Wow, I can't believe I've been here for over a month now. I'm still taking it pretty easy and spending a lot of time hanging out in hammocks, swimming, walking on the beach, or some other equally taxing activity.
So what exciting adventures can I tell you about? Well, there's a guy at the hostel who does 'Bushtucker Walks' around the grounds, showing you what bits of plants can be eaten or used as medicines, sunscreen, firelighter, or whatever. It turns out that the most important thing to find is sugar if you're out and about in the bush. I now know what flowers I can suck nectar out of, should I be caught short of jelly bears at any point. I've also ventured further afield to explore a few more small towns in the vicinity. I'll post up pictures from Lennox Head, Skennars head and Ballina once the internet connection stops being painfully slow. There may also be some pictures up from the Fantasy Tea Party that some of the folk in the campground organised. I went as a goblin and covered my face and arms in green body paint. The photos are pretty amusing.
Ah yes, then there was the incident with the ants. I have always rather liked the advice "if you swallow a live toad first thing every morning, you can be safe in the knowledge that nothing worse will happen to you all day" and figure if you aren't willing to swallow the toad then you have no right to complain anyway. Waking up covered in ants is also a good way to put the rest of the day in perspective. We had something of an infestation one day, when a whole flock (what's the correct collective term for ants?) tramped in through the ceiling and took over my (top bunk) bed, with me fast asleep in it. Luckily, the hostel sorted it out straight away. Still, not the most pleasant start to any day but it did make difficult to get too worked up about either of the banks that chose that day to become awkward. (All bank problems appear to have been sorted out now, by the way. No more ants required). Also, now waking up ant-free starts every day with a strange, happy feeling of achievement.
The absolute highlight of my time in Oz, though, was the trapeze lesson. There's a circus that trains in Byron over the winter and offers classes, so I figured I'd give it a go. So.Much.Fun. Firstly, I was taken to a ground-level trapeze over some crash mats and shown how to do a 'knee hang'. Basically, you're hanging below with your arms apart, then you roll up to hook your knees over the bar. You let go with you hands and arch your back to strike a sort of 'da-da!' pose, before grabbing back on with your hands and manoeuvering back into the starting position. Then, they send you up a little, rickety ladder up to a platform eight meters above the floor. Try to imagine: you get to the top of said ladder, then an instructor clips a couple of safety lines to you and takes you out to the edge. The position you take is not dissimilar to that of a bungee jumper immediately prior to jumping - your feet sticking out over the ledge, your body leaning out at an alarming angle, your brain not quite accepting that this is an entirely wise idea. In this case, the instructor holds on to you as you reach out over the drop to grip the trapeze with first one sweaty hand then the other. Finally, after a brief string of meaningless (to me) words -- to describe the intended to trick to the guy holding the safety lines, apparently -- ending in "Huup!", I'm launched out on this giant swing. It was so much fun I almost entirely forgot that I was supposed to be doing something up there. The idea is to get into position at the top of the first swing (i.e. the highest point on the opposite side to the platform) but the trapeze had done a fair few swings and was almost stationary in the middle before I finally got there. Still, I was disproportionately pleased with myself. To get down you have to swing fowards, backwards, forwards, then grab your knees. This produces an impressive looking back flip as you drop from the trapeze to the net below. For anyone still trying to imagine this, the net is about 3m up from the floor and very comfortable to land in, if difficult to walk over. At the edge to this, you rolley-polley off onto the crash mats (which is actually the most difficult thing to do. I got tangled in the safety lines every time), then scamper back up the ladder for another go. During the course of the lesson, I got rather better at the whole timing thing and learnt a new method of hooking my knees on. The 'hockstar' basically involves keeping your arms together to start with then bringing your legs up around the outside. Once I got the hang (so to speak) of that, I got one more, grand finale trick: the 'catch'. Basically, this involved putting a (proper, circus-trained) guy on the other trapeze so that when I struck my 'da-da!' pose, he could grab my wrists so I'd be hanging from him instead of the trapeze. Not so much a 'catch' as a 'pull you off your trapeze', but it was amazing. Watching the other people in the class have a go, it looked really impressive. I certainly felt like a circus performer. It was absolutely amazing. So.Much.Fun. I was on such an adrenaline high (no pun intended) that I was running around for the rest of the day. Don't worry though. Given that I'm already on the other side of the world, to then run away with the circus would seem like overkill.
So yes, that's my life up to date. Hope y'all are having fun and that anyone not bored of pirates enjoyed International Talk Like A Pirate Day yesterday. Yaaarr.
