Netball!

So, I joined the Melbourne Office Netball team. Netball is a popular Commonwealth sport that unfortunately Canada has missed out on. Traditionally played by women, we sported a co-ed team for the Corporate Olympics - a tournament for Melbourne businesses.

TONS OF FUN!

It's a bit hard to describe, but if you picture a smaller basketball court with slightly lower nets and no backboards and seven players a side each of whom can only go in specific areas of the court and not dribble or run with the ball....nor have any kind of contact with each other....you'll be on the right track. This "Netball 101" video was very helpful in getting me up to speed.

We've been training (Australian for "practicing") for the past few Fridays, but getting the hang of not taking a step after you've caught the ball and not trying to smack it out of someone's hands was a bit difficult. Game day arrived yesterday and you wouldn't believe the number of fouls I was called on!! I got better as the day went on, but it was a bit comical how all both teams were at following the rules.

We were good enough, however, to make it through to the finals today - on a 1-point differential tie-breaker. We started strong - were up 10-4 at the half - but ended up losing something like 14-11 in a heartbreaking second half.

Oh, and believe it or not, they decided I was to play "Goal Shooter" which basically means being one of two people allowed to get close enough to the net to shoot. I still find it hard to believe.

I will be looking for a netball court when I'm back in Canada - it is a really fun sport!!

A Small Chateau for the Weekend

Several weekends ago a dozen or so "engagement loans" (the nice name for homeless people like me with no real life to attend to on weekends) got together to pool our hotel budgets and rent a small little chateau known as Campbell Point House on the Bellarine Peninsula about an hour outside of Melbourne. In all about twenty work friends came together to celebrate the joint birthdays of L and D (our fantastic organizers).

Although everyone else found the mansion to be gaudy ("inspired by the Chateaus of the Loire Valley of France" but poorly executed), I thought it was great - tons of fun. Five huge bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms, a heli-pad, an infinity pool, grass tennis courts, fake family portraits, and several dining areas. And on a lake! A perfect weekend retreat in my opinion!

We ate (some went crazy in the kitchen as most of us hadn't seen a fridge in 3 months), we drank (an impressive amount), we sunned, and we slept (not much sleeping went on). It was a fantastic time. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves!

Looking at the Chateau from the pool house

Pool table room

A hallway near the entrance

Cooking!

Formal Dinner

L being a great hostess

Heli-pad. Enough said.

Photoshoot at the pool

Tennis courts

The pool and lake

Australian Animals...Best I've Got!

A few weekends ago I took myself to the Melbourne Zoo, thinking it would be a relaxing way to spend a sunny Sunday. It was Kids Day. Strollers galore. I still managed to spend several fun hours there. The zoo is set up like IKEA - divided into quarters, you have to snake through enclosures to get where you want to go. 

I was primarily there to see some more Australian animals - I definitely have not had my fill of kangaroos, and have not seen any that are close to the six-foot mark I was promised. The Melbourne Zoo fell short on this front. There weren't more than two kangaroos to be seen, and they only have one koala bear!! I also visited the one platypus and a couple other spiky animals that were mildly interesting. As for the other animals, the highlights are included here...but let's just say after an African safari I'm not sure I will be satisfied with a zoo ever again.

For me, the koala was the best part. Did you know that when a koala is born it's just the size of a jellybean and it has to climb up the mother's stomach and into her pouch all on its own? And if it falls down the mother won't go after it....it just gets left behind! Here's some video I took of the koala. (You can hear the annoying kids in the background.) I was lucky to be there just at feeding time - they sleep 20-22 hours a day, so I'm very privileged she woke up for me!

A lazy kangaroo. Where's the bouncing action?

An emu?? Very large and walking around unsupervised and uncaged! 

ANOTHER lazy kangaroo 

This is the koala. This is all she was doing for the first 15 minutes I was there

This is a cool animal who lives with the koala. He's an echidna, and like the platypus, lays eggs 

The koala woke up!! Much cuter from this direction!

Cute...and a bit scary! 

Hungry!

Thinking about going back to sleep...

There was a beautiful aviary

Really massive pelicans

Only non-Australian animal that was interesting

A tree kangaroo (I think!) 

Australian penguins. Very small!

The platypussary!!

Great Barrier Reef

Last weekend D and I headed to Port Douglas for some quality R&R. We flew into Cairns, 3.5 hours from Melbourne and then drove an hour to Port Douglas. Why go to so much trouble for just a weekend? The Great Barrier Reef! (And I took the Monday off as a vacation day!) We stayed at the Sheraton which was a bit dated but very nice - they have seven or eight lagoons all around the grounds which I enjoyed all day Monday. I was so busy enjoying it I didn't really get any pictures of the hotel!

D found a really great boat that went out to the reef for the day on Saturday. There are different areas of the reef - we went to Opal Reef. The boat was fantastic because the top floor was a sun deck with amazing lounge chairs you could enjoy for the 1.5 hour ride out and back. Here's a snap of me on the way out. I had to hold on tightly to the rail to avoid toppling over; the waves were deceptively large!

Once we got out to the reef we stopped at three different spots to snorkel (or dive, but scuba diving remains one of the only adventurous things I won't do!) and they were all beautiful. There were lots of neat fish, but I was most impressed by the coral. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Unfortunately the colour gets absorbed by the water so it doesn't look as bright as it actually is, and it is even duller through the camera. Imagine all the coral is bright, and colours of the rainbow! The best way to experience the reef (other than actually being there) is by video, so check out my 7 minute tour here!

What kind of a fish is this???

This picture below is of a white tipped reef shark. Let me tell you a story about this sighting. First of all, they told us on the boat that there are reef sharks and that they are harmless and actually smaller than they look (the masks make things look 20% bigger)...and if you see one you're really lucky. So, I'm snorkeling all by myself (D was diving) which was making me a bit nervous to begin with, and then I see this shark, and I'm actually not scared of it, but trying to chase after it to get this great photo (success!). However, this smaller pointy fish starts swimming into me. At first I don't know what it is, and am checking if it's my bathing suit tie or camera strap or something....but no, it's definitely a fish. I know it's not going to really hurt me, but it keeps startling me. So I start to swim away quickly, hoping to lose it. Here's a tip: don't try to race a fish in water. You're not likely to win. Anyways it keeps following me and bumping into me. One of the guides who is out in the water is nearby so I make it over to him and he's laughing at me. He saw the whole thing and I'm sure could hear me shrieking underwater each time I got nudged. He said that little fish follow sharks around so they can get their leftovers....and when I was right above the shark the fish got confused and thought I was the shark!!! (At least it didn't mistake me for a whale I guess!) So I ask the guide to get the fish to leave me alone because I can't continue to snorkel with a fish bumping into me every 30 seconds....but he can't get it away! He tells me to dive down deep and maybe that will get it to leave....no success. So I have to book it back to the boat with the little fish following me the whole way and not leaving me alone until I was totally out of the water. Nuts!!

The picture below is of a giant clam - weighs about half a ton!! At the second spot we stopped to snorkel they took us on a guided snorkel and the leader dove down and waved his hand in front of this clam and it....clammed right up!! Super cool. The clam is over a meter long!

Here are some photos of clown fish - super cute, but really small!

Look closely - strange looking fish are in this picture!

Possibly the most unusual looking fish I saw. A pufferfish?

As if all of this didn't make for a full day, D and I drove into Port Douglas (all that's there is really the marina and some restaurants) for dinner at On the Inlet, a great seafood restaurant on the water. Fantastic. The wine we ordered was so good we had to leave the car there and walk back to the hotel (not advised....no sidewalks really, not a pedestrian-friendly town!) Here are a few pictures of the waterfront at Port Douglas:

Sunday was a day for relaxing around the hotel (and for D figuring out his flight situations since he was flying back on Quantas and they grounded their planes....not fun) and then heading back into town for oysters on the water and to pick up the car. As I said earlier, I stayed around all day Monday too and really perfected my tan. A word of warning: the sun is insanely strong here - I went through an entire bottle of sunscreen in a weekend and still got as dark as I get in two weeks in Florida!!