Pro-Logue

It's nearly time for our next journey to begin. So to start with, I will bring you up to speed on what we've been doing for the last 3 months. We've been in sunny north queensland, Mackay actually, being Bella's home town, doing some serious saving. Bella swung a job with the local city council and with Bella's parent's offering some rent-free accomodation it sounded like a suitable place to save. Being a booming mining town, I thought I would have no trouble getting a job. I was sort of right, and after about a week and a bit, along with some nagging from Bella, I managed to get a storeman's job, working in the warehouse of a bathroom tile shop. Needless to say, Bella had a pretty standard office job, mine on the other hand was a bit of a shock, especially going from a dive job, but moving boxes of tiles around gave my muscles a bit of a workout and for 3 months, I would probably have done anything.

Along with saving, we also managed to do some pretty good spending too. We went up and dived the Yongala which is a shipwreck that sank in 1911 and is probably the best wreck dive in Australia. We agreed. We also managed to head down to Byron BluesFest over Easter, a great music festival. It rained most of the weekend as we have come to expect, but the music was well worth it. From crazy old blues guys from the deep south who hardly sound like they are speaking English but obviously have the blues real bad, to modern day musos such as Ash Grunwald and Ben Harper. The highlight for me was probably Taj Mahal who I had wanted to see previous years but the timetable never worked out. We also had a long weekend up in Townsville, which also included a trip out to Magnetic Island. This is pretty much the only place we took our camera, so now you can expect photos.

A view of the original part of Townsville with Castle Hill in the background.

A man on a rock on Magnetic Island.

Bella with a tiny ball of fur above her head. (It's a koala).

Here is a better picture for all of our international people.

We leave Australia on May 24 and are heading straight to Beunos Aires. We are in South America for about 5 months. Making our way from Beunos Aires to Lima, mainly in Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. We then have a two week summer in Costa Rica before we head up to Vancouver, Canada, where we intend to find jobs. Any advice from anything to do with countries or places to visit, diving in Costa Rica or anything else will be gladly excepted.

So that's about it. You can next expect to hear from us when we will be well entrenched in all that is South America.

Adios.