4/52

it's 05:30am, 3 hours before the end of my 4th of 7 night shifts here at the royal darwin. ang is somewhere out there too right now, in the bowels of the hospital working night shift (or perhaps the uteruses of the hospital, given that she's doing o+g...or would that be uteri?). there's a beautiful quietness to the hospital at this hour, one of many reasons that i love working overnight.

what's to report? i'll just pop in some photos and commentary and that should suffice.

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i decided that i'd had enough of several ugly lesions on my arm and neck, so dr ang came to my rescue and excised several pieces of ondrej on an ad hoc operating table (converted massage bed) in my spare room. the second installment of this story (10 days later) involves ang and i being discovered by the head of midwifery in a dark little room at 6am when it was time for the stitches to come out. my shirt had just come off, ang was wielding a blade, enter stage left mega-bitch midwife wearing expression of horror and disgust. the timing was comic.
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my housemate john snuck in during the operation (no surgical nurses barking like dogs to scare him off) and caught the action from below the massage table.

as of the last couple of days the clouds have started to move in and we even had an unseasonable downpour yesterday. beautiful but boring sunsets like the one above will soon make way to the majesty of wet-season sunsets. can't wait! (but i'll try - on the beach with a bottle of wine) :)

you've got to love a bit of practical advice. a billboard on the way in to kakadu.

i had some days off mid-week and headed back to kakadu, this time to the relatively isolated gunlom falls. the hero of the story was, once again, adam, who did 74km of off-road like an absolute champion. we even shared our first fishtail together over a particularly sandy part of the road, which was quite romantic save the smell of shit in my pants.

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the rockpools above the falls were sublime, and i had them all to myself. mmmMMMmmm. during the day it was hot (and very dusty), so one had no choice but to seek sanctuary in the water. however, my festering wounds put me out of mind of a day of swimming, so i headed back to darwin early.

newly smitten with frogs, here are some closeups of one of the hundreds of tiny ones hopping around gunlom at dusk (and a fly for good measure - was having a macro-fest). i threw this little froggy into the rockpool only to have a rabid school of fish appear out of no-where and swallow it whole as it tried desperately to make for the water's edge. i decided that allowing yourself to be caught by a human was in itself a sign of evolutionary weakness, and so didn't feel too bad when i threw a few more froggies in to research their responses to dangerous situations. rabid school of fish 3, frogs 0.

who would have thought sleeping pills and alcohol don't mix? after mixing it up one night, i awoke with my room a mess, phone calls registered on my mobile, tens of photos on my camera (see above), and evidence of a few other things i don't care to mention, with not a single memory to accompany them.

in 4 days i'm heading back to south east asia - this time mainly to cambodia - for two weeks of supremely well deserved rest and relaxation, and some more amphibiously good times with my favourite frog of all :)

peace.