22:51 Sun.

8 Oct, 2017

Sailing Part #1

WhitSundays

Tags: catamaran, islands, sailing, snorkelling, stingrays, sunrise, sunset, white sands, whitsundays, wings 2

Airlie Beach , Australia

26 °C

Partly Cloudy

5:39 am

12:00 am

Friday 7 AM

And so it began, our long long way down to Sydney. First stop was Airline Beach, around 800 km south of Cairns. It took as about 10 hours with a bus, with 2 short breaks in between. The bus was nothing special, no WiFi or chargers in it, at least it was interesting to look through the window and watch the Australian landscape, which is quite different from what we have here in Europe.

Our bus at a petrol stop. — We stopped on two small shops beside petrol stations on our way down.

Landscape through the window. Sadly it was nearly impossible to take some more interesting pictures from a bus.

In the evening we arrived to Airline beach, where our next adventure awaited. As soon as we disembarked the bus we were greeted by two local Cockatoos who were screaming over our heads, but we had no time for them since we were in a hurry to check-in for our sailing trip in the following days.

The next day we boarded a small/medium? catamaran that will take us sailing around the islands for the following three days. We were joined by about 15 other young people, from Germany, Italy and UK. And were led by Kiwi (New Zeland) skipper and Aussie guide.

The boat was surprisingly spacious inside, I think there were 25 or even 30 sleeping spaces on board. Veronika and I were positioned on the left side of the boat, but we didn’t spent a lot of time inside, since it was so beautiful to be on deck and watch the sights around us.

Toilet and a shower. It was really small.

We did variety of things on the boat, we prepared the sails, watched for turtles and other animals in the water, plaid games, talked and so on. A big surprise to all of us was the food. It was plentiful and good. It turned out that the skipper was a very good chef in youth, owning a couple of restaurants but decided later that he wants to do something else in his life.

Food was surprisingly plentiful and despite using simple/normal ingredients it tasted very good. We had one of the best meals in Australia on this boat.

We sailed around the islands, stopping at different locations in order to go snorkelling. One of such locations was Whitsundays beach. It is a large beach that goes way inland and is covered by a snow white, very fine sand. All in all it makes the water look nice shade of light blue and to top it off, whole bay is full of stingrays and other large fishes. I even saw a shark, 5 m from me in the water (I was standing in the water at that time). Luckily it wasn’t vicious, only about 3m in length and by the looks of it afraid of me, since it swam away from me as soon as I started to walk toward it.

We spent whole morning on the second day here. Swimming, and looking for stingrays. They were plentiful and can almost disappear in the sand – I almost stepped on them 3 times and you don’t want to do that, they can sting you with their enormous stinger on the tail.

It really was an incredibly beautiful beach and the time just flew by.

When we were here, the low tide was coming so a lot of them were swimming from shallow ends to the deeper end of the bay.

Whitsundays from air, taken by our skipper.

The evenings and mornings were especially amazing. It was cold, but the colors of the sky were amazing. I don’t remember ever seeing such a purple color of the sky before.

As I said in previous post in general it is very dangerous to swim anywhere in Australia, you have tons of animals that can kill you, sharks, crocodiles but the most dangerous are jelly fish, that is why we always had a wet-suit on when we went swimming, even if the water was above 24 C.

Half time

End of first quarter.

Day 76 , 71 remain

Tags: first quarter, half time, snow, sunset

Lulea , Sweden

1 °C

Cloudy

7:50 am

4:39 pm

Even though I still don’t know exact date of departure, I’ve inevitably reached half of my incredible journey. So far it has been everything and more what I expected from this adventure.

Today I had my last course in this quarter. What does that mean? Well now I have an “examination week”, where we have exams from courses we have taken in previous quarter. Luckily the courses I’ve taken don’t have exams but so called “home exam”. This is supposed to be exam that you solve at home, though it’s more like a project than exam. In one course it’s about 5-6 pages long project where we have to plan something, basically the same as we were doing during classes. We have about 2 weeks to solve this one. At the other course exam will be published on 30th and we will have 5 hours to solve it. This one should be a bit more similar to “normal” exams with theoretical questions.

I’ll post more about this after examination period. In other news: Nothing new in the North. =) Last few days were bit warmer, sadly melting all the snow. The other day I went on a “ski” hill to get a view over sunset. It was around -6 or -8 when I was taking pictures, my hand (without glove for handling camera) almost froze. View was amazing, you can notice how much sun has moved from summer pictures at my arrival.

Luleå

New Home

Day 2 , 145 remain

Tags: arrival, cold, dorm, Luleå, sunset, tired

Lulea , Sweden

16 °C

Fair

3:51 am

9:16 pm

After few steps I realize just how cold it was. It looks like the train had heating turned on, so I was only wearing shorts and t-shirt, later I learned that it was 8 degrees, at 7 AM on 9th of August 2013. I think I can safely say, that I haven’t been anywhere near this cold in the middle of the summer yet.

I was supposed to meet with Fredrik (he is taking care of Erasmus students arrival up here) at 9 AM at the university, so I figured out I could just walk up there rather than sit in that cold. In retrospect this was one of the stupidest ideas I had in a long time. I had 2 suitcases and one bag with me, total of 50kg. As I later learned the distance from train station to university is around 6km. At first the walk went easily but after midway my hands really started to hurt. One suitcase has some weird wheel-handle thing so I was basically carrying it all the way instead of dragging it on wheels. The walk went very slowly after midway as I had to exchange places of suitcases, to rest the arm that was carrying the weird one. To top it off my hands began to sweat so the handles began to slip away every few meters. As a result of this, I’ve arrived to university shortly before 9 AM, with no feelings in my arms (part from heavy lifting, part from cold). Now it is 1 day later, and my arms and shoulders still hurt.

Shortly after my arrival at university Fredrik had come. He handed me some contracts to sign, keys to the apartment and gave me basic information that I’ll need while I’m staying up here. After that he got me a cab and I was on my way to Väderleden 11, my new home for the next 5 months.

After unpacking I went to sleep and I really needed it, I don’t think I slept for more than 5 hours in the past 2 days. After that I noticed that I have no internet connection (Fredrik warned me that it’s possible that my account for internet is not set up yet) so I decided to make a walk to the university and to possibly take some photos on the way.

I’ve arrived to the university at around 9 PM. I was surprised to see how many people were still walking around campus. Shortly after I found a table with benches where I was still in range of university’s Wi-Fi. As I was sitting there I noticed that there were really a lot of mosquitos flying around and trying (some actually succeeded) some Slovenian blood. I left for home at around 10.30 PM with still enough light so that street lights needn’t be turned on.

This was one of the reasons I was so excited to come up here in the middle of summer. There is light from around 3 AM to around 11 PM and then the sky never goes completely black, but turns red at horizon. My room is facing north, so I was able to look at red horizon through all the night (not that I was able to, I was so tired I fell asleep in minutes, but I had my alarm set every hour to check the sky). It was interesting to see how the brightest part of the sky slowly moved from west to north and to east again. In Slovenia we are used to the sunset on the west and then teleport of sun to the east in the morning. It’s too bad I couldn’t arrived a month earlier, back then there was no night at all, but still I have experienced the longest lasting day of my life.