The Asylum

Hello Blogtown USA. It's a muggy evening in Cairns right now and we haven't had an over the top ridiculous out of nowhere thundering downpour in the last 5 or 6 hours. That is a change from the last 3 or 4 days. We have been on cyclone watch since Friday with cyclone Hamish hanging out just offshore. But even without the cyclone threat, things have been pretty exciting here in Cairns.



After moving out of the o so fabulous Lakes Resort on Wednesday I checked into the Asylum Backpackers Hostel Cairns. The Asylum is a slightly different establishment. Those of us staying there are not guests or tenants. We are referred to as inmates. I have only taken a couple showers in the last 5 days because there isn't really any point to it. With the heat/humidity I don't really ever stop sweating. And on top of that the Asylum is just plain dirty. I sit in one of their chairs or lie down in the bed or just wander out to the reception area with the dirt everywhere and the effects of the shower are lost. I love it. This place is awesome. It is a relatively small hostel so I know at least the names of most of the people. They have free breakfast every morning (cornflakes and milk) and free dinner every night (meal voucher to one of the bars in town). They claim to have free internet but that's not really true. Free internet means one computer in the lobby where we can sign up for 15 minute time slots throughout the day. I don't bother and walk down to Mcdonalds with real actual free wifi. The library doesn't even have free wifi. Gotta love Mcdonalds. Let's see what else...

First night in the Asylum I met a few guys at dinner and we headed down to the Rhino Bar for Power Hour. You pay 8 dollars and get as many drinks as you can take from 10 to 11. Great evening. As many drinks as you can take doesn't mean as many as your stomach can handle. It means as many drinks as you can get after elbowing your way up to the bar for each drink. You have to develop a system in the chaos. We adopted the buddy system. One person fights and pushes and shoves and gets some space at the counter. Once he gets his drink and has to clear out he lets his partner into his vacated space at the bar and has his drink right behind his buddy while his buddy works to flag down the bartender again. Once he gets his drink the partner finishes whatever is left of his drink and swaps back up to the bar. We managed 1 drink in the first 15 minutes without the buddy system and by 11 we had polished off about 12 (mixed drinks usually didn't have a full shot in them so it didn't feel anything like 12 drinks in an hour). After that we danced the night away for a while before wandering over to The Heritage which was doing Wii Bowling night. It was my first time bowling in a year or so but I managed a 180 which was enough for the W. So far I love Cairns.



Friday night is all you can eat bbq night at the hostel. $4AUD gets you all the sausage, lamb, chicken, and steak you can eat. I knew Sydney was an expensive place to live but I didn't realize how cheaply you can survive elsewhere. One of the favs around The Asylum is goon pong. Beer pong except for it's played with tea cups and you are only allowed to bounce the ball and it's played on a really long table. And they don't believe in water cups so the drinks get pretty dirty pretty quickly. O and the tea cups are filled with with boxed wine (goon). The Asylum has a lot of character. TV is in a room out in the back. They have 4 different sport channels piped in here among other things. 3 of the channels are focused on rugby or cricket or soccer or other aussie sports. But then they also have ESPN. ESPN! I have watched a couple nba games. I caught a bit of the world baseball classic. The big party night at the Asylum is Monday night. There is a pub crawl and drink deals and food and fun all around. Right now it is Sunday night and its the first night I have been here that people are taking it easy. Resting up. I'm excited for tomorrow. So far I love Cairns

I've had a week now in Cairns and the original plan was to get down to Byron Bay to meet up with the rest of the rescuers but I don't know if I am ready to leave yet. There is still a lot I want to do around here. It's a super touristy little town and I didn't think I would enjoy it that much for that reason. But so far I love Cairns.

Cairns and the GBR

Hey All, welcome to Cairns for reals this time. I finally got around to chronicling the first four days in Cairns. The time was completely dominated by adventuring out on the Great Barrier Reef. The days since have been dominated by adventuring around Cairns the actual city but I will get to that soon enough in a later post.

The Lakes Resort and Spa – We checked into the modest Lakes Resort on the 28^th of Feb. Listed as only a dinky 2 star hotel we weren't quite prepared to find something like 7 pools littered about the 100 some odd condo like rooms. We had multiple bedrooms plus a living room plus a full out kitchen and eating area and laundry room. Lap of luxury at this point for me is defined as a functioning washing machine and drier. But wait it gets better! In the kitchen there was a microwave. WOW. I have not used one of those things in months. I was nuking just about anything I could find. Pita bread. Tortillas. Butter. Yoghurt (just for fun). So four nights at The Lakes was a wonderful break from the comparatively cheap accommodations I have grown accustomed to.

Day 1 in Cairns – After dropping my stuff off at the hotel I wandered downtown. I took the boardwalk along the water, and by water I mean miles and miles of mud flats with not much of a beach at all. Cairns doesn't really have beaches because of the Great Barrier Reef which breaks up all the surf so very few waves make it to the shore to break up the turf into fine sandy beaches. But that's ok because it was still a great walk with the ocean and the supergreen rainforesty rolling hills all around, something I hadn't seen too much of in Sydney. I found my way down to the wharf and visited an information centre that overloaded me with diving options. We eventually decided on a full load of day trip adventures for while my mom was in town. Finally I wandered into the cbd (central business district) area. Every other shop is an adventure booking agency or a dive shop or a restaurant or a surf clothing store. Very touristy but not too flashy and annoying. My favorite part about it was the prices of everything are much lower compared to Sydney. There is no such thing as a quick meal in Sydney for under 9 or 10 AUD. So picking up a sandwich for 6 bucks was definitely more exciting for me than it should have been. So after getting acquainted with the city we cooked a little dinner and had a little sudoku war. I got domoed by mama bear at the sudokuing while we were in Sydney. But once we got out to Cairns I reasserted myself as numero uno. I think she just couldn't handle the humidity and it affected her game. Anyways I was feeling great with the puzzle world until I tried a super hard sudoku while on a sailboat which was eventually cruising at 45 degree angle to the water with all the wind in the sails. It really messed me up. I feel a little seasick just writing about it and don't want to look at a sudoku for a while now.

After staying up way too late (this after getting 3 hours of sleep on my last night in Sydney) watching Kiss the Girls which wasn't very good at all we got up nice and early for Day 2 in Cairns to get ourselves down to the docks for an all day diving adventure. We found our way to Finger E at 7am I think where the Tusa5 was docked. The boat felt a bit crowded with about 60 Great Barrier Reef enthusiasts on board even though the skipper claimed the boat could hold 120 passengers. We did three dives during the day. Two before lunch and one after. We visited Saxon Reef and Hastings Reef. The Great Barrier Reef is made up of hundreds of smaller reefs spanning most of the East coast of Oz. During our first four days in Cairns we tried to see different reefs and as many different areas of the GBR as we could. The first day we saw sharks and turtles and rays and many many fish. A couple eels got thrown in every once in a while. I can't remember which day we saw the eels. The days are all blending together now. The first dive or two I was focusing mostly on getting used to diving again. Managing buoyancy. Trying not to destroy any large section of coral. All that stuff. In between the dives we had a huge buffet of chicken and turkey and pasta and just all around goodness. I wasn't about to let a little bit of seasickness hold me back. So overall it was a pretty wonderful day.

Day 3 in Cairns was more of the same. Up unbelievably early to get picked up by a shuttle to take us up to Port Douglas where we boarded the Poseidon for another day of diving. Port Douglas is another touristy waterfront town about an hour up the beach from Cairns. It's more upscale and ritzy than Cairns and was very very beautiful with a few real beaches around to relax on. Alas we had no time to relax. As soon as we got out of the shuttle we got on the boat and went straight out to Agincourt Reef #4. I had heard even from people back in Sydney that Agincourt is supposed to be the best of the best as far as reefs go. While it was really amazing we didn't think it was a step above the other areas we had seen. Just your usual run of the mill best-in-the-world diving site. We saw more of the same. Sharks, turtles, fish, rays, with some giant clams thrown in. The boat was much less packed with only 11 people diving. Unfortunately one of the guys in our dive group was a complete mess underwater.

A little story to illustrate his ineptitude: we started our dive with around 200 bar of air in our tanks (loads and loads of compressed air) and we make sure to end the dive with at least 50 or 60 bar left in the tank just in case. That means depending on how deep you are diving you should be down in the water for 30 to 50 minutes. About fifteen minutes into the dive everyone signaled to the guide how much air they had. I was doing pretty well with still 160 bar left in the tank. Usually I find that I suck air a lot quicker than most people so I was pleased to be conserving my air. The other guy signaled he had 80 left. I couldn't believe it. At first I just assumed he meant 180 and was doing really well with his air. I couldn't suck that much that quickly if I tried. I wondered if he was just releasing huge amounts of his air straight out into the water without breathing it when everyone wasn't watching. After being in the water for only 20 minutes or so the rest of the group had to sit around and wait for the guide to help the guy surface while everyone else had at least half their tanks left. While this bothered me at the time, later I wished he would surface early again rather than flounder around on the sandy bottom kicking up dust everywhere he went. We found a little ray resting on the bottom underneath a rock overhang and as soon as the guy came over to take a look he kicked up half of the sand on the bottom and scared the ray away (even if the ray didn't run away we wouldn't have been able to see it anymore with all the sand/dust in the water). Anyways besides the low visibility and the guy that caused the low visibility, the three dives were absolutely amazing. My favorite was the giant clams. Clams bigger than me. Clams that didn't look like they could close up all the way if they wanted to.

There was no rest for the weary on day 4, the final day before my mom flew off to Adelaide and Kangaroo Island. Because she would be flying in less than 24 hours we elected to do a day of snorkeling. Flying after diving can be dangerous as your body doesn't like experiencing that extreme change in pressure from 20 meters underwater to high in the sky. We were up bright and early again to be out on a sailboat by 8 or 9am. The sailboat was much smaller than the larger Tusa5 or Poseidon from the previous days and it was nice to go out with only 15 people or so total. We made our way out to Green Island and spent the day relaxing on the boat and exploring the reefs around Green Island. It was great to be able to wander off on my own snorkeling rather than have to be following a guide whenever we were diving. Plus I got to stay out for as long as I wanted which I think was around an hour and a half a couple times. The water was around 28 Celsius (around 80 Fahrenheit I believe?) everyday out on the reef so you could stay out snorkeling for as long as you wanted (which for me was until lunch was ready). Where we were exploring the bottom was around 15-20 feet deep but little chunks of rock and coral would jump up in your face and only be 3 or 4 feet under the water. Prime snorkeling territory. We didn't see as many of the big ticket items on the snorkel trip. No sharks. The mom spotted a turtle but I missed it. But lots of fun fish and much of the bottom was covered in spaghetti coral. It was mesmerizing to float and stair at the field of soft coral waving back and forth in the current.

So thats the long and short of the first few days in Cairns. The mom is now gone adventuring down in South Australia. I am wandering around Cairns overwhelmed by all the possibilities for what to do next. I checked into a nice little grimy hostel a short walk from downtown. It seems to have a nice atmosphere so I am excited for the next couple days there. A freak downpour just started here outside the hostel so I am off. Cairns is very prone to freak out of nowhere its completely sunny and then all of a sudden pouring rain pockets of weather. I love it. I hear weather in the states is just as nice? Happy square root day (3/3/09 the first square root day since 2/2/04 and there won't be another until 4/4/16) to all of you who forgot to celebrate.

Finally one other little tidbit from something I saw on tv yesterday. Oz is notoriously laid back but yesterday I loved seeing a commercial claim that “9 out of 10 aussies experience stress” (the ad went on to push some sort of stress relief pill). So there you have it. Whereas in the rest of the world we all experience stress and it is just part of everyday life, here in Australia that number is reduced by 10%. 1 in 10 people here do not experience stress! That's pretty incredible and another reason to come visit me because if you are the lucky 10% you might be completely and utterly free of stress!

- BL

Leaving Sydney

Welcome to Cairns everybody! Phase 2 of Rescuers Operations is now under way. I am up in Cairns, Queensland with my mother doing nothing but scuba diving. Erin is in Canberra with Diana. Taylor is God knows where with his sister. And Jesse is still in Sydney working away for another week. But we are all moved out of 597 New South Head Rd! No more dealing with Sydney's public transport system. No more waging war with the spiders and 7 (guesstimate) species of cockroaches residing in our Rose Bay apartment. And no more selling pizzas at Two Fat Chefs.

It was a bittersweet moment leaving the apartment for the last time. We had a lot of fun there but it was well past time to move on from Sydney. That and as I was walking out the door a little worried about missing the bus to the airport, I realized I had left my The Office Season 4 dvd's in the dvd player. Alas Jesse will have to be the caretaker of season 4 for a few weeks. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me talk about the last couple days in Sydney. My mum arrived in Sydney on the 24^th and we spent a solid 4 days hitting all the hot spots Sydney has to offer for the first time for her and for the last time for me. We walked the harbour bridge and explored the rocks. Walked around the opera house and the botanical gardens. Went to the movies. Slumdog Millionaire. So good. We visited the aquarium and had lunch in Chinatown. Sudoku wars. Fish n chips at Watson's Bay. We did the Bondi to Coogee walk and a little snorkel at Shelley Beach near Manly. Pretty full couple of days there. Here are a couple highlights I managed to capture photographically.

Here we have a nice little birdcage like object in the botanical gardens. Notice the axe and sickel I am holding. And at the top of the cage we have an arm holding a dagger. And in the middle there is a layer of what is supposed to be animal bones that you can't quite make out from this picture. We read the little plaque next to the cage and it did not in any way further our understanding of how/why a morbid piece of scultpurey like this would get created and displayed in a beautiful garden. Maybe you culture experts out there that were so good with the St George and the dragon mystery can do a little research and explain to me this particular piece of “art”.

Now here is a great picture. Here begins the amazing adventures of the mini-elephant. Some of you noticed I mentioned a mini-elephant in a previous post without any sort of explanation. Well here we have the belated appearance of our microsized pachyderm. My aunt Nancy sent me a mini-elephant with a request that I show it Australia. And I plan to do exactly that. Here is it's first day out on the town and it immediately has a run in with the largest predator on Earth. I might have to create another miniature sized blog for the adventures of the mini-elephant. I might have to make up stories to go with all the places the elephant sees. I might not have time to do any of that since I have trouble enough making time to contribute to this blog. We will see though.

Anywho. Finally we have a couple highlights from the snorkel at Shelley Beach. We ran into a super friendly blue groper right when we got into the water. It trailed us for a while and let us come right up to it and pet it. It almost seemed to like the petting but then again we could have just been imagining that. Can fish smile? Can they be happy? Do they like affection? Anyways we later came across a jellyfish that was also blue. We had no desire to pet this one though. We don't know how dangerous that creature actually was. But for those of you who like to think of Australia as a super deadly crazy dangerous place to be then yes it was super poisonous with meter long tentacles that are invisible so you can't see it in the picture and we just barely escaped with our lives. That's what I would like to think.

So that was my last four days in Sydney. I have now been in Cairns for 3 days and have so much more to write about in another post. I already miss my fellow Rescuers so much and I am blogging to let them know how I am doing as much as I am to tell you statesiders about my activities. Happy March! - BLindy

boringexcitingstory

Alright people – I’m back and better than ever. Why am I so great? Because work is just about over and we’ve moved out of our flat and gotten ALL our money back. We each had to pay $500 for bond and a cleaning fee when we first moved in to the place. After living at 597 New South Head Road for 4 months or so, we’d more or less forgotten about the money. Then as we prepared to move out, we realized as long as we cleaned up well, we were all going to get some cash money. It’s almost like getting a 100% tax rebate or something… great stuff. Anyway, yesterday I woke up at 5am with Erin for some final cleaning. She was heading off to Canberra (the capital of Australia) with her friend Diana. Lindy was in Cairns with his mom (where he is now) and Taylor and his sister were also heading to Cairns later that afternoon. Long story short, Steve (our landlord) is pretty much a jerk and made it harder than it should have been to get our money back… but we got it.

Ok so besides getting money… what’s been happening here? Well honestly not that much. I will be writing a blog in the next couple of days about an awesome track meet Erin and I went to the other day. It was the coolest thing ever, but I’m not going to write about it until I get Erin’s pictures because it won’t be nearly as good without them. Instead I’ll be writing about a rather mundane evening in hopefully a quite exciting way. If you don’t like poker - skip the boring poker description paragraphs.

Alright so the night started like any other Wednesday night. Erin, Taylor and Lindberg were all working (ok Brian was with his mom, sue me) and I decided to go play in a poker tournament at a hotel nearby. The buy-in was $22 and I figured it was not that expensive and would be a lot of fun, so why not. So I head outside to catch a bus that will get me there 15-20 minutes before I actually need to get there, but of course it came 10 minutes too early so I missed that one. Then I walked to a different bus stop to catch another bus (which I also missed) and so eventually I got there at 7:50pm. I wanted to get there at 7:30pm at the latest. Everyone had started playing already but they said I could join because they were only a couple hands in.

The first hand I sat down for really set the tone for how the night was going to go. The game was texas hold’em and the community cards ended up being 7, 8, 9, 10 and a King or something. I had folded pre-flop but two dudes stayed and both ended up having a Jack and thus a straight, but the one guy for some reason pulled all the chips towards himself. The other guy flipped out and yelled “It’s a split pot” and the other guy said something along the lines of “No duh” (with a bunch of extra expletives). The other guy returned some more cuss words and I thought a fight was going to break out until each of them had their chips. I’m pretty sure nobody said a word the rest of the time I was there.

Anyway, there were 8 people (including me) at the table and the first hand I actually played was the 7th hand when I was the big blind. I was dealt pocket Kings and only the guy to my left had stayed in so I raised. He raised me back and I gave him a little look and raised him again. He raised back and I said enough of this and went all in. I hadn’t used any chips yet so that meant everything I was given was in there. We flipped our cards and he had pocket 9s to my pocket Kings… so I was basically a 95% favorite. Of course a 9 came on the turn… so I lost. BUT – he had less money than me so I was still in.

The very next hand I was small blind and had King-Queen so I figured I’d play again. The same guy that took me out the previous hand wanted to play again so it was just us two. I scored a queen on the flop and bet big and he called. After going all in on the turn when a King came out (thus giving me the top two-pait), I felt confident I’d get some of my chips back. Unfortunately, he had 9-5 and had three trip 9s again (the third of which he scored on the final card). So this time I was out for real. $22 and ten minutes of poker and I was gone. I know Skinner can totally appreciate this because that one time in Vegas he got gypped by that woman playing in the poker rooms. Turns out it’s more luck than skill.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy about my night so far. I went over to Erin’s work because the hotel I had been playing poker at was really close. She wasn’t too busy so she took a break and we hung out for 5-10 mins. Then I went home (or so I thought) and on my way I realized I had forgotten my stupid keys. I’d been living in the same place for 4 months and had never forgotten them until the week before moving out… what an idiot. I called Brian to see when he might be getting home and he said maybe within an hour but maybe not. I knew Taylor and Erin wouldn’t be home forever, but I figured I’d take my chances with Lindberg.

I went across the street to feed some fisheys in the bay. It was mildly exciting because I say a couple different kinds of tiny little fish and even a plate-sized Ray (manta ray or whatever). Bats the size of dogs were flying overhead and scared the crap outta me so I went for a walk. It started raining on my little walk (it just kept getting better and better). When I got back to the flat… Lindberg was nowhere in sight, so I decided to head back to Erin’s work to grab her key. The bus took forever to come and then the train took equally as long and by the time I got to Erin’s work, she only had about 30 minutes before she was done.

I ended up just waiting for her and thus my night’s adventure was over. 5 hours, $22, and more sitting than you can shake a stick at. Be careful when you say that last phrase in your head.

Alright so this blog was quite boring, but I wanted to blog about something and that was literally the only eventful thing that has happened in the past couple weeks (besides the track meet) so I laid it out there for you. Sorry if you are super bored – you’ll get over it.

Keep an eye out for some great pics coming up soon and some even better blogs. I know Lindberg will have lots of great stuff from up in Cairns and I’ve got some firepower to work with already here.

Love you all and miss you and can’t wait to have loads of exciting things to talk about. There are so many fun things coming up soon. Be excited.

- Jesse “Bored but Excited” Meredith