My Vacation in Oz

Australia was a blast. I flew into Brisbane and met up with my friend Jeff Campbell. I hadn't seen him in awhile, so that was nice. The whole trip was super relaxing. We spent two days in Byron Bay, one of which included an excursion to Nimbin, a kind of weird hippy land. Then we headed up to Noosa. Noosa was great. We stayed at Dolphins Beach House, which is full of cool people. I met a Japanese couple, Ken and Ai. It was fun to use my Japanese outside of Japan and to talk to such laid back Japanese people (something of a rarity around here). Ai made sushi for everyone one night. I did some hiking (bought a new pair of boots too; they rock). The land is really beautiful. I saw a big lizard called a goanna. It really shocked me when I came upon it on the path. It's pictured here. Sadly I didn't take a lot of pictures. I spent a lot of time on the beach and never wanted to take my camera with me. Should have bought a disposable but then those would have never made it online. Nights were spent playing beer pong. All in all a very good time.

I just stumbled upon the word goanna in my dictionary ( The Oxford American English Dictionary). I had been curious before as to why the word sounded so much like "iguanna". It turns out that it originated as a derivation of "iguanna" even though the lizards are quite different. It's Australian only. We call these lizards "monitors". I'd actually heard of monitors before; Josh used to have one as a pet. I had no clue that's what I actually saw out hiking.

I also spent some time on a farm, wwoofing. WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms. Check it out here: WWOOF International. The farm we stayed on was just Jenny and Margaret (age seven). They have an orchard and a vegetable patch. They didn't really have a lot going on, but the food was excellent. They get what produce they don't grow from neighboring farms. I've never tasted such nice bananas. Jeff and I dug a couple drainage ditches and did some serious weeding. Jenny had had housesitters who didn't take care of the place like they were supposed to while she was away, so we basically had to pull up a field of grass that had grown around these young fruit trees. That was pretty miserable work. We also spent a day working with Jenny's neighbor's the Carters. Jimmy Carter was a great guy to work with. We put up a fence together and had a few beers afterwards. On the last night there we went down to the local winery for a lamb roast. Yummy. The wine was actually pretty mediocre, but it was a good time.