Things to look out for on ski slopes

• Guy snowboarding while playing super Mario brothers theme tune on an accordion. Genius.
• Person snowboarding while drinking coffee.
• Several guys skiing while undressing, continuing half naked down the slopes with hands on hips.
• Guy skiing with child on shoulders.
• Heavily pregnant lady skiing!

Last day in Whistler

25th March 2012

Last day on the slopes today. There's been no new snow for a couple of days so the untouched powder is hard to find, and its a bit crunchy as the sun has been out melting it between freezes.

Will and I hit the snowpark on Whistler for a few hours in the afternoon yesterday and today to see what damage we could do. It was going well until we had a huge waffle with all the trimmings at lunch time - Will suggested a warm up run before heading back to the snowpark and went off piste a little and crashed into a tree, his leg took the impact which kind of ruined the rest of the afternoon for him!

Steven has been resting for the last couple of days due to a number of ailments. His mountain name is now 'blind fury' because he isn't wearing his glasses, has no contact lenses and his goggles had a tendancy to mist up.. so often he would fly past us while we waited in the slopes to decide which way to go, and he couldn't read the signs. We employed the 'international super secret signal' and the 'sea monkey dance' to attract each others attention when meeting at the ski lifts which works well even if your vision is impaired.

We made the most of the hot tub at our apartment for the last time. After 17 days of luxury in Whistler (13 days on the slopes) its time to leave. In the morning we head to Vancouver for a day before we split up. Steven and Will go back to England and I fly to Montreal.

10 days of snowboarding down, 3 to go..

It was a pretty clear day the other day, this is the view from Harmony Ridge on Whistler.

We stopped for lunch. I asked my brother if he could possibly try and look more like an old man..

Let it snow!

We've had 5 wicked days of snowboarding, the snow has been totally savage leaving over 20cm of snow over night most nights. The last couple of days they didn't open the top parts of Whistler or Blackcomb but the rest of the runs were so good we didn't really care. My brothers friend Will joined us a couple of days ago and arrived just in time for the massive dump of powder.. awesome timing!

We have a 10 day lift pass and we're pretty tired after 5 full days so we decided to take a down day today and slept until lunch time. Also we have extended our stay in order to get an extra 4 days in after this lift pass expires just because the conditions are so good.. we will be totally destroyed after that but it will be worth it!

Time travel

I arrived in Vancouver on the 9th of March, 2 hours before I left Sydney after travelling for 17 hours. Deprived of sleep I battled through customs who grilled me and then searched my bags and grilled me again on my way out, almost causing me to miss my transfer to Whistler even though my flight had landed almost an hour early.. but it was all good and I met my brother Steve and we jumped on the mini bus as planned.

We've done 2 days of snowboarding now and the conditions are excellent! It has snowed pretty much all the time since we got here and the powder is really deep, its coming up over my knees.. theres a lot of happy people up there on the slopes! Its so good that we missed lunch today as we completely lost track of time. Steve wiped out in the deep powder at one point and it took him at least 10 minutes to get himself out, comedy to watch. Looking forward to getting back up there tomorrow morning on the first lift.  :D

View Larger Map

Goodbye Australia

9th March 2012

• Goodbye long bus journeys
• Goodbye plastic waterproof money
• Goodbye everyone I met
• Goodbye goon
• Goodbye crazy Aboriginal people
• Goodbye ridiculously long roads
• Goodbye epic toilet fail girl
• Goodbye drive through bottle shops
• Goodbye jelly fish infested waters
• Goodbye excellent (but expensive) Australian beer
• Goodbye German Sarah the stalker (who I met multiple times at bus stops, on buses or in random hostels, completely unplanned)
• Goodbye awesome Utes
• Goodbye kangaroos and koalas
• Goodbye everyone that let me stay with them
• Goodbye high level of attractive women
• Goodbye stupid over sized 50 cent coins
• Goodbye great weather, gonna be cold in Canada
• Goodbye surfing
• Goodbye places on the east coast that I never made it to because I ran out of time

I had an awesome time, but now I have to go to Canada.. 2 weeks of snowboarding in Whistler here I come!

Here's my route around Australia!


View Larger Map

Serious ship!

8th March 2012

It was my last night in Australia so I thought I'd go up to the harbour and have a last look at the Sydney opera house. When I arrived I saw this huge cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2, and it was about to leave so I hung about to watch it. Its ridiculously big!

Epic toilet fail

My last bus journey was 13 hours from Byron Bay to Sydney. I was sat near the back of the bus beside the toilet. A few hours into the journey one of the girls on the bus went into the toilet. I guess she didn't quite lock the door properly.. because we must have hit a bump or made a quick change of direction and the girl in the toilet suddenly flew through the toilet door and landed in the aisle next to me with her pants round her ankles! "ouch", she said. It looked like a pretty painful experience. Everyone on the bus turned around and looked because it made such a loud noise, and I had to give her a hand up as she was in a rather awkward position - she then went back into the toilet and came out a few moments later with a rather embarrased look on her face.. Poor girl!


View Larger Map

Byron Bay

3rd to 6th March 2012

Another 8 hours on a bus and I arrived at Byron Bay. Another pretty small town with a good vibe. Some nice beaches and awesome surf. I stayed at the backpackers holiday village and they have free surf board hire which I took advantage of again. The 3 guys in my dorm were big surfers so I headed out with them each day, even thought the weather was a bit crappy. Other than that I just took the walk up to the lighthouse for some nice views of the area.

View Larger Map

17 little hours

29th February 2012

The bus journey to Noosa from Airlie beach was 17 painful hours.. Being tall I cant really sleep on coaches anyway but it was mainly because I had sunburned my chest after falling asleep in the shade for 2 hours whiling away some time waiting for the bus.. super awesome.

Noosa is great, it has several really nice beaches and good surf. The weather was good when I got there and the hostel I stayed at offers free surf board hire which is a nice bonus. So I spent a few days mostly surfing and walked along the trails in the national park there.

On the second day I woke up to overhear a conversation about bed bugs. One of the guys had been eaten alive during the night.. fortunately I had no bites but the hostel staff moved us all to another dorm and washed all our clothes for free which was pretty good timing since I needed to wash my clothes anyway so that saved me some cash. woohoo.

I forgot to turn my GPS on for the first 5 hours of the bus journey to Noosa (doh) but heres the track anyway.


View Larger Map

Airlie beach

27th February 2012

9 hours of bus journey and I arrived in Airlie beach. This is a tiny place, with a tiny beach and a lagoon, and not much else! Most people I've met went to the Whitsunday islands from here but since I can't afford it I just hung out with some guys from the hostel.

It rained pretty much all day for 2 days running, and apart from bumping into my doppelganger while using the internet at McDonalds nothing exciting happened.. so I booked on to the greyhound bus to Noosa for the 29th.






View Larger Map

Jumped out of a plane at 14,000 feet! :D

23rd to 26th February 2012

So now I'm kind of rushing down the east coast a bit as I have to fly to Canada on the 9th of March, so I can't make all the stops I originally wanted to really. I heard mission beach is a great place to do a skydive, so I made it my next stop. I stayed in a great hostel called absolute backpackers, probably one of the best Ive been to so far.. they gave me a free night for booking the skydive with them which was a bonus.

On the morning of the skydive it was pouring with rain and very cloudy so it was postponed from 7am to 9:30am when it had cleared up. After signing a responsibility waiver and not paying 30 dollars for insurance we did a quick briefing on what to do and then drove to the airstrip.

We flew up to 14,000 feet and then people started jumping.. I was fifth. Thankfully they didn't give you much time to think about it, no counting you in, just a quick shuffle to the door of the plane and the next thing you know you're free falling!

From 14,000 feet you get 60 seconds of free fall, which was probably the quickest 60 seconds of my life! Then the parachute goes out and you glide down over a few minutes. Dave, the guy who jumped with me, let me fly the chute for a while too which was cool. As soon as we got on the floor I wanted to go again but its a bit too expensive for that really! In the evening we had a beach party.

I met some Canadian guys when I did the skydive, and they said they were doing an extreme white water rafting trip at the Tully river the next day so I booked up for that too. That was great fun as well. Apart from the rafting we did some other swimming activities which involved jumping into the rapids, dropping down a 5 metre waterfall and a couple of cliff jumps.. when we got back that evening I was completely knackered! I don't have any pictures for it because they charge a fortune and I couldn't take my own camera, even if it was waterproof I wouldn't have had a chance to use it, never mind.


View Larger Map

A good place to chill

18rd to 22th February 2012

I flew to Cairns and stayed for 4 days, mainly because its a really nice place to chill out. Its not a massive city and its just got a good vibe. While I was there I went to Green island and did some snorkeling but other than that I just spent a few days doing not much other than swimming in the lagoon and having a few beers.. its a hard life.

View Larger Map

Jumping crocs?

14th to 17th February 2012

Apart from having to share a room at the YHA with 2 losers, I had a good time in Darwin. One of the guys is a 49 year old electrician who came to Darwin looking for work but just decided to get drunk constantly and had therefore failed to get a job at all, he continually talked rubbish and repeated himself a lot which gets boring pretty quickly.. He shit the bed on his last night there and woke us all up at 5am which was totally awesome.. NOT. The other guy was a total recluse and had managed to travel around a lot of Australia by catching a lift with truckers but somehow had not actually seen or done anything.. pretty special really.

Anyway, here's a few things I did in Darwin;

• Went to bicentennial park
• Walked through the botanical gardens (they seem to have one in every major city)
• Fed the fish
• Got stuck in a crazy thunderstorm near the harbour
• Went to Litchfields national park and saw some huge termite mounds and went for a swim at the various waterfalls there
• Did a boat trip down Adelaide river to see the 'jumping' crocodiles. They tempt the crocs with some meat on a stick (the girl with that job was called Sissy, which I found slightly amusing) and get them to jump out of the water to get it, actually they're just swimming up very fast but meh ;P

This is a video from the jumping crocs tour at Adelaide river.



After the jumping croc tour, we saw a few whistling Kites and black Kites around Adelaide river which Sissy was feeding on the way back.




View Larger Map