The Grouches Down Under...

We walked off the train with our last threads of sanity (almost) in tact. We headed to a hostel called 'The Funk House' (yep sounds like we're headed for a much needed night's sleep doesn't it?!) Actually, it was ok as it happens, so we went to book another night to avoid getting up early and checking out. No Space. I walked down the road to our first hostel in Sydney, to finally get my sim card and phone back (wooooo), and made the decision to book us in for five nights - until the end of our time in Australia, thinking that would cut this stupid moving around stuff out. We spent the day washing, reading, and chilling a bit, and headed to bed for an early night at around 9.30pm.


I've been slightly concerned about how tired I'm getting lately. I am totally exhausted, and beginning to feel a bit ill because of it. For example, the other day I opened a bottle of Sprite which fizzed up on my leg - I nearly cried. That is how tired I was last week, and I haven't had a full night's sleep since then. Despite being in bed between 9.30pm, and 8.30am, I managed about 3 hours sleep. Loz can sleep through anything - in fact she shouts at me in her sleep sometimes and doesn't wake herself up, she points too, so I know it's my fault. I however, can not - I try to make up the odd hour by napping on transport, but it's only ever half sleep... Loz can't nap in the day, despite having spent five years as a student. Odd. The light did not go off until about 12.30am, which meant I was awake until then, but in that weird 'where the hell am I daze'. I felt a bit rough and was relieved when the last of the girls who was in put the light off.


After this the girl in the bed below me's phone went off on full volume, once every 15 minutes or so, 3 times. Not long after that I woke again to hear her being sick. No attempt was made to go to the bathroom, which meant I had the scratch and sniff version... this happened about every half hour, 3 times. Now she didn't get up any of thos times, which means there is a large bag of vomit somewhere in the bed below me. Nice.


Just as I'd dozed off again, one of the girls came home, off her face and slammed the door. Her phone went off (also on full volume of course), so she shouted back down it for a bit before she went to bed. I just about got back to sleep when at 4am, the last girl came back, also off her face, this time with a guy in-tow (who was incidentally also off his face). She left him in the room while she went out for a few mins. Now I don't know about you, but if you were in an all female dorm and woke up at 4am with a drunk guy leering over you, I'd be a bit freaked out. As it happens, I had seen the intro, and no one else woke up, so it was 'ok'. Anyway, she came back and shagged him on the balcony for a bit before moving to the bunk, and constructing a tent of blankeds around the bunk bed. This went on til around six, when they finally shut the F up, and I fell asleep, until my alarm went off at eight - I could have thrown it at one of them.


Amusingly when we woke up, the blanket thent had fallen down - we'll we'd had the audio, we might as well have the bloody visual I suppose. The girl in question was mortified that her blanket structure had failed to stay in place, as she had managed to be so damned subtle about his existance until this point! Her face was a picture. Loz and I made things better by reenacting her surprise and scenes from the previous night with a banana and some suncream across the top bunks. It amused us. I also may have accidentally slammed the door at every opportunity. Oops.


So we're on the train to the Blue Mountains (they'd better be blue!). We missed the train by 30 seconds (literally), and so had time for a traditionally shite and overpriced station breakfast, and are now heading out to Katoomba an hour later than planned. I had thought I'd have a nap, but of course no train journey is complete without your average dickhead who has a phone on full volume with a trance ring tone... which of course he can't hear ringing repeatedly because he's busy listening to trance at full volume on his ipod. Finally he answers his phone, and proves the intellect of people that listen to trance. His phone keeps cutting out - we're on a train - however you would think he'd been abducted by aliens... 'I don't know what's happening, I can't hear you and you can't hear me...' etc etc. Please someone help us.


I think anyone still reading this can tell we've had a rubbish couple of days since leaving Cairns (which is definitely my favourite place in Aus so far, even more so because it has the reef), and I think it's testament either to our wonderful sense of humour, or perhaps just loss of sanity, that we are already able to laugh at these things, particularly when we try to write them up for you, so you feel like you were there suffering with us. True we do usually cry when we read them back, but that's usually tears of laughter. Although to be fair, at the moment, I'm not entirely convinced Cat's aren't tears of despair. Even the Kirspy Kreme doughnut I bought in an attempt to cheer her up didn't seem to work.


At this point things got a bit silly - again due to delerium, so you'll have to imagine our people watching. I wish we could scan for all you readers the pages in our notebooks that we use, like naughty children, when we can't talk out loud in case the public hear us. I think our wonderfully illustrative drawings would also be winning prizes. We people watched for a bit. We were given gold, and spent most of the journey in hysterics... the young uni student in his first year, the girls opposite him having sat there blatantly cos they fancied him, while he talked about how thick his behavioural science text books were for a bit... don't think they were interested poppet. He finally cottoned on, and went into one of those, 'Oh my course is so difficult and time consuming, but it's ok, cos I'm amazing and I wrote my 50,000 word essay in three hours, and got an A double star.' Bless. Someone also used 'far out' in a real sentence. Then one of the girls got off, and the other started talking about how this other girl went dogging on the weekend with her friends' (don't think she had any left by the sounds of it) boyfriends. We can only assume that has a different meaning in Aus... we hope. Then an emo guy got on with his fly down. We were not short of entertainment.


So we're in Manly now. Yes, Manly, and are having a good snigger at 'The Manly Pharmacist', 'The Manly Jeweller' and 'The Manly Souvenir shop' - tee hee. It's now Loz's turn to be in a bad mood. The waitress in Nandos is Australian, which a high percentage of the time in our experience, can be interchanged with the word 'rude'. Having clearly asked for a 'lemon and herb' chicken, and being given a 'mild' one, on sending it back the woman told Lauren that in fact she had asked for the wrong one, and even checked on the til so she could prove this! Of course, that does assume that she put the information in correctly in the first place, which she must have, cos people don't make mistakes. Surely everyone knows that the customer is always right whether they are or not! (Loz was btw, I heard her.) Anyway, so having just spent £10 on a crap and wrong meal in Nandos, Loz is a bit pissed off. We're also a bit sandy again. Bugger.


I think we've established we are pool people. Realistically we're not a big fan of catching rays - as we usually manage to catch sunstroke, and probably skin cancer in the process. We're also not big beach bums (despite having big bums) as sand just gets everywhere. AND, we aren't really hot on the rave scene, so I guess we were rather foolish to come to Aus, as that and bankruptcy seems pretty much all it has to offer. However before we get overly grumpy, we should tell you we've had a lovely couple of days...


Firstly, after not sleeping, I was less than optimistic about our trip to the Blue Mountains, however we really enjoyed it. Despite the lies about the distances of the walks (fairly sure the signs were pointing as the crow flies, as opposed to round the bloody great craters - there was no way that was only 3km), and despite Loz walking into the biggest spider's web she's ever encountered (it still freaks her out), we had a lovely day. The mountains were red, not blue, although they did have a bluey haze to them so we saw where they got it from. We headed back shattered and got back around 10pm, and fell asleep for a whole night without incident!


The day after, we went to Featherdale Wildlife Park, which was wicked. It is full of Australian animals, and they let the kangaroos run loose in the grounds, so you can pet them and feed them. When they've had enough of the kiddy school trips, they have an area which is off limits to humans so they can go rest. We patted a koala and had our photos took. Unfortunately ours was sleeping, and in a very unattractive pose practicing for the Koala pole-dance championships later that month. We went back for another photo later when he was awake and looking a bit more dignified. They had dingos, Tasmanian devils (who apparently everyone knew were real except me), flying foxes, miniature pengins, emus, the biggest crocodile I have ever seen (we watched a film in Kuala Lumpur about that very one, so we gave him a wide berth), snakes and lizards, dragon things, echidnas... etc etc. It was fab - the kangaroos were so cute, feeding them was good fun as you'd have an emu appear on your shoulder and try to steal the food... it's quite hard to argue with a hungry emu. Loz doesn't like birds very much, which made it even more amusing, and we ended up buying several more cones of food so we could actually give some to the kangaroos. That night we slept again, almost without incident, although for a while I thought there was going to be a repeat of the other night.


So our final 2 days are now upon us. We've spent most of today sleeping and planning things for Hawaii, and are flying tomorrow. Very excited! We're going to a hotel too, which isn't particularly stunning I don't think, but will be a godsend after the hostels here. It has been like being thrown back in with the types of people I managed to irradicate from my life on leaving school... bitchy cow bullies. The kind that come back and add you on facebook 10 years later to make themselves look popular (*clicks ignore*). They even forced one girl to move rooms the other day. I'm not sure she was any better, but they are in their twenties, I'd have thought they could keep their mouths shut and deal with it by now. Oh well. Not long to go!


[We apologise for the lack of imagery in the last few posts, only our slow and stupidly expensive internet means we can't upload any. Normal service will hopefully be restored in Hawaii.]