Well, ive been in Melbourne for 4 1/2 weeks now. I dont think this blog will be as exciting as the last but i will try to keep you all on the edge of your seats lol. The Werribee Open Range Zoo was amazing!! If you look on my facebook albums you can see the photos. There was even some camels! I am still staying with Colleen and Brian who have been amazing at putting up with me so far. a couple of weeks ago we went to The Werribee Mansion on a tour/play experience thing. It was really cool, there are 2 actors that show you around but involve you in the play as if you are guests in the house. They say that the place is haunted since the owners died and Im not gonna lie, I was very scared at some points in the dark and kept grabbing on to ryan, or brian, or colleen haha. We also visited the Melbourne Musuem which was good but full of stuffed animals, little creepy. and saw a video of a baby being born...... think adoption might be the way forward when i want kids haha.
I have found myself a job!! woohoo!! just waitressing in a motel restaurant but its pretty god money, much better than back home. But I'm only casual staff so just work as and when they need me. but i need have 2 shifts last week and got 2 for definate this week, maybe more. The manager seems to really like me so that helps.
me and the bushells are planning to go to the MCG on sunday to watch an AFL (australian football league) which is Gaelic football apparently but dont hold me to it. Its a mix of rugby and american football i think. but i dunno. I'm home after ive gone back round to sydney i could come back and go there again to watch a cricket match. Its really good to meet some real australians although i seem to get a lot of abuse for my accent and how we say things. My argument is that is our language! so its them that are wrong haha. I am really looking forward to the footie though.
Also gonna be meeting some of the bushells extended family this weekend too which should be interesting. I am going to start looking into lots of touristy thing to do now i have a job so if anyone has some ideas let me know.
My back is much improved now and the insurance company have agreed to pay for all my treatment as well as the cost to change my flights. so this is all good but i have to fill out a claims form and they are not very helpful with getting back to me! I think I will be leaving Melbourne around the beginning of October and making my way up to Darwin, I cant wait to get back to travelling again but again I'm a bit nervous about the summer coming! Im going to die in the heat!
Monday, August 23, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
The first 2 1/2 months
I spent 2 months in new zealand, and when i arrived in auckland i had ridiculously bad jetlag and was really poorly! just wanted to sleep but felt so sick! no one warned me bout this!! so i started on the "kiwi experience" which is a tour bus with lots of other travellers that stops in a different place every day and offers activities to take part in. we worked our way round the north island where we went to places like rotorua which has loads of geysers which are sorta like volcanos but with boiling water that comes out and produce lots of sulphur which makes the whole town smell like eggs!! we visited a place called te puia where we were taken on a tour and shown the geysers anbs the bubbling mud pools. got a sample of the mud that can be used as a face mask but still havent tried it. we also went to a place called mercury bay where 4 of us did some kayaking to a beach called stingray bay. only saw one stingray though. was really hard work though. the next place we went to was called waitomo and they have lots of caves that are full of these glowworms. it was incredible like a nigh tsky but with more stars than ive ever seen. but as soon as the light goes on you cant see anything! i am having to look back in my journal so i dont miss out anything. i promise to give you more regular updates after this.
we then arrived in taupo which was a place where lots of activities were offered including bungy jump! not getting me doing that! but there was a trek called the tongariro crossing which was an 18.5km walk across a volcano. and passing a part of it which was used as "mount doom" in the lord of the rings films. . we couldnt walk up that bit because of the snow. not that i was fit enough to get up there anyway.it was the most difficult thing ive ever done and unfortunately it was so cold and windy that we werent able to even stop at the top. i just got my phone out, took a picture and then started making my way back down!. but i was so proud of myself for completely it even though it took me an hr and a half longer than it took everyone else!! I was in so much pain the next couple of days though! but luckily the next stop had a sauna and hot tub so i took full advantage!!
Wellington (capital of new zealand and where peter jackson is from and has the studios where he created lord of the rings, avatar and many others) known as the windy city but should have been called the rainy city as it poured with rain all 3 days i was there. they have a musuem there and to make room for it they had to move a hotel out the way. they literally picked the hotel up and put it on rollers and moved it. didnt even take the sheets of the beds!! as the buildings dont have foundations due to the likelihood of earthquakes this stops the building from falling down is an earthquake was to occur. and the musuem that was built is call te papa and it is humungous! took us 3 hours to make our way round and i wasnt even really looking at everything in detail. we also visited the wellington museum, not quite as big but still interesting. as wet as it was i really loved wellington and saw lots of film related stuff including peter jacksons studios where they have miniature replivcas of all the different characters from the films. we also met the actor who played samson pilot one of the officers in the avatar film!
we then got the ferry down to the south island and got onto a new bus which a whole new group of people. we visited a few places with some stunning lakes and went to a place called fraz josef which has glacier mountains. Here i took a helicopter right up to the top of the glacier and had a 2 hr hike across the icde. it was the most amazing experience of my life! so much blue ice where it is so compact. and the people that just did the day hike where you walk up the glacier only got to go half as far as we did. More people did the skydives from 15000ft! Madness! next, on to wanaka which is a little ski resort town. we werent there quite at the ski season so it was very quiet but a stunning place and our hostel looked right out on to the lake which was awesome. and there was a shop there called "alice in wanaka" writeen like alice in wonderland! was so cool! then we went to queenstown, basically a larger busier more built up version of wanaka! very expensive though. stayed in a different hostel to the rest of the bus with a girl i had met on my original bus. it was actually a really nice hostel with great fireplaces. took a gondola ride up one of the hills and got a great view of queenstown! and met up with some people from my new bus and ended up spending the day with them playing crazy golf and went for a drink and went out for the night! there is a bar called world bar which serves cocktails in a teapot and you have to drink it out of the spout. very cool! they also have a burger place there called "ferg burger" which is famous in new zealand. these burgers are gigantic and just amazing (no gourmet burger kitchen though) and in the 7 days i was in qtown i had 6 burgers! haha.
I then had the long 8 hr drive from qtown to christchurch which is where i was meeting helen and dave baker (friends of heather and patrick) and was then going on to meet my friend megan from home who works the ski season in a resort called mt hutt near methven. helen and dave were lovely and looked after me when i was a bit poorly. was so nice to have healthy food and they took me on a drive around the coast and showed me some sights and even drove me to methven to where my friend lived. I stayed in methven for 3 weeks! had the most amazing time, got lots of discounted skiing in. was pretty good snow, no 3 valleys but still good. very hard work as it was very bumpy and then icy too so had to work hard. met some friends for life here and might possibly go there to do a ski season working myself next year if megan goes back. this also gave me the thought of possibly going to france next year to do a skji season there. who knows!! i then flew back up to auckland and then stayed with more of heather and patricks friends debby and tony bradley who had a stunning house and i had my own room with bathroom and the most amazing shower ever!
i then started a new tour which took me round the east coast of the north island of new zealand. on our second day we got to go on a horse trek with a guy called reg who had an arm missing and a metal claw in its place and managed to horse ride and roll a cigarette at the same time. well he was really impressed with my riding as i was the only one who could rise and fall properly when trotting. well this was untill my horse got freaked flipped out and i couldnt hold on and flew up landing flat on my back. and who knew how much trouble this would cause!! we were miles from a hospital so had to wait till the next day and i had ppl having to help me undress into the shower, sit down and stand up, get into bed and even work on occassions! how embarrassing. we got to a & e about 4pm the next day and i waited about 4 hrs to be seen. they did an xray and confirmed there were not broken bones and gave me some strong pain killers. luckily i didnt have to pay for anything! unfortunately these pain killers caused awful nausea and drowsiness so i couldnt keep taking them. and i had another 2 nights and a 3 hr bus journey till i got back to tony and debbys house to relax. and even then i only had 2 nights before a flight to sydney!! debby took me to see her physio who said i had strained the muscles in my lower back and gave me some acupuncture which did help with the pain but only temporarily.he recommended that i consult another physio in sydney.
and now onto the next more recent part of the email. i promise to be better at keeping you updated from now on.
I am now in Melbourne, Australia, staying with friends of jeanette (my mums best friend who lives out here) in a place called werribee. I am staying with a couple (Colleen and Brian) and one of their sons (ryan, 20). they have another son (andrew, 22) but he is in usa with his girlfriend for 5 weeks. they are all lovely, if a little loud! They love dogs and have 2 cavaliers max and mason and on my first day they took me to the dog club which jean is a founding member of too and they had a fun day with competitions and stuff. was awesome! They have been very welcoming and looked after me with my horrible cold and this awful back pain that is still lingering from the horse accident. After some quite gentle physiotherapy in sydney I am now having horrible vigorous physio here which is really helping but is just so painful!
I didnt mind sydney but feeling as poorly as i did i couldnt really enjoy it properly so looking forward to my next trip there (touch wood i wont be ill or injured again). i saw a physio a couple of times and they did some treatments to prepare me for the bus journey down to melbourne and i had to buy a back strap and a hot water bottle (didnt think id find one of them in australia) and had to stay in an awful hostel too. But i did get to see my friend rachel from home who is living there which was awesome! and she was on a high as her parents are coming to visit her and take her on a holiday up the east coast! i am very jealous! i want one of your lot to come visit me! I am still having withdrawal symptoms from new zealand - everyone should go there in their lifetime! its is just the most incredible place ive ever been. every town you visit has something completely different to offer and its just great and stunning too. And its tiny compared to Australia so I cant begin to imagine what i have left to see here.
I went into Melbourne city centre yesterday. Ryan took me to the aquarium which turned out not to be very good but the penguins were pretty cool! Colleen was sposed to be signing off on andrews new house today which would mean we could start moving his stuff in put that all got cancelled so not done much today. me and colleen just went to the info centre and she picked out about a million leaflet of things to do. I think she is more excited than i am abpout all the activities. she also took me to her butchers and it was just incredible the stuff they had, she spent $108 but if mum had been in there she woulda spent double that! it was amazing and colleen thought it was funny how excited i got about the food!
Tomorrow we are going to werribee zoo which is an open range zoo. so the animals are not caged and its a bit like a safari as we have to get a bus to take us round. Im really looking forward to that. Jean cant come as she is stewarding at a dog show tomorrow but will maybe see her tomorrow evening. Ive got to spend a bit of time with her and absolutely love her. She mentioned about maybe joining me when i travel to america on the way home! i am going to make her! that would be awesome! and i reckon i could get her to come back to england to stay with us for a bit so she can meet emelia! and rolo! She keeps calling me lucy which im obviously used to but it seems silly as its now been the longest since shes seen lucy! mum must have talked about her all the time when she came out. good or bad i dont know! haha. I met jeans dogs tomorrow! billy (the brown one) is so cute, and i like steph but mr chips is a little scary so can understand why mandy didnt like it. Phsyio said i should be able to work after the weekend so colleen has a friend who will hopefully get me some bar work which would be awesome as i need to save up for my trip up to darwin. and next saturday we are going to the werribbe park mansion where they have this old fashion play where they tell you the old stories about the people that lived there etc which looks really interesting. they did have a ghost hunter show there but it was ridioculously expensive so decided against that!
I have also opened a bank account now with anz but i need a job soon cos it charges you $5 a month just to have it!but i do get a bright pink card! haha so sad. and also got my medicare carde which means if i do (touch wood) get ill again i wont have to pay anything or if i do they give it straight back which saves claiming on insurance as they are useless. cant use it for physio though unfortunately. erm i dont think i have anything else to say except feel free to email or txt me at any point as its great to hear from people and it is very cheap for me to send a txt! and my skype is alicerath87. although i only go on there your morning time as by the time i wake up in the morning its already 11pm your time. I dont think i have anything else to tell you. Miss you all dearly!! and hope to hear back from some of you!!
we then arrived in taupo which was a place where lots of activities were offered including bungy jump! not getting me doing that! but there was a trek called the tongariro crossing which was an 18.5km walk across a volcano. and passing a part of it which was used as "mount doom" in the lord of the rings films. . we couldnt walk up that bit because of the snow. not that i was fit enough to get up there anyway.it was the most difficult thing ive ever done and unfortunately it was so cold and windy that we werent able to even stop at the top. i just got my phone out, took a picture and then started making my way back down!. but i was so proud of myself for completely it even though it took me an hr and a half longer than it took everyone else!! I was in so much pain the next couple of days though! but luckily the next stop had a sauna and hot tub so i took full advantage!!
Wellington (capital of new zealand and where peter jackson is from and has the studios where he created lord of the rings, avatar and many others) known as the windy city but should have been called the rainy city as it poured with rain all 3 days i was there. they have a musuem there and to make room for it they had to move a hotel out the way. they literally picked the hotel up and put it on rollers and moved it. didnt even take the sheets of the beds!! as the buildings dont have foundations due to the likelihood of earthquakes this stops the building from falling down is an earthquake was to occur. and the musuem that was built is call te papa and it is humungous! took us 3 hours to make our way round and i wasnt even really looking at everything in detail. we also visited the wellington museum, not quite as big but still interesting. as wet as it was i really loved wellington and saw lots of film related stuff including peter jacksons studios where they have miniature replivcas of all the different characters from the films. we also met the actor who played samson pilot one of the officers in the avatar film!
we then got the ferry down to the south island and got onto a new bus which a whole new group of people. we visited a few places with some stunning lakes and went to a place called fraz josef which has glacier mountains. Here i took a helicopter right up to the top of the glacier and had a 2 hr hike across the icde. it was the most amazing experience of my life! so much blue ice where it is so compact. and the people that just did the day hike where you walk up the glacier only got to go half as far as we did. More people did the skydives from 15000ft! Madness! next, on to wanaka which is a little ski resort town. we werent there quite at the ski season so it was very quiet but a stunning place and our hostel looked right out on to the lake which was awesome. and there was a shop there called "alice in wanaka" writeen like alice in wonderland! was so cool! then we went to queenstown, basically a larger busier more built up version of wanaka! very expensive though. stayed in a different hostel to the rest of the bus with a girl i had met on my original bus. it was actually a really nice hostel with great fireplaces. took a gondola ride up one of the hills and got a great view of queenstown! and met up with some people from my new bus and ended up spending the day with them playing crazy golf and went for a drink and went out for the night! there is a bar called world bar which serves cocktails in a teapot and you have to drink it out of the spout. very cool! they also have a burger place there called "ferg burger" which is famous in new zealand. these burgers are gigantic and just amazing (no gourmet burger kitchen though) and in the 7 days i was in qtown i had 6 burgers! haha.
I then had the long 8 hr drive from qtown to christchurch which is where i was meeting helen and dave baker (friends of heather and patrick) and was then going on to meet my friend megan from home who works the ski season in a resort called mt hutt near methven. helen and dave were lovely and looked after me when i was a bit poorly. was so nice to have healthy food and they took me on a drive around the coast and showed me some sights and even drove me to methven to where my friend lived. I stayed in methven for 3 weeks! had the most amazing time, got lots of discounted skiing in. was pretty good snow, no 3 valleys but still good. very hard work as it was very bumpy and then icy too so had to work hard. met some friends for life here and might possibly go there to do a ski season working myself next year if megan goes back. this also gave me the thought of possibly going to france next year to do a skji season there. who knows!! i then flew back up to auckland and then stayed with more of heather and patricks friends debby and tony bradley who had a stunning house and i had my own room with bathroom and the most amazing shower ever!
i then started a new tour which took me round the east coast of the north island of new zealand. on our second day we got to go on a horse trek with a guy called reg who had an arm missing and a metal claw in its place and managed to horse ride and roll a cigarette at the same time. well he was really impressed with my riding as i was the only one who could rise and fall properly when trotting. well this was untill my horse got freaked flipped out and i couldnt hold on and flew up landing flat on my back. and who knew how much trouble this would cause!! we were miles from a hospital so had to wait till the next day and i had ppl having to help me undress into the shower, sit down and stand up, get into bed and even work on occassions! how embarrassing. we got to a & e about 4pm the next day and i waited about 4 hrs to be seen. they did an xray and confirmed there were not broken bones and gave me some strong pain killers. luckily i didnt have to pay for anything! unfortunately these pain killers caused awful nausea and drowsiness so i couldnt keep taking them. and i had another 2 nights and a 3 hr bus journey till i got back to tony and debbys house to relax. and even then i only had 2 nights before a flight to sydney!! debby took me to see her physio who said i had strained the muscles in my lower back and gave me some acupuncture which did help with the pain but only temporarily.he recommended that i consult another physio in sydney.
and now onto the next more recent part of the email. i promise to be better at keeping you updated from now on.
I am now in Melbourne, Australia, staying with friends of jeanette (my mums best friend who lives out here) in a place called werribee. I am staying with a couple (Colleen and Brian) and one of their sons (ryan, 20). they have another son (andrew, 22) but he is in usa with his girlfriend for 5 weeks. they are all lovely, if a little loud! They love dogs and have 2 cavaliers max and mason and on my first day they took me to the dog club which jean is a founding member of too and they had a fun day with competitions and stuff. was awesome! They have been very welcoming and looked after me with my horrible cold and this awful back pain that is still lingering from the horse accident. After some quite gentle physiotherapy in sydney I am now having horrible vigorous physio here which is really helping but is just so painful!
I didnt mind sydney but feeling as poorly as i did i couldnt really enjoy it properly so looking forward to my next trip there (touch wood i wont be ill or injured again). i saw a physio a couple of times and they did some treatments to prepare me for the bus journey down to melbourne and i had to buy a back strap and a hot water bottle (didnt think id find one of them in australia) and had to stay in an awful hostel too. But i did get to see my friend rachel from home who is living there which was awesome! and she was on a high as her parents are coming to visit her and take her on a holiday up the east coast! i am very jealous! i want one of your lot to come visit me! I am still having withdrawal symptoms from new zealand - everyone should go there in their lifetime! its is just the most incredible place ive ever been. every town you visit has something completely different to offer and its just great and stunning too. And its tiny compared to Australia so I cant begin to imagine what i have left to see here.
I went into Melbourne city centre yesterday. Ryan took me to the aquarium which turned out not to be very good but the penguins were pretty cool! Colleen was sposed to be signing off on andrews new house today which would mean we could start moving his stuff in put that all got cancelled so not done much today. me and colleen just went to the info centre and she picked out about a million leaflet of things to do. I think she is more excited than i am abpout all the activities. she also took me to her butchers and it was just incredible the stuff they had, she spent $108 but if mum had been in there she woulda spent double that! it was amazing and colleen thought it was funny how excited i got about the food!
Tomorrow we are going to werribee zoo which is an open range zoo. so the animals are not caged and its a bit like a safari as we have to get a bus to take us round. Im really looking forward to that. Jean cant come as she is stewarding at a dog show tomorrow but will maybe see her tomorrow evening. Ive got to spend a bit of time with her and absolutely love her. She mentioned about maybe joining me when i travel to america on the way home! i am going to make her! that would be awesome! and i reckon i could get her to come back to england to stay with us for a bit so she can meet emelia! and rolo! She keeps calling me lucy which im obviously used to but it seems silly as its now been the longest since shes seen lucy! mum must have talked about her all the time when she came out. good or bad i dont know! haha. I met jeans dogs tomorrow! billy (the brown one) is so cute, and i like steph but mr chips is a little scary so can understand why mandy didnt like it. Phsyio said i should be able to work after the weekend so colleen has a friend who will hopefully get me some bar work which would be awesome as i need to save up for my trip up to darwin. and next saturday we are going to the werribbe park mansion where they have this old fashion play where they tell you the old stories about the people that lived there etc which looks really interesting. they did have a ghost hunter show there but it was ridioculously expensive so decided against that!
I have also opened a bank account now with anz but i need a job soon cos it charges you $5 a month just to have it!but i do get a bright pink card! haha so sad. and also got my medicare carde which means if i do (touch wood) get ill again i wont have to pay anything or if i do they give it straight back which saves claiming on insurance as they are useless. cant use it for physio though unfortunately. erm i dont think i have anything else to say except feel free to email or txt me at any point as its great to hear from people and it is very cheap for me to send a txt! and my skype is alicerath87. although i only go on there your morning time as by the time i wake up in the morning its already 11pm your time. I dont think i have anything else to tell you. Miss you all dearly!! and hope to hear back from some of you!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)