here's us on the vehicle ferry heading over to Fraser Island

Just to give you an idea of what the driving was like, mostly single-track and on the island, the fastest we would usually get going was 20 km/hr (slow)...., driving on the beach you can do up to 80km/hr, but it's WILD driving on a beach, I just went to a place in the states where you can do it (Oceano Vehicular Rec Area, - Pismo Beach, CA), but I've never seen this anywhere else.
This shot is through the wreck of the Maheno which is on the eastern coast of the beach.
Here's a nice shot of my feet hanging over the ledge. It's probably a good 70 feet down to the bottom. Strange though, this was probably one of the only cliffs I saw on the island.

So all in all, the trip was awesome, you should check out the photos , maybe they will help paint a better picture. We took the nice bus from Hervey Bay so we got back to Brisbane around 6am this morning. it's been a rough and groggy day. I just got back from our Ultimate Frisbee league tonight and now I'm destroyed... I got a flat tire on the way back as well, so tomorrow will be a fun day putting the bike back together, as well as mending my foot wounds from ultimate... hmmm, good night!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/supawanich/

Missed Buses, Ultimate Frisbee, and Australians

So I started off this week with a fairly busy Monday morning. So it all begins around 7am when my alarm goes off (typical on the weekdays), but the alarm clock is only in collboration with the sunrising directly through my window and into my bed at approximately the same time. But I was up and stirring and noticed it was a little bit colder in my room than usual, and that my heater had stopped working. This is of course was not that far fetched since I paid $6 for that heater, and only half of it worked... but the thought that I would 1) spend the following nights in my 20 degree sleeping bag unless I found a new heater 2) need to figure out how to buy another heater for less than $20, crossed my mind, and I just didn't want that kind of stress to start my day off. But luckily, the heater, the lights, and the computer all had lost power. So luckily, my junk heater was not the culprit.

My first item of business of the day was a trip downtown to the Executive Annex of Queensland Government to watch a presentation about urban design in Ireland... turns out the presentation had very little Urban Design content, but was somewhat interesting nonethless. The best part of that 1.5 hours was when I actually got to chat with the Office of Urban Managment lady who has a good deal of knowledge of what goes on in city planning in Brisbane. After that meeting, I headed down to the BCC Library to catch a bit of the NY Times before heading down to Griffith Uni for some afternoon meetings.

So being the clever transportation student that I am, I saw that the next bus didn't leave for Griffith until 12:40, so trying to overcome this system, I decided it would be in my best interest to catch a different bus, heading for a different part of town, somehow thinking that I would take me to where I needed to go. So to put things into Metro-Atlanta perspectives, imagine you were trying to get to Kennesaw State, and all of the sudden, you see Six Flags pass out of the corner of your window, with the only bus stops around being signposts with a little patch of matted down grass where a person probably stood a week prior.

So back to Brisbane, once I realized that I was on the brink of rural Australia, I hopped out of the bus, and headed back in the other direction. Through this confusion, I actually managed to make it back to Griffith and only cost me $1.10 more and 40 minutes. Of course this was 30 minutes past when I was supposed to meet my contact at Griffith, but he's a laidback guy, most Aussies are, and he was content meeting up at 1:30pm. At 2pm, I had another meeting with a gentleman who is originally from Florida but had a bit to speak about on land pricing.

Zooming forward, I had yet another meeting at 4pm back downtown with a lady that does network planning for the transportation network of regional brisbane. Whew, so my workday ended around 5:10pm, and I hopped back on the train for Indooroopilly.

I managed to squeeze in a trip to the gym that literally lasted 20 minutes, then went back to the lodge to suit up for my cross-town bike adventure to try to find the Yeronga Football Club, where I had message passed to me, I could find an ultimate frisbee league there.

The first 20 minutes of the bike ride went pretty smoothly, which took me back to the UQ campus at St. Lucia. Once there, the new and unknown journey began by crossing the river via bridge, and then passing a large cemetary (this is all at night btw), So I'm sitting there cruising on my $0 bike that weighs probably 80 pounds, along a dark road, with water on my right, gravestones on my left, and no friends for miles. After about 7 minutes of that, I finally started to see life and civilization again. And in approximately the location I expected, I saw bright field lights. But upon closer inspection, I realized no one there was playing frisbee, I waited around a bit, but became more convinced that this was the wrong field. After asking for directions, and getting miserable results, I pointed south and started biking. By looking at my map, there are only so many large swaths of green which would be worth of playing frisbee in this town. So I headed to the next one, about 10 mins away. Upon arriving there (the Yeronga High Schoo), I found no lights, not people, and no frisbee. Luckily, there was a scout troop which was holding some kind of meeting next door, and of course. You can't go wrong asking a boy scout. So they were able to point me in the right direction (which naturally was only 3 minutes from the first field), and I finally found little white discs floating through the air, just as I'd imagined. I met up with a girl named Maylin who was my contact, and jumped on their team called the Chimmichungas (sp?). The group was mostly guys of varying ages, and a few gals. Played some intense disc for the course of an hour. The team was a great group of people, and I found out that most of these individuals were somehow involved with the Australian National Team., Wow, cool. When the game is over, both teams circle up arm in arm, and the captains from both teams speak and talk about the game and compliment the other team etc..., it's really a cool sight, very Rugby-esk.

After the match, I was invited over to one of the guy's house for a team dinner, which consisted of lasagna, salad, desert, literally the entire works. They were fantastically friendly, and I will be playing on their team every Monday night until I leave now. In addition to the pickup frisbee on Wednesay nights.

After the whole dinner thing, I started on my bike ride home which lasts about 40 minutes back to Indooroopilly, passing all of the same solemn sights as I saw on the way in. Made it back around 10:30pm, and did some odds and ends.

Today (Tuesday) has been really boring to be honest. I've been in the office and working about 30% of the time. I'm waiting on some contacts to get back to me about property values and real estate, and I have very little motivation to start writing my report. In actualilty, I'm still at the office, it's 3pm, and I'll probably be here for another 30 minutes, unless I have some kind of breakthrough. Let's hope that happens. But things are great otherwise!