Time to come home

Well I'm now back in Sydney. I started the trip here and now inevitably I must finish the trip here. It feels a bit weird that it is all coming to an end. This traveling thing and living out of a bag has become my life for the last six months and I think it will be a bit of an adjustment when I come back home to my own room and all the regularities of home life.

Last time I posted I was living it up with Kels and Wyatt with me going up the east coast. We did that whitsunday sailing trip that i talked about and it was so amazing! Without doubt one of the best parts of my whole trip and having Kelsey and Wyatt there to share it with was nice as well. After that we went up the coast and actually went to a real aussie outback ranch. It was a beef cattle ranch and there are a lot of those in the outback of australia because it is basically a desert and nothing else can survive there. haha. I'm not sure how big that one was but talking to others I found out that the largest ranch in Australia is in South Australia and it is 13.8 Million acres!! That is insane. But it was good fun to see outback australia a little. THen we went to Mission Beach Where we all did a skydive from 14000 ft. WHat an adrenaline rush that was, so much fun. Then it was our last stop together in Cairns where we went snorkeling and scuba diving on the great barrier reef, which was also really really good. The colour in the corals in pretty spectacular. After that Kelsey and wyatt had to go home and i continued on upward to Cape Tribulation which is northern part of Australia where they have the Daintree Rainforest. I spent a few days up there walking through the rainforests and spotting crocs in the wild! I came back to cairns for one night and then took the greyhound bus to Alice Springs where I did a three day tour of Uluru or Ayers Rock. It is the largest rock in the world and it is the middle of the Australian outback. It was pretty cool to see and the aboriginal history behind it was interesting as well. I finished that and then flew back here to Sydney, where it all began.

I am doing one last tourist thing tomorrow when I go to the Blue Mountains which is a day trip out there to see the mountains and waterfalls and stuff. Other than that I am sorting out all my bank accounts and tax to be ready to leave the country. It does seem crazy that it is almost over. Thanks to everyone who thought about me, prayed for me, kept in contact and messaged me, and to all those who kept up with my blog. I know I didn't always have news and it took a while for me to get to putting up new posts. But I am home soon and you can tell me what you thought of it when you see me. haha. Thanks again to kelsey and wyatt for taking there time and money to come see me, we had a kick ass time. And trust me its better this way! ha.

Until I see you all in person, stay safe and enjoy the summer.

Cheers

It's been a while!

Wow it's been a while since I've written on here. I won't get into a lot of detail because that would take a long time to cover everything. Basically after my trip to Tasmania for a week I flew to Adelaide looking for work. It took me about to weeks to find some work but in the end I got a bit. I was working weekend night shifts at Hungry Jacks. haha. Hungry Jacks is what they call burger king over here, so needless to say it wasn't the highest paying job, but it was actually pretty fun. A good experience anyway. haha. During the weekdays I was working a sales job. For the first two weeks I worked as a salesperson in events. Basically my job was to stop people walking through the malls and attempt to sign them up to a charity for heart disease. It was good money if you were good at it and I was ok. But it was kind of repetitive after a while. Anyway after two weeks I switched over to telemarketing and did that for the rest of my time in adelaide. So now looking back on my jobs in Australia i've got quite the additions to my resume. ahaha. Fast food, telemarketing, door to door sales, and salesperson in a mall. ha, what joke. But that was sweet when i got to work for acdc concert back in brisbane!

Anyway after i finished working in Adelaide for 4 weeks and had been there for 6 weeks total I was pumped to get to leave and start travelling again. And now I was going to start doing it with Kelsey and Wyatt because I flew to Brisbane and met them there a couple days later. It was pretty exciting to see them. Very cool that they would spend all that money and fly out to see me and travel with me. Since then we have been travelling together for about 2 weeks and it has been soo much fun! We are travelling north up the east coast and this is like the main backpacker area with tons of fun things to do along the way. We have done a 3 day trip to fraser island, which is the largest all sand island in the world and we camped in tents and drove around checking out all the lakes on the island and it was with a group of about 16 of us and it was so much fun with all of those people! We have been snorkelling, and chilled out on some of the most beautiful beaches i've ever seen. We are now in Arlie Beach and about to do one of the things i have been most excited for this whole trip. Tomorrow we leave to do the whitsunday sailing trip. It is 2 days on a sail boat with some stop offs for snorkelling along the Great Barrier Reef and its all in this group of 74 little Islands. We are all so pumped to do it!! It will be so good, especially if we get the weather that we have been getting lately. Perfect cloudless days that are like a perfect 25 degrees. So Good!

But ya that is the sum up of my last 2 months haha. Sorry to all those who keep checking this and find nothing new. If I get the time I will also try to put some pics up on facebook. Cheers mates!! O and kels and wyatt say hi as well. Later


P.S - Big shout out to Chortitz Road!!! Wooh! you know what i'm talkin about G. Keep it real dog

Melbourne, Tasmania, & Adelaide

G'day mates! Hope your all well, once again it's been a while since i've updated this blog so here is the new news. I spent two weeks in Melbourne and did the great ocean road for one of the wknds and that was awesome. I really liked melbourne. It just seems like there is always something goin on. I went to a show at the comedy fest that was going on there, and left just before the final day of the grand prix race. I didn't go to any of the grand prix races but it made for a good atmosphere in the city with such a big event on. From melbourne i flew down to Hobart, Tasmania for six days. Tasmania is a state of Australia but is an island state off the mainland. I saw hobart and Launceston, which are the only two official cities of the state. Not many ppl live in tasmania and even the cities are more like big country towns than anything, and seemed so slow and boring compared to the big cities but were still nice and then did a 3 day tour of the west coast that was one of the best parts of my whole trip. I got to treck up to the summit of Cradle Mountain, went to some sand dunes and a bunch of rainforest walks to waterfalls and stuff. A lot of scenic stuff, but I really enjoyed it! Then spent the last night in Hobart and flew into Adelaide last friday. I'm now trying to get work here in Adelaide and it's going alright. I basically just apply to any place that I think will have a large turnover of employees so everything from fast food restaurants to clothing stores and newspaper ads. I actually had my first interview today for a telemarketing position. haha. I know, I get all the best jobs; Door to door knocking and now telemarketing. But, the training for that starts on Monday and if I don't find anything before that I'll try it out. The city of Adelaide is ok. Definatley not as much going on as the bigger cities of sydney or melbourne but the beaches are nice and the people are really friendly. Literally when I got off the plane I had like 3 experiences where people just came up to me and started helping carry my stuff and helping know where to go to find my hostel and stuff.

O rite, and I also went to a AFL (Aussie Rules Football) game in Melbourne at the MCG stadium which can hold 100 000 people. It was Essendon VS Geelong, and there were only 58 000 people at this game, but it still had a really good atmosphere in there. I had the rules explained to me a little more before the game and ya i actually thought the game was really fun to watch. It's like a mix of rugby, soccer and american football. ha.

So hopefully I get some solid work here in Adelaide and if I do I will be staying here for a while. I hope you all had a good Easter holiday, I even made myself a gourmet chicken and potatoes meal for easter, so mine was good.

Take care. Till next time, Cheers

Melbourne here i come

Hey hey hey it's cole here for another update. I have been hearing that some of you would like me to post more often, well to be honest lately i haven't done a lot of exciting things. I've just been working here in brisbane. I haven't been doing a lot in the evenings because last week Queensland got some of the heaviest rains in record. The dams were 98% full in Brisbane and other places around Queensland were flooding. But, I have my final day of work tomorrow, and on Saturday night I am flying into Melbourne and continuing my travelling down there. My plans for the next couple of months is to see southern Australia and some of the west. So I want to be in Melbourne for about 10 days probably, then i will hopefully catch a ferry from melbourne that can bring me over to Tasmania. Tasmania is a island off of the Mainland of Australia, but is a state of the country and from what I've heard very nice to visit. So I would like to do that for about a week i think. When I get back to Melbourne I will travel down the Great Ocean Road which is just outside of Melbourne and is only a 200km stretch of highway that runs right along the ocean, and other travellers have said that it is very beautiful scenery and in that short distance there is so much to see. I am thinking of renting a car or campervan for that with a couple of other people then taking it all the way up the south coast to a city called Adelaide. See the city and sights then from there catch a train to Perth which is in Western Australia. Very few people live in Western Australia, but it is also said to be nice to visit and have great beaches. I think by the time i do all of that it will take roughly 2 months. So that is my rough plan for the next while. I am probably going to have to stop and work one more time as well, so it will be interesting to see how that all works out, but I'm looking forward to the experience it will be. I am excited to start actually travelling again. But, my time in Brisbane was good. I met heaps of cool people and probably learned more about actuall Australian culture than i will anywhere else from working and spending time with australians rather than other travellers.

I will keep you all updated on how it goes, and how well i stick to that plan. Until then take care

Still Working

G'day mates. I's been a while since I have posted something on my blog so I will try and fill in the gaps of the last few weeks. My last post I told you all that I started training to be a door to door salesman. It was all commision work and the first three days were all unpaid training and by the end of the week I had made 4 sales and thus made all of 100 dollars in the week. So when I got offered a new warehouse job starting that monday with a consistent hourly pay I dropped the sales position and began working for at a warehouse for a toddler and children clothing line called Bright Bots. It is the start of a new clothing season so they are getting a container full of boxes with the new line of clothes coming in everyday so I've been hired for a short term to help with the demand. Basically I sort all the boxes that come in and then once we've done that I have to pick orders for each store that buys the clothes from the company so I will take a package from each type of new clothes we got in and put it all together with everything else the store wants and we ship that off to stores all over Australia. It sounds like a boring job but the people I work with are a lot of fun so it makes the days go by quick. I start at 630 am and work till 230 in the afternoon so i also get most of my afternoon to do what I want as well. I've doing that job for the last 2 weeks now, and this last week I got offered the sweetest job of all time! A person I met up with in Brisbane is friends with someone who runs risk management at all kinds of big sporting events and concerts. And ACDC was in Brisbane this last week on there Black Ice Tour. So he got me a job helping set up for the concert and working at the concert. I got to work two days before the concert happened helping to make sure the stadium it was being played in was totally safe. Because the job of risk management is obviously to reduce the risk of the patrons at the event. So i did things like ensure all the fire hoses and fire extinguishers were checked up to date and working properly. Then on Thursday and Saturday I got to go to the concerts they played. It was so cool. During the concert my main duties were to stand on a staircase and if anyone fell down the stairs to help them out and call over any paramedics when needed. But, essentially i got paid to go to ACDC so that is just awesome. I didn't get to watch all of it because of what i was doing but i heard the whole thing and got to see some of it when i went on break. And after the show on Saturday night as ACDC was leaving the stadium I was able to get the lead singers autograph and talk to him a bit as he was getting into his car to leave! So this job has been making me money and is also now one of the highlights of my trip. That was last night, and now I will go back to just working my warehouse job for probably another week before moving on.

I hope you all are doing just swell back at home. Cheers

Getting to work

Whats up people? I'm doing awesome still, and spent last week job hunting. I start training to be a door to door sales person for a marketing company tomorrow. So we'll see how that goes i suppose. I would be asking ppl to switch from there current electric company to a new one called Electric Australia. So yes, i'm one of those annoying ppl ringing your door bell to sell stuff. haha. I haven't done a whole lot other than looking for jobs the last while. On thursday i went inland to a town called Dalby and got to see a different side of Australia rather than the big coastal cities i saw little towns like Hague and cattle ranches and stuff. So that was nice to do. I've toured the city of brisbane quite a bit, and i got to drive on the left side of the road for the first time, which was pretty cool. Its not that hard really, just got get used to having the centre line of your right side instead of left and your golden. I don't have much other exciting things to talk about so that's all for now. See ya

Happy Australia Day

Hey everybody I celebrated it yesterday but if your reading this back home it might still be January 26, which is australia's national holiday for there own country. In true aussie form i spent the day surfing and relaxing at my hostel where we had a bbq then went out to celebrate. I spent it in surfers paradise. I was there for 4 nights and it was quite busy because it was the last week in the school holidays for aussie's and so they were all on there last holiday vacation. I went to a water theme park called wet n wild which was nice on such a hot day. It has been really hot lately, and because i'm moving north up the coast everywhere is always getting hotter than the previous place. But anyway this morning i took a bus out of surfers paradise and am now in Brisbane. It's the third largest city in australia i think about 1.3 million and i'm not sure what there is all to do here but im sure i'll find something in the next few days.

Hope you all have a good aussie day! cheers

Byron Bay

Hello all back at home. Hope you're all doing well. I haven't posted anything in about a week so I will fill you in about what I've been doing the last while. After I left sydney I spent two nights in Coffs Harbour where I spent time on the beach and whent to a dolphin and seal show which was pretty cool. From Coffs Harbour I went further up the coast to the northern part of New south wales, to a city called Byron Bay. It's a very popular place for travellers and i could tell why right away. They have awesome beaches that stretch the whole coast line of the city. In Byron Bay I tried surfing again, which was really fun. I met all kinds of people from all over the place and for the first time i met some people that were actually from Australia. I spent 8 days in Byron Bay, and the highlight of those days was when I went scuba diving in the ocean. It was so cool, because i had never done it before i had to do a small intro course that showed me how everything worked in the pool of the dive center. Then we went out to a place called Julian rock thats just a few miles of the coast. Diving was such an amazing experience I was with an instructor and he pointed out all kinds of marine life to me. We were swimming behind a leppard shark for a while and we saw a couple of absolutely massive turtles that just blew me away when i first saw them. They were so big. My instructor told me later that they were probably all over 100 years old. I really enjoyed my time in Byron and this morning I took a bus to Surfers paradise, which is in Queensland so I have entered my second state now. Surfers Paradise is best known for the beach that stretches for close to 70 km up the coast and the city is packed with high rise apartment and hotel buildings. I'm not sure how long I will spend here but hopefully its a good time.

Thats my update for the last 10 days or so, and i hope everyone back at home is staying warm. lol. I'm not having a problem with doing that.

Buh Bye Sydney

Hey all. I woke up at 5 am this morning to catch my bus out of sydney and started up the east coast. I'm going with a bus tour company called Oz Experience. So i can hop on and hop off at all the places they stop along the way. I got off at Coffs harbour today, which is about 6 hours north of sydney. It's good to get out of the big city, this part of the trip should be awesome and im really looking forward to it. When i move on from coffs harbour the bus makes a stop at a surf camp so i will get a lesson on surfing which should be fun. Today was so nice, about 30 degrees i think, a lot nicer than where most of you are im sure. lol. Anyway thats all for now.

Tata

hey hey hey, I'm still rocking in sydney and having a blast. I have been here for 8 days now and i am actually running out of ideas of what to do in the city. I will be ready to move on once my time is up at this hostel, which is on monday. From there I think I might take a tour of the Blue mountains, which is a set of mountains a few hours from sydney and there are caves there and walking tours. But recently in sydney I have gone to the sydney tower, which is the highest viewing point in sydney. It was an awesome view up there, you could see the whole city and where the harbour all extended to. A few days ago I went to Manly beach which is across the harbour so I had to take a ferry there, which was pretty sweet. The beach was probably a mile long and I think it was full the whole way down it was crazy. Today I went to a place called Wildlife world. It's kinda like a zoo but it focused mainly on the famous australian like kangaroos and koalas and crocadiles. You could pet the koalas there and see the kangaroos sun bathing. Tonight I think I will stay in my room and watch a movie with my roomates who are danish and german. lol. There are a ton of German travellers out here. I think I have only met maybe three people that actually grew up in Australia. But all the same it gives me a chance to find out about all these other countries that these people are from and ask about where they have all been and seen in Australia. It's been awesome so far and I hope it continues!

Later

Hey everyone. I've been keeping pretty busy in sydney. I took a city sight seeing tour on one of those double decker buses with the top open. haha. It was pretty cool. On sunday I went to a huge church called st. mary's cathedral. It was cool seeing such a huge church and it was in like a gothic style so it looked really cool to. Today I went to Bondi Beach, which is a huge beach in sydney and one of the most popular ones so there were a lot of ppl there. It was a good day for it too. We've had some rain lately, but today it was nice outside. Well thats all the news for now, later

Happy New Years!

Hey everyone back at home. I celebrated new years last nite watching the awesome fireworks show. They take new years pretty seriously out here. lol. It was like an all day party before the fireworks.People were lining up to get good seats for viewing at six in the morning. It was tons of fun tho.Today there was also an all day music festival to celebrate new years to. There was a bunch of bands playing all day long, but it was expensive to get in so I didn't go to it. And today I walked down to the opera house and saw the harbour bridge. The opera house was really cool, like you can see it in the pictures but when I actually saw it it seemed so much bigger and going inside and looking around and stuff, it was very cool. I also walked through the botanica gardens which was nice. The hostel is alright I celebrated new years with the people in my room so iv gotten to know them a bit.

I think tomorrow I will catch a ferry to Manly beach. A few people have mentioned that its a nice beach.

Hope things are good at home. Happy New Years everyone!!