roadtrippin'

at last...the first installment of my easter adventures...

for some reason the uni's "midsemester" break comes at the third week of school...which is alright, since that means more time for us international students to explore this wild country. after much searching, we found ourselves sitting in two hyundai elantra's (automatic :( ), ready to hit the road. Me, Tom from Guelph, Lena from Germany, Meike from Germany, Sonja from Germany (lovingly called "team germania"), and Judith from Netherlands were all part of this crazy crew. 10 hours later, surprisingly with no major car misfortune (driving on the left side of the road..eep!), we were in melbourne. we visited the market (and bought matching aussie hats), went to the art museum and saw a great collection of aboriginal art (at first seems so simple, and then the more you look at it and read the stories, the more you can really appreciate it). for lunch we ate our usual lunch of bread, veggies, and sweet chilli sauce (btw, can someone please check if they sell sweet chilli sauce in canada? if they don't, i'll have to bring loads of it back) by the water. Lena went up the tower (not i...you know my fear of heights), took us some pictures of melbourne while we all played hackysack (a group favourite).
that night we went to st. kildas, a hip cafe and restaurant area, conveniently close to the beach. we ate, we played, we watched the beautiful sunset. we also got a little wet...except for meike, who, instead of jumping over the water to get to a little island-y type thing, walked over in a handstand (gymnast). awesome.
next day we drove to a surf competition...which, i found out yesterday, had gotten moved anyways...no matter, we went to the wrong beach anyways :) played along the beach and hackysacked anyways. Drove ourselves to Warimbee Gorge, a national park. Did a 10K walk through gorgeous terrain..was a really fun walk cause there were rocks and ropes that you had to hold on to to keep yourself on the rocks...oh, and there was a huge chocolate egg. happy easter. sonja got bitten by a "shitfuckingant"...due to her piercing screams everyone thought she had fallen off the ledge...so we laughed...until we saw the size of the ants at the park. weren't laughing after that. beautiful park...lots of pictures...
slept in tents at a yha that night...played asshole for quite a while, then chilled. surprisingly comfortable. the next day we asked the guy at the YHA where we could see some koalas...he told us "sausage gully". hahaha. accepting the fact that we were never going to see koalas, we drove on....Started down Great Ocean Road, the most beautiful drive I have ever done. 500K of driving directly along the oceanside...beaches galore and stopping every hour to see something new. and lo and behold...sausage gully...and there were koalas. lots of them. just on the side of great ocean road. once we had pulled over, we attracted a crowd (who wouldn't want to see wild koalas?) took waaayyyy too much footage of it on my videocamera (not the most active animals in the world), and everyone else took wayyyyy too many pictures (even of koala poo).

more to come...