Picture this: It's 10 p.m. in Byron Bay, you were on a bus for 13 hours, you carry 20 kg on your back, it's 35 degrees, you smell like a pig, all accommodation is booked out because there's a market fair the next day and an English girl comes to you and asks: "Do you know where the Cheeky Monkey is?" Do you blame me for suggesting to look up her arse for the cheeky monkey? The funny thing is that this stupid woman was running around in a 20 meters radius and was asking the same people all over again about the bloody monkey. Short memory problem obviously. On top of everything else, it was quite obvious that the people she was asking had only just arrived, checking in at receptions and stuff.
Apparently though we were the only people who didn't go to the Cheeky Monkey. We met Kate, a nice English girl (it's so funny how everybody was telling her that she was a nice English person and how not nice are usually the English tourists) and she was dragged to the bloody cheeky monkey. The main attraction there was that they had the boys and the girls dancing on two separate tables and the aim was to pull a member of the opposite sex to your table. Kate was wondering whether that was civilization.  

Next stop was Airly beach and the Whitsunday Islands. We went on a sailing boat with a skipper that looked just like Keith Richards and 11 of the most boring people in the galaxy ("as long as there are sausages, I'm happy", guess the nationality). We had 45 knots wind, only in the opposite direction, so we couldn'd go anywhere and we spent two days anchored. On the first night everybody got romantic and they decided to sleep on the deck. When they finally shut up, after some drinking and singing stupid songs, the wind and the rain came and they crawled back to their beds. Nobody dared to brave it the second night, hehehe. Anyway, we saw some nice coral, swimming in our stinger suits cause the y have two species of deadly jelly fish there, of course.

And then we experienced the life in the tropics. Rainrainrainrain until we reached Cairns. Flew to Alice Springs, nice e xperience landing when the temperature is 40 degrees, bumpy as hell. We booked a 3 day tour to Ayers Rock and off we went. The night before the tour I got massacred by bed bugs, some very nasty ones that left a trail of bites on my devine body. I know the name in Greek (korios) cause I had made their acquaintance in the army, please translate if you know the English term. On the first day the temperature was 41 degrees. Then we got of the bus and that's when it started. Have you seen pictures of cows in Africa or India with flies in their eye sockets, ears, mouths and everywhere? That's exactly how we were. The flies would go in your ears, up your nose, in your eyes and they are so persistent that they won't budge even when you chase them away. People with glasses get the bonus effect of having flies walking on the inside of their glasses. The highlight was that what I thought as toasted bread at lunch time was actually white bread covered in flies. It's undescribable really, we must have eaten a few flies each. Despite the heat and the flies it was quite interesting though. On the second day we dug up a few fat white worms, called witchetty grubs which we grilled and ate. Funny enough, they don't taste like chicken, they tasted like roast walnuts. As for the toilet experience, aka "the shovel", I just have to show you. Actually we can arrange a demonstration in M&M's garden.

The plan after that was to drive to Melbourne but we couldn't find a relocation (=return a car to the company for 1$/day) so we decided on the fly to go North by train, to Darwin. A small diversion equivalent to the distance Vienna-Athens. We'll do the Kakadu national park there, same camping style and then it's Melbourne and then the 36 hour trip I'm looking for to Dublin.

Vassilis