Back in School

I've always had problem deciding what do to or chose. And to finish things I've started. This became obvious on the road-trip when the girls always complained about me leaving food. Anyway this is the first week of the semester and it's time to decide which subjects to read (courses). Stressful, oh yes. Luckily the system here at Melbourne Uni do encourage my inability to make decisions, since it's allowed to change subjects during the first TWO WEEKS of the semester.

I really liked the lectures for my psychology subjects and they seem really interesting. Feels good to read something that feels genuinely fun. The Environmental monitoring subject includs a field-camp for 5 days during the break (which costs 1500, that sucks). And we're going to study sedimentation and erosion in a river. Very interesting, not. Then we have the environmental policy subject on thursday nights, which collide with a party, not good. We'll see what happens.

Susy leaves on thursday and we only have one day left. I cried a bit when Sophie left so it will probably be a bit emotional on thursday to say good-bye. I'm a bit on my own after that, which means that I'll have to find some new friends.

Goodnight

Pictures

Now I've uploaded most of the pictures from my holiday. I'll add some descriptions tomorrow to the photos as well. I really can't be bothered to write in the blog

about the vacation now that it's over.

Love Johan

Best of first week roadtrip

Best of road trip week 2 and 3

Sailing trip on the withsundays 14-16 july

We had decided to do something touristy on our trip and the girls picked the withsundays, which is a group of islands around 300 km south from Townsville. It was pricey, around 350 dollar, but I didn't regret it, cos I had a great time

We left around noon Wednesday. The rest of the group were around twenty and mostly european, There were two Israeli girls, which I thought were exotic but I didn't speak so much with them. It was really nice to blaze on a ship in the sunshine all afternoon. We arrived at the withhaven beach after dark, and had some good dinner. The rest of the night were quite calm, since we were told that we would be woken up at 6 am next morning. After a lovely breakfast, consisting of a toasty and coffee we were transported to the withhaven beach. It was nice to stroll on the beach in the morning, but we didn't swim so much. The beach is famous for it's fine grained sand that can be used to polish rings .

Day 2: Mataranka

We decided to go to the larger park, Kakadu, the second day and pass the hot springs in Mataranka. The drive was about 400 km, so we drove most of the day although we had time to check out two waterfalls and a big field of termite mounds

When we tried to use the gas burner to cock water for the breakfast we failed big time; no matches and then not enough gas in the burner. When we finally got our water boiling our 'brazilian' coffee tasted like hot chocolate and only contained 1 % coffee.


The first waterfall was really cool, but swimming were not allowed since there were a crocodile lurking around. Instead we took a walk around the fall and got some stunning views. The second waterfall provided some really good swimming and we had a nice sandwich lunch.

We stopped on the way down to Mataranka in Pine Creeks, which was a really small and isolated town. People had their dogs standings on the backs of their cars open storage spaces, quite weird and hillbilly-like.

In Katarine we saw some Abourginal people walking around with bare foots: western civilization meets an ancient culture. After Katarine they warned for controlled fires (they do that to prevent bush-fires) along the way to Mataranka. It was really cool to drive with fires around us, but when we got closer to Mataranka we got a bit worried when the fires grew larger. Luckily, there were no fires in Mataranka and we could finally get some food and rest at the second camping site we tried (the first one said it was full, even though there were not full).

Day 1 (29/6) Litchfield National Park

I'm going to write about my trip to Darwin and Cairns in the coming weeks. I'm going on a road trip with my friends from Melbourne Univeristy: Susanna and Sophie. I will upload photos as soon as possible.

I woke up at 8 30 after only 4 hours sleep fairly easy to a warm climate and buzzing AC in a hostel in Darwin. The flight to Darwin the previous night had been delayed so me and Susie were at the hostel around 3 am.

The van we had rented were old and rusty, but it was cheap and had some paintings on the sides of asses which lead us to give it the name ' the butt-mobile' after a while. After we had bought food for three days we left Darwin, heading for Litchfield national park. It was nice to leave Darwin where the temperature approached 32 degrees. Several people we had asked had recommended Litchfield, which is much smaller then the most popular park: Kakadu, which is described as a 'small country'. We wondered if they meant the Vatikatan State or Belgium.

On the road towards Litchfield we saw smoke, which made us worry a bit about bush-fires, but the smoke were luckily not wide-spread and eased after a while. The roads became more winding and after a couple of hour of driving we had reached our first stop: Burley Holes. These holes were beautiful rock lagoons that had been formed from the stream in the middle of the forest. We had a really nice and refreshing swim.

We arrived at the camping site at sunset. It was a basic camping with some BBQ-plates and showers. The camping were made up of spaces located around the some winding small roads. We did not see any free spots and even if there were a lot of free space on several spots, we all felt very polite and swedish and ended up a parking spot eventually. We prepared a lovely barbeque meal and started chatting with this two middle aged australian dudes that were on a road trip as us. They were quite funny, but we left them quite early for a refreshing sleep. They joked about us being lame and old and that we should party more, but we enjoyed to go to bed at 10 pm. The van was too small to extend the legs fully, but we all fell asleep after I had given some ear plugs to Susie and Sophie to help them cope with my snoring.