This is the cake I got. :)

It wasn’t just family and friends I left behind. I also left a big bunch of work mates (some of them are also good friends) behind. They were a huge part of my life and I like them a lot. I was so moved when they gave me a friend book filled by them and an emergency fund they had collected for me. I also got a cake! I quite couldn't finish the cake on my own so I got a little bit help from my friends. :) That night was one of the best with my work mates and I must say I miss them. Even more now that I just read the friend book through.

When I was still in Finland I was known to sleep late and not wake up early if I didn’t have to. It was nothing unusual if I got up at 3 p.m. after a night at work. Now I couldn’t imagine staying up until the early hours of morning! I’ve become quite a morning person here. My last week’s day off was the first morning in two months that I slept as long as I wanted to, not having the alarm waking me up. Well, I did wake up at 7.30 a.m. and got up because I was just so hungry! :D But after breakfast I just went back to bed and happily slept until 12.30 p.m. And I had decided I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for sleeping for once!

I really like the mornings when I do opening at the hostel. It’s nice to get up and go around in cool crisp air listening to the sound of birds and pretty often you can also enjoy the sun shining its early morning rays.
If I wake up before my alarm it’s pretty easy to tell by listening to the sounds around if it’s time to get up or not, without even looking at the clock. If you can hear birds (they can be really loud in the morning!), there’s no need to get up, but if there are no sound of the birds, it just might be good to get up and have breakfast, maybe.

Yamba was one of my few stops along the coast south of Brisbane. I must say I liked it. It was small, but you had everything you needed close by. I just wished I had been able to surf I would have enjoyed my time there even more. There’s only one hostel, so it wasn’t hard to decide where to stay. The hostel was really nice and Shane’s tour is a must in Yamba! I had so much fun during those few hours! I just wished I had done it on my first day in Yamba. Yamba has beautiful beaches and it’s a great place to surf, so I gathered from other people. It’s not allowed to have surfing contests in Yamba so it has stayed as a small and relaxed place, not known to huge crowds. The sunsets in Yamba were just one of the best I’ve seen! On my last night I sat on a huge rock on a break wall wind blowing around me and watched the sun go down. It was one of the best moments spent alone I’ve had here. 

One of the nice places Shane took us on his tour.

A nice view in Yamba Bay.

It feels a bit funny that the winter is coming. I’m so used to having winter when it’s in northern hemisphere that it’s a bit weird to have winter when northern hemisphere is having their summer. But what I hear, here in Hervey Bay it just gets a little bit cooler and the sun is shining most of the time. Nights can be cold (nothing compared to Finland though!), but I guess it will be just nicer to sleep when the air is cold, not so warm and humid. I guess the winter here can still be better than Finnish summer! :D

This one needed saving before
someone stepped on it.

Two nights ago I was in the kitchen and one boy said to me: “I think you have a visitor over there.” He pointed towards the shelf with coffee cups. A cricket had found its way inside which is usual in the evenings. I just went to get a paper and got a glass and carried the cricket outside. I wouldn’t have done it two months ago! And later I saved another insect and carried it outside. I was so proud of myself that I didn’t just runaway. I’m sure there will come the time for me to run away! :D



When the sun starts setting here rainbow lorikeets start their singing. If you can call it singing because the noise is so loud that you can hear it when you’re driving a car windows closed! In the evenings they get together and you can see dozens of them in one tree. They look really nice but the noise isn’t charming.
In Port Macquarie it was flying foxes that started their nightly flying at dusk and you could see hundreds of them flying over the river towards Pelican Island. During the day the flying foxes hung in trees in Koolonbung Creek and made just an awful noise. Due to an unknown reason for me they had changed their spot in the forest since I walked there with my sister in December 2010. But they were still equally scary hanging in trees above you and a few flying now and then to another spot. I wouldn’t have liked to be there on my own! :D  

Time seems to be flying by and I guess soon I’ll notice that six months is gone, at least past almost three months have gone in a flash. I know I haven’t seen that many new places but it doesn’t bother me. I’m older than on my previous travels and I don’t feel like rushing from place to place every three or four days. I have the visa for a year so why hurry? On the other had I might soon notice that my year is almost up and I still have loads to see. The more you see the more places you seem to have you want to see. There’s always some other place you want to see. You’ll never sit down and think: “Now I’ve seen everything I want to see.”

"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."
- Anais Nin -