fill 'er up

gas gauges are wonderful things... when they work, but when they don't they can make a drive slightly more adventurous. hugh and i knew a couple of things as we started our journey from cairns...

1. he has run out of gas 3 times in his life; i enjoy seeing if the fumes can get me to washu and back twice before i drive to the farther away but cheap station on hanley.
2. our gas gauge is finicky which caused the people who previously owned the car to put gas in when it reached 300km.
3. it was about 20km to the next town.
4. we had gone 305 kms.

SOO.... as i started to doze off in the passengers seat i start to hear a slight bit of sputtering and i awake to see hugh pulling the car off to the side...

two days previous we had thought about putting gas in the extra canister in the back, but after conviently forgetting, we spend aboiut 10 mintues trying to find the container... then another 10 debating who is goign to hitch hike to the next town to pick up gas... (since it was my turn to buy, i got the honor).

i stand on the side of the road, looking as forlorn as i possibly can, a lovely family (who were returning from a mornign of shopping at the biggest town in the area (complete with a grocery store and a target!)) picked me up. we drove about 10km to the next town where THERE WAS NO PETROL STATION. the town 'used' to have one, but it must not have been popular enough... or maybe people aren't stupid enough to run out of gas near it...

at this point, our next logical option was to either drive down the road to the (hopefully!) larger town of gruthalumbra.. but since that was 16 more kms away, we decided it was better to go back to the veggie stand (owned by some guy they knew.... and whos twin brother was married to the town doctor) that we passed and see if they had any petrol hanging around.

of course they didn't... so we (and by we, i meant the retired army general/aussie outback crazy grandpa who up to this point i had thought was in a coma) decided that he would siphon off gas from their car. i guess this is somethign that happens rather frequently--the farmer at the veg stand had a hose... gramps knew how to do it... and us womenfolk just picked out veg like it was normal.

i got a ride back from a couple in a VW van who were on day one of their 15 week around OZ trip and they actually had the right attachment for our gas canister. karma!

hugh, who hadn't even been eaten by vultures or a deadly aussie animal, was just kind of enjoying the slight pause in driving was deeply involved in his book and insistend on being 'stranded' for 10 more minutes so he could finish his chapter!

i would like to say that austrailians are now fastly becoming as nice as kiwis... they gave me about 3 liters of petrol... we didn't perish on the side of the road... i got a cheap watermelon.

hope this email finds you well and enjoying snow, the oscars and friends instead of worrying about operation iraqi freedom.

my pictures from OZ are online at:
great barrier reef: (not as good pix as i hoped) pix
rainforest: pix

my pictures from the rest of NZ can be found from www.kristinp.blogspot.com

big news from the holiday front... hugh and i are now the proud owners of a cell phone and a car! shocking! we have free incoming calls, so we would love to hear from you. (the time change from STL is 16 hours behind OZ and the number to call is (61) 0401 447 553.) we can also txt msg, but aren't sure that its digitally compatible. our car, buttercup, is a yellow 85 mitsubishi sigma with about a bazillion kms on it, but it will do the job. it came fully decked out with a radio and camping gear, so we are set!

we are in a slight lull again after a busy couple of short trips in and out of the far north queensland area (and i apologize to those who have already read hugh's version of the events, but i promise mine will be more interesting and enjoyable then the crap he rambles on about in his emails... come on his tan? toilets? can we get more pathetic? hehe!)

anyway... hugh and i, and our swedish buddies first went north to cape tribulation inside daintree national park... the worlds oldest rainforest and a world heritage site...

basically to become a world heritage site the location has to be of "outstanding universal cultrual and natural value." its darn tough to be included on the list (730 sites in the world--14 in OZ, 18 in the US) and this place definitly deserved a spot. despite the constant and downpour (but its a rainforest, so what can you expect) we saw wonderful bush, views and wildlife.

i have never been more intimate with spiders than i was on this trip. they were outside the bunkrooms, in the eating area and above my head when i showered. and i'm not talking about a daddy-long-legs or somethign like that. these were SPIDERS. size of your hand, mess wiht your mind, scary as spiders. beyond our eight legged friends, we were lucky (?) to see a 'slightly toxic' snake, some toads (which if you lick their shoulders you can experience a feeling of euphoria--don't worry, we didn't test that out), a few tree lizards and a couple cool birds.

we didn't get to enjoy the beaches along the coast in this part of OZ at all due to overabundance of Chironex Fleckeri (or the box jellyfish). one little run-in with this bugger would really screw up the holiday, so we stayed far from the waters edge. there are a lot of deadly things in OZ-- animals/insects/PLANTS... and we even saw some of the deadly leafy green things... and this isn't even from eating... its is from casually walking by them.

but that didn't stop us from doing a rather intense, RAINY hike one afternoon up mt. sorrow where we experienced tree lizards and blood sucking leeches (who enjoyed to focus on my ankles as their prime blood resourse.) at this point i had a cold (from all the rain i had encountered) and considered it as a throw-back to the 1700s or soemhting when people would be cured of their diseases from blood-letting...

on the way back down from cape trib we went on the daintree river and went for a croc cruise. we saw a bunch of crocidiles and, as luck would have didn't even get eaten.

after a couple days of playing cards in cairns, we hopped on a boat to sail out ot the great barrier reef for a 3 day 2 night scuba diving adventure. while hugh was getting certified i went diving with some people through some lovely reefs. we saw tons of fish life, really cool coral and a couple turtles.

i went on a night dive the first day and got to play god by lighting the way for a red bass to his dinner. hugh and i decided to get our adventure diver ceritficate the next day , and we went on a deep dive (to 26 M or 87? feet) where we played egg tennis (cause there is so much pressure under the water the egg will stay together!) and hoped to get nitrogen narcosis (not a permenant affliction it just kind of makes your motor skills slow and everything a little 'happy'). our second dive of the day was suppose to be underwater navigation, but as soon as our instructor broke out the leftover breakfast sausages, the dive quickly turned into 'lets feed the HUGE fish sausages and hope the or hands don't get eaten!' the fish that we saw, Wally, the maori wrasse was about 5 ft. by 2 ft. and was actually quite docile. he let you pet him, and basically he just scared the living shit out of me when i fist saw him. hopefully there will be pictures of him online soon...

we are planning to finish up the requirements for advanced diver down the coast in the whitsundays or a the S.S. Yongala wreck in townsville.

so hugh and i bought a car.. and he is spending the first moments in it driving to his hook-up girls hostel. but no worries. we will have plenty of time together in the next couple of months... i'll bee wishing that i let him stay in cairns!

hey there... updating my pictures... if you scan through all my old blogs and click on the highlighted htings you should hit the pix!

oops... didn't include one of my emails... so
tongariro crossing pictures
dolphin swimming pictrues

the only thing that is a new locale... and not in an email is the trip that hugh and i just took... so that is here

when i last emailed, i was about to embark on a trip around the east cape (pictures), a rugged, very unpopulated (more so then the rest of new zealand even!) section of the north island. we left as the rain was POURING in rotorua--making the already sulfer-smelling air that much more potent. we drove for ages and ages stopping for nothing cause it was raining so hard you couldn't even begin to think about seeing a view. got into the hostel (a small farmstay near the coast with horses, cute little puppies and a dart board) that evening and just kind of crashed... miserable. i was dreading the next couple of musty days...

the gods decided to rescue us from the deluge and i awoke to clear blue skies and relatively dry jeans. went for a horseback riding on the beach and through the hills around the farm on by far the most mentally unstable horse to ever go riding. now, i don't fancy myself a horse girl (there is a reason that city slickers is a funny movie) but i have gone on a couple rides and can even "trot" without too much fear. but this horse didn't listen or respond to anything except the cows that he felt like gallopping towards... this would have been alright, except that we were suppose to be heading in the exact opposite direction at the time. i had a good chat to my horse for the rest of the ride (basically a cross between soothing words and more explatives than i thought i knew.) and we got on a bit better for the rest of the ride.

after relatively safely dismounting we hopped back on the little van-bus and went to the wee town of gisborne.... saw a wonderful sunrise and had my first surfing experience. i learned a couple things from the lesson, namely, you will drink a lot of sea water no matter what you think, and that there is a phrase with kiwi surfers more popular than "sweet as" ... everything was a "sick" wave... a "sick" ride... it was brilliant... and my body hurt, a lot, the next day...

went on to napier, art-deco capital of NZ and stayed the night in a prison-turned-hostel... it was the oldest prison in NZ and even had hangings take place there.... pretty freaky, eh?

went back to rotoura (IT RAINED AGAIN) and spent another eve with my friend, jeremy, who has been too kind to let me crash in his home... the last time i stayed we went on a rafting trip on the kaituna (which means "to eat fish") and went down a 7m waterfall... scary as, but cool. j and i drove to auckland for an ultimate frisbee tourney the next day which was a ton of fun.

our team, WULFDD, (the acronym doesn't so much matter... we just banked on the fact it would be super-hard to say) and we ended the weekend 3-3. not so bad... i even scored a couple times from some sweet passes to the endzone. i really enjoyed playing ultimate in NZ and am even goign to play on the NZ women's team that is coming to aussie at the end of april. by the way, christchurch pictures are here

one would think that my last hours in NZ would be spent enjoying the town and the vast RAIN cloud that burst open after the tourney--checking out a museum, or even just sightseeing in auckland a bit more... alas, that was not the case. i spent the most of my last day in NZ uploading music to my ipod due to a rather entertaining and unfortunate string of events that unfolded.

never content with anything that i have...i wanted to add a couple more songs to my burgeuoning list on my mp3 player.... so i requested the help of a new friend with a mac... i collected the music and connected my ipod and some we "accidentally" deleted all the files. it kind of sucked. i cried. (not really. i laughed and THEN cried). since he is "a nice guy" we spent the next day and a half trying to get music on the damn thing, even enlisting the help of his flatmates girlfriend who has similar tastes in music. somehow the whole ordeal trashed his computer and his whole hard drive needs to be deleted. oops. damn technology.

anyway... i'm in cairns right now... walking through even MORE RAIN! i met up with hugh and we are trying to buy a car and plan out the next couple days...

hope all is well with everyone... i send my love.

krisitn