Cairns

Although my time in Cairns was short lived (due to my insane travels described below) it was a good time. Originally scheduled for a 3 day orientations weekend, with trips to the Great Barrier Reef and the rainforest, I only spent 1 and a half days missing the Great Barrier Reef. I did get to go to the rainforest though, to a place called Rainforestation that was literally 20 minutes outside cairns. Cairns is a cool place in that you can be inside the city with 10+ story buildings, nightclubs, malls and restaurants then 10 minutes outside be surrounded by sugarcane (and sugarcane toads—which it’s the law to kill on sight) and 10 minutes further and up a mountain to be in the rainforest. With a zoo-like animal sanctuary, actives like how to throw a boomerang and play a didgeridoo with aborigines, and army duck tours through a rainforest set-up it was a quick immersion into Australia and Australia’s wildlife and plant life. The wildlife park was probably the best part of the day with kangaroo’s up-close, koala’s, wombats, barramundi, crocodiles, cassowary, snakes, and a lot of the other animals in Australia that can and will kill you (and the signs made sure you knew it). I spent the rest of my brief time in cairns touring the small town/city enjoying the cultural intricacies of Australian life. Oh, and I saw Dark Night with a bunch of people (yeh, 2 days before its release in America).

Airlines Suck

So I arrived at EWR with plenty of time for my 6:40 flight only to find out that it had been delayed to 7:35. Ok, well that’s fine, 55 minutes…unless of course you have only 1hr 40mins to catch a connecting flight at LAX. In typical Newark fashion we sat on the tarmac for an hour, and then because of a storm front to the west we had to go around it and up into Canada. Needless to say we didn’t get into LAX till 1-something. I had missed my connecting flight…so without any luggage I spent the night in a hotel only to get up and spend the next day sitting in LAX…for 9 hours. Departing reasonably on time, we spent the next 11 hours flying only to be notified by out captain that we had run out of fuel and would have to stop in Noumea. I should say that we hadn’t strictly speaking run out of fuel but would if we continued to Brisbane because of a storm over Brisbane. Noumea looked lovely, from what we could see from our small 12 inch windows, but yet again I had a connecting flight in Brisbane (which I had 4 hours this time). 2 hours later we took off again; to arrive in Brisbane 50 minuets after my connection to cairns had left. So I sat in Brisbane airport for 6 hours. Narrowly avoiding passing out completely in some fairly uncomfortable airport chairs I got on my flight and made my way to Cairns, arriving 36 hours after everyone who I was supposed to be traveling with. Cairns is awesome though.
Now pictures of Noumea (c) Amanda Sacks (the person next to me, because i couldn't be arsed to get my camera out):

Gallery Updated with Bookmarks

just a quickee to say that gallery now has bookmark functionality. its something i was thinking about in the previous post (a way to manage the gallery if it had LOTS of photos in it). i was originally calling them albums, but opted for the more suitably named 'bookmarks' as really they just allow you to 'jump' to a specific point in the gallery.

Gallery Added.

So as my departure draws nearer, I'm just about finishing up the mini- site. I just added the gallery--its flash driven with an XML document and loads all its images externally. Its simple but fairly useful and dynamic. right now it'll work for a few images, but ill probably have to add some more functionality if the numbers of images increases too dramatically. And yeah, its just filled with default/dummy images and text right now.
I'll be trying to add a few more posts this week, pre-departure stuff and info posts about studying abroad.
1 week and 1 day till departure.