Onwards and upwards, and downwards.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Sadly I have to keep moving; again I cursed my luck at winning a competition that gave me a ton of free stuff at the cost of having to leave a pretty girl behind, she went south and I had to continue my free holiday to the north.

Ok so after leaving Magnetic Island and Annette, my to do list had skydiving at the top, time to jump mission beach. The Treehouse YHA is a lovely little place, run by a sweet old couple that looked after me and were generally very friendly and helpful, it’s an all wooden building complete with an old dog and gigantic cat at mission beach, which is essentially another excuse to live by the beach and is just a few houses in between the jungle and a beach. Naturally 99.98% of Aussies live by the coast where it is considerably easier to breath and perform such actions as standing without instantly being inside a cocoon of your own sweat. I met a generous guy here who passed on a bit of food, showed me his photography projects and explained how he was biking down the east coast, a feat I thought slightly insane considering the heat and distance involved.

I woke up and got myself prepared, a friendly skydiver picked me up and off we trundled through the rain, which had picked this day to show up, just this day. He said it should clear up but if the conditions got any worse we would have to postpone until midday or maybe tomorrow, so naturally whilst I was talking to ‘The Boss’ about whether or not a free film would be a good idea for them to do, (naturally I didn’t want to pay for it) the rain grew, and grew into such epic proportions that soon it could be heard far away in space, naturally I only speculate as I was of course trapped under the deluge, but there was so much water I began to question whether in fact the sea had recently migrated just to pay us a visit. Even the mist from such a downpour could have put out most bush fires. The jump was cancelled.

I was also planning on meeting a filmmaker, who was staying in Mission Beach during the filming for Sea Patrol, but he had no car and I didn’t fancy ridiculous taxi fairs so we failed at that too.

So I left Mission Beach having achieved nothing but meeting a ridiculously oversized cat, and a Swiss man with a moustache! In Cairns I had more luck but I still didn’t get the free video, they agreed to it, but only after I had jumped, I think they got a little caught up in the debating of who was the one responsible for that type of decision so they never got round to realising they only had a short time before I had already fallen from the plane and that the video would be slightly useless without anyone in it.

So sorry people, the video and pictures of the jump would have cost me an extra $150 and that seemed a little steep! Plus mad seeing as my bank was surprisingly empty at this point.