hello ondřej!: /b/

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what a blurrrrr of a summer. after coming back from laos, it was game-ON in terms of study for the freakn exams. check this shot out of me and my white-board with all the 375 boxes well and truly stroked in the lead up to the deed. i studied hard and loved it.

but the summer. oh the heat! the heat! i wanted more, more. meanwhile, the frog leapt over to paris to become une grenouille gelée while the best days of summer sizzled by. i have distinct memories of myself riding g's bike around richmond at night with my shirt open and a warm wind on my skin, that summer hum in my ears and my heart. happiness is a summer evening. wasn't great on all accounts though - musashi boiled in his aquarium :(

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hence: introducing ni! the latest member of our dover street family. (le poisson stupid est mort, vive le poisson encore plus stupid)

we took time out for our karaoke party, which i have to mention because we got some fun pics.
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here are g, david and bastion in full regalia.

check out these three hot chicks and leggo-man on g's tits. hands off magda!

BGS boys! busse looks like a stunned mullet - congratulations on the engagement! and i look fucking atrocious - i wish someone had told me to take off that wig a bit earlier ;)

the photo below is one of my favourites because every person in it seems to have a completely different story. pat looks like he's on another planet but what's new?

some crowd shots including paul of blog fame! and one of g howling like the wolf he is. woof.

summer is also great because you can dance in the park with friends. happiness is dancing in the park with friends.

but to be honest i felt like i missed summer completely because of all the study, and thank god i passed my exams because i'm not sure i would be psychologically strong enough to go through all that preparation again. we headed up to my old stomping/limping ground of brisvegas for the exam itself and stayed with lovely stephen :) here are a few pics of g+o as we're heading out the door to the exams themselves. i was pretty chilled out until we reached the exam venue where i started experiencing nausea and debilitatingly severe shortness of breath. incidentally, g thought it was cute that i was pre-arrest and clutching at my chest.

here's a celebratory champagne and the proof in the pudding that i passed the three exams sat - candidate 23401 suckers!

but brisbane is not to everyone's tastes, and g doesn't particularly want to set foot inside the city limits ever again in his life if he can help it. what can you do? i thought i was bad, but g is a melbophile extraordinaire.
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so we fled to the tropical north. we managed to stay in an amazing house overlooking the town of cairns and the ocean for next to nothing (thanks studdly29) and g cut loose with the great aussie art of barbecue (no pics unfortunately!). it was a meaty week.

we joined the tourist train up the mountain through the jungle to kuranda

and took the skytrain back down. very touristy, but still good :) the views of the jungle are straight down from the sky train. the geometric shape of the ferns was quite shocking. the cuteness of the frog was encore plus shocking.

after getting off the skytrain, g hopped on a bus to get the car. i snuck back in to the visitor's centre for my 4th frosty fruit of the day, and got unsuspectedly paparazzied by g from behind the dark bus windows! happiness is frosty fruit: tropical flavour. i sucked so hard i bled.

but the whole point of cairns is the great barrier reef. we didn't want some expensive hoo-ha, we just wanted to see the fishies, so off we went to the kangaroo explorer - the live-aboard boat equivalent of a production line in which bells ring for breakfast lunch dinner swim and everyone on the boat hates everyone else on the boat. we had our own little cabin. here's a pic of the boat and a little tour of our room ;)

unfortunately we had no undewater camera, so the most exciting part of the holiday was undocumented! i had never been snorkelling on a tropical reef before, so i really had no idea what it would be like. i had heard stories of dead coral, barren reefs, and nasty, disappointing holidays, but this was AMAZING!!! to dive just below the surface and find hundreds of brightly coloured fish, coral, sharks, turtles, sea cucumbers and other animals just floating around was INTENSE! what were they all doing there? it seemed so strange to look out across a flat, almost featureless ocean, and then to look only several centimetres below the surface to find such a cacophony of colour and vitality. we even saw a couple of nemos! we were in rapture!

we had to wear sexy swimming suits to prevent being stung by the box jellyfish/irukanji. check out us hotties below.

but all good things must come to an end, and when we saw the ugly young german horse-couple taking a fourth helping of dinner and later eating food out of each other's mouths, we realised that enough was enough, and hopped on the boat back to cairns.

after the excitement of the reef, our next adventure was a trip to the atherton tablelands, most of which occurred during a tropical storm. our first stop was granite gorge up neer mareeba, famous for its rock wallabies. the storm started while we were there and we ended up shedding our clothes for a swim in the wier, and hiking back to the car in our tighty whities to the delight of the busloads of japanese tourists waiting in the parking lot.

there were some really awesome trees in that rainforest that needed to be seen to be believed. they appealed to something of a primal hunger in me to connect with nature. they were huge, and filled with the essence, and the ecstasy of existence. those big trees were life itself.

it was still raining a bit when we hit the crater lakes - gorgeous round lakes surrounded by rainforest. it's difficult to see, but there were fish swimming about our ankles on the steps into the lake. check out the trail of bubbles as i set up the cam and dove into the lake for this time-exposed pic! swimming in those lakes was really peaceful. don't miss it if you head to cairns.

back on the coast we headed up to port douglas (somewhat of a non-entity), and over to the lovely mossman gorge. the place quickly became crowded, but was nonetheless a gorgeous river for swimming surrounded by walls of rainforest. a great break from the midday heat.

the area around port douglas sees the meeting of two world heritage listed national parks - the rainforest, which goes all the way to the great barrier reef containing ocean. despite being beautiful, the water was not to be swum in during the end of the wet season, as if death didn't come in the form of a box jellyfish or irukanji sting, one would certainly be sampled by a crocodile. and as we know they have been particularly hungry this season.

and here's the little car that took us around!

and then it was back to cairns. the best thing about cairns was the night-time flying animals spectacular, in which all of cairns' thousands of bats rise up out of the trees to fly off to the jungle for their night-time feeding sessions, and thousands of frightened birds spin through the streets in panicked flocks. check out the vid to see the death-flocks passing our car!
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meanwhile, it was standing room only in the surrounding trees as hundreds of rainbow lorikeets packed out the branches to watch events unfold. these pic were taken at night-time at a distance of about 10 metres, so please excuse the amazing zoom potential of g's new camera!