(So, I’m actually the worst b/c I’m like a
month behind real life with writing this and I have no excuse! So much idle
time on my hands! UGH, procrastination is the ultimate disease!)
My Mum and I spent a few more days in
Melbourne than originally planned. I wanted to see my friends Sarah and Pete,
their 19 month old daughter Taylor who I hadn’t seen since she was about a
month or 2 old, and Sarah’s Mom who was visiting from Ottawa, (I also really
wanted to watch the Golden Globes and Tweet* them live, clearly) and we wanted
to go the Australian Open to see a first round match.
(*You can follow me on Twitter @The_A_Mrk I
will be live Tweeting the Oscars as well, and blogging about Awards season with
my oldest brother Alex over at our other blog: amrkacademy.blogspot.ca)
Going to the Open was so cool, and
definitely something I didn’t ever think I’d do. We bought tickets a day or 2
before they announced the schedule, keeping our fingers crossed that if we
bought seats to see the evening matches at Rod Laver stadium, we would see
someone big. And it turned out we got to see both Djokovic and Serena Williams
play their first round matches. I haven’t been to a lot of live sporting events
(with the exception of NHL games) and so it’s always a shock to watch something
live when you have only ever seen it on TV. First off, it is sooooo quiet. Not
only do you not hear the commentators (obviously) but the whole stadium is
pretty much hushed while they play. It is so quiet that you hear the players’
sneakers squeak against the hard courts. Also, the stadium is so much smaller than
it looks on TV.
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| Selfies with Susie Mrk! |
Before the matches, we had a chance to see
Federer practice (hard to see b/c there were so many fans surrounding the court
hoping for an autograph). There were so
many psychotic Serbs there to support Djokovic. It was almost too much to
handle. The flags, the eagle, the face painting—UGH. Don’t get me wrong, I’m at
least 50% psychotic Serb, but this shit was leading me towards a rage blackout.
Good thing Susie Mrk was around to give me a few pinches, b/c I was gonna get
into with some people in the stadium. That wouldn’t have ended pretty!
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| Roger and his red shoes! |
The Djokovic match, despite only being 3
sets, was pretty good. He played a Slovakian player, Lacko, and the second set
went to a tiebreak which was exciting. The Williams match was not as exciting and
was over very quickly, though she played a young Aussie girl, so the crowd was
pretty into it. I don’t like Serena Williams (if you want to know why Google
her + Steubenville rapes and you’ll understand why) but goddamn is that woman a
powerhouse. You can feel her strength and competitiveness in the air when you
watch her.
The next day, my Mum and I headed up to the
Whitsundays, a group of 74 small islands off the coast of Queensland in the middle
of the Great Barrier Reef (about 2/3’s of the way up the east coast of Aus). Everyone
we spoke to recommended going there in order to take an overnight sailing trip.
We arrived figuring that there were probably a million different trips to chose
from at our leisure, only to discover that every single boat trip in the area
was booked for days! We eventually managed to finagle the 2 last spots on a
boat called the Waltzing Matilda (Australia’s national song I believe, and why
Heath Ledger + Michelle Williams named their daughter Matilda-just some
Hollywood gossip for you!) but the trip didn’t leave for 4 days, giving us a
lot of time to kill in Airlie Beach, a small and somewhat shitty
beach/backpacker town with not a ton to do.
The beaches aren’t very nice and you can’t swim (on account that it’s
stinger season) but they do have a big salt water public pool called “The
Lagoon,” a used book store (which my Mum and I frequented often enough that we
started giving out fiction recommendations to other tourists—I made a Swedish
girl buy Lisa Moore’s Alligator) and nightly trivia at our hostel where the
winners get a free bottle of champagne.
Well, I don’t have to tell you that trivia
is pretty much my favourite thing, might in fact be my true calling in life,
and absolutely brings out every morsel of Serbian crazy within me. My Mum and I
lead our team to victory the first night (and then won the next night with just
the two of us--tie break question: who wrote Anna Karenina-come on, give us
something challenging!!) But that was the end of our reign as trivia champions
b/c we implemented a self-imposed ban (other people at the hostel started to
groan when we would walk into the common room).
Eventually we killed enough time (and drank
enough coffee) for our boat trip to arrive. The Waltzing Matilda was a small
sailboat (maybe 20 feet long and 2 masts) and had a crew of 2: Captain Greg,
who had been sailing for 40-some years all over the world and was an absolute
laugh riot, and Rich, the most stereotypically young golden Aussie looking guy
I’ve ever seen—God he couldn’t have been more than 22. He made me feel like
such a lecherous old woman! There were 14 passengers-a good mix of people too:
a Swedish couple with their 2 young daughters who were traveling Aus for 6
months, a trio of British pals about to turn 30, an Italian-French couple who
were traveling around the world for 1 year, a funny Dutch dude (who accidently
dropped the fridge door on my head-I had a bump on it for days), a 20-something
American-Swede girl, and then a Norwegian girl (don’t forget her, this becomes
important later on).
It was pretty early on that my Mum and I
realized we had what I like to call a “competitive conversationalist” (or a
“one-up-er”) on our hands re: the Norwegian girl. You know the type: you’ll say
you climbed the highest mountain, and she’ll say she did it twice, and
blindfolded. At one point when we were
all sharing a pretty magical moment on the boat at night under the light of the
moon and Captain Greg was telling us crazy stories about some of the
unexplainable stuff he’s seen out on the ocean, Norwegian girl piped up to let
us know that science makes everything explainable. BUZZ KILL!
Anyway, one of the things that all of the
sailing trips do is take you to Whitehaven beach, which is apparently the
second nicest beach in the world (the first one is in the Maldives, but who
determines the criteria for the nicest beaches I don’t know!) I find that
whenever I’m travelling, I’m always a bit sceptical of the places or
experiences that are the most hyped up (is that the Debbie-downer in me?) even
though most of the time, the places do live up to the expectations. Whitehaven
beach was no exception. It is definitely the most beautiful beach I’ve been to
(bumping off Paje in Zanzibar, and Maya beach in Thailand where “The Beach” was
filmed). I don’t know if pictures do it justice, but just look:
The second day on the boat we went
snorkelling twice, and b/c it’s stinger season, you have to wear a full body
wet suit (whenever faced with a wetsuit, I always wonder how many strangers have
peed in it, is that just me?) I don’t think I’d ever actually seen Coral
before, and I was nervous b/c I know that so much of it is gone from pollution
and environmental destruction, but it was incredible. I didn’t know that there
are 2 types of coral, hard and soft, and that it’s the soft coral that usually
has the bright florescent colours (and there is less of it than the hard
coral). One of the coolest things I saw were these clams--Maxima Clam/Rock
Clam, they are a bright blue gorgeous colour and imbed themselves in the coral
and open and close (they close if you swim close to them). I obvs didn’t have
an underwater camera, but this is what they look like:
I also saw 2 huge sea turtles (both the
size of my torso). The first one I only saw for a split second, as he saw me
and got the hell outta there! But the second one, I used my stealth skills and
was able to swim with him for 10-15 minutes, keeping enough distance between us
that he didn’t seem to be bothered. Ahh! Turtles are the best! Watching him
swim was so cool, because it’s so graceful and slow, and their flippers
actually look like wings flapping. I also saw this HUGE fish (the size of a hula-hoop)
that apparently always hangs out in the same area and has been named Elvis. I
saw his “girlfriend” fish too, but I forget her name (Tammy?)
