Our Big Explore: Cairns & Splendour In The Grass

Friday 18^th July

After saying goodbye to the Augustini’s in the morning, we drove out to the AJ Hackett adventure park.

Last year I got a voucher for a jungle swing as a birthday present, from my missed friend Malene, and now was the time to use it. The park specialises in bungy jumping and have the worlds fastest jungle swing.

After watching people bungy jump I was pleased that I got a voucher for the swing. It would take too much courage to take that one step – some people couldn’t even do it, and lost their money on it.

I was very satisfied with my swing, it took me up to 45m., and up there I had a self-release strap that I had to pull to get down again – meaning when I was hanging up there I had no other way to get down, than to pull the strap, no opportunity to bail out, which for me is the best when it comes to heights. Although my fear of heights, more or less, seems to be cured, I was still screaming my lungs out, when I realized how fast I was falling. It was fun and definitely the swing of my life – A great adventure!

In the early afternoon we drove home to my friend Dean, who I know from my time in the Rocky Mountains in Canada. He’s living in Cairns with his girlfriend, Courtney and their adorable 10 month’s old boy Arlie. It’s 4 years ago, since we saw each other. I felt it overwhelming that he (and her) was so hospitable to us. It’s amazing to travel to the other side of the world, and meet an old friend, and then he’s so friendly and easy going - just like that! We got our own room at their house, they cooked us dinner and served us ice cold beers - no wonder we felt like home straight away!

Jungle swing video!!

Our hosts

One of the big ones we saw

Saturday 19th - Wednesday 23th July

On Saturday morning Dean took us on a boat trip around the rivers to spot crocodiles. It’s easiest to spot them during low tide, at that time of the day they’re hanging out on the river banks and enjoying the sun.

We spotted around 5, but they’re really shy, so as soon as they saw us they went into the water to hide.

Did a bit of fishing as well, but none of us catched anything. We spend time with Dean and his family during the weekend, and enjoyed their hospitality. Erik fixed our loose spare wheel, and a few other things on the car, so it could be ready for the outback.

Tuesday we went out for dinner to celebrate Dean’s 34^th birthday, Courney had made a chocolate cheese cake, and Erik finally discovered that cheesecake dosen’t actually taste like cheese.

We didn’t do any touristy stuff during those days. We felt like we needed a break away from all the crowds and we needed to save some money too. We were far behind with blog, so we spend a lot of time to get that updated, while Dean and Courtney was working.

Out for a walk with the little family

Arlie loves to help mom in the kitchen

Thursday 24th- Monday 28th July

We flew down to the festival, Splendour In The Grass, between Byron Bay and the Gold Coast.

Malene (the lady we lived with in Sydney) came and picked us up in the airport. We were really excited about our job in the Danish hotdog stall and had been looking forward to an awesome weekend in good company. The festival is the biggest in Australia, and there's around 25.000 visitors each year. To us that's a small festival, and it turned out that it wasn't half as developed as the ones at home. There was hundreds of foodstalls, and very few bars. People had to buy tokens to buy alcohol, and the lines to both the tokens and the bars were unreasonable long. We found it unfair to charge people so much money ($380 =1976kr ), and then letting them stay in lines through half of the festival.

Well, thursday was in the very beginning of the festival, so the business was very slow during the whole day.
We all had time to go out and explore the festival area. At night we had some wine and beers in the stall and the atmosphere was great. Our boss didn’t give us any specific working shifts, so apparently we should all be in the stall from opening, at 9am to midnight or later. If we weren’t busy we could figure out mutually who should go out and enjoy the festival. Friday was slow as well. We went out and listened to The Presets and Spiderbait.

We had got a few beers during the day and since the business still was slow when we came back, we assumed it would be okay to drink a few beers to kill the long night.

The later it got the more frustrated the boss became, until then we hadn’t sold even half of what he thought, and if we didn’t do something drastic to make people aware of what we were selling and some obvious price signs, he would lose money – LOTS OF MONEY. But it sure wasn’t easy to convince that old stubborn man that we needed some signs that made people notice us.

He was more stubborn than the two of us together, but eventually he let us put up the signs, saying Danish hotdog $8 (42kr).It helped a bit, but it was still too expensive compared to the young crowd, who’s use to buying hotdogs for $2-4 (10-21kr).

The next day the boss still was grumpy and he started being unkind to us, mostly because we came with some suggestions about how we thought we could sell more and probably also because he knew we were right. But wouldn’t admit it! He started to annoy us more and more.

Malene and her daughter, Hannah have worked for him many times, so it’s a while ago since they stopped suggesting new stuff to him – they just do it his way, without further comments. Frankly that’s not how Erik operates, if there’s something wrong he’s not afraid of letting people know.

Saturday afternoon the boss decided to put the price down to $5 (27 kr), and finally we got busy. Although there was still an uncomfortable and awkward silence in the stall. The boss knew he was losing money and after he treated us and talked to us so disrespectful, we didn’t feel like we owed him anything, so none of us was talking or trying to make anything good again.

At night we went out to listen to Rufus, an Australian band we really like, and of course the boss was making a scene when we came back to the stall. Erik stayed there while I escaped out and listened to City And Colour. Our boss was a nightmare to be around, and he basically ruined the whole weekend.

We both really tried just to forget about him, and have fun and enjoy ourselves, but it was impossible when he was around. That’s what you get out of taking time out of your calendar and travel around 1700km to help people!!

The good thing was that we earned more money than we thought we would, but then again he promised us $600 (3120kr) each, and we only got $500 (2600kr), cause he didn’t earn as much as he thought. But if it had been the other way around, and we had been smoking busy all weekend, would he have given us $100 (520kr) extra? Dream on! And we wouldn’t have asked for it! All right, the complaining round is over. Had to get it out of the system!

Monday morning we took a bus to Byron Bay to explore the little surf town, sadly we were too exhausted to do anything when we got there, but we got to see the beach and the inside of our eyelids. Then a helpful lady from the tourist office gave us a lift up to Coolangatta, close to the airport, and we strolled around in the beach town before we flew back up north to Cairns. It had been a long and sadly also an irritating weekend, due to our boss’ grumpy appearance.

Our friend Dean picked up us at the airport and we were pleased to be back in there company, and sleep in a normal bed again.

Signs hidden under the tent!

Mainstage

Byron Bay beach

Tuesday 29th July – Thursday 1st August

We slept like babies, and we didn’t get out of bed before noon. Courtney was making fun of us, cause Arlie was going for his second nap when we got up. So actually we slept more than babies! My new investment arrived on tuesday, a Nikon D7000. We were flat out with getting the blog ready, and hoping that it was the last time that we would spend hours and days on an update. We celebrated my birthday with burgers and a swim in the cool blue lagoon, located in the middle of the city. No crazy party this year! Haha! Friday morning, we said goodbye to our friends and left for our big roadtrip into the outback.