carpe diem: camping in kangaroo land

Crikey! Almost a whole month with no updates? Shameful, shameful. I certainly have my work cut out for me, to properly chronicle the past two weeks... they were phenomenal!

The real excitement begins on Friday, September 14th with Macquarie's annual celebration of Conception Day. As far as I'm aware, this is the "conception" of the university. Naturally, it's become a giant outdoor concert and drinking fest that over 6000 people show up to. In short: awesome! Bright colours, beer, sunshine, live music, dancing, and tonnes of people... can't go wrong with that. We started the day over at Ola's backyard--I trekked across campus with all my camping gear and Mat and Ian, then we chilled in the sun for a couple hours before heading over to the lawns to see the main event. We mingled all afternoon, did a bit of dancing, had a sausage sizzle or two, and enjoyed our beer. We spent some time talking with Ignacio, one of my neighbours who opened the music (he's a fantastic guitar player!), ran into our badminton coach Mark, some of the rugby guys, and roommates of roommates and friends and neighbours. I spent the night at Ola's in their spare room, so as to be up on time for camping the next day.

Annabel and Nicki outside of Ola's

Ian and Mat just chillin...

myself and Anna, one of Ola's Swiss neighbours

me and Ian inside Conception Day!

random crowd shot...

mm, beer

Ola and I with Ignacio, the fantastic Chilean guitar player =D

oh the clappy hands...

demonstrating how my new shirt allows me to camouflage into Ola's watermelon walls... hehe!

And then... camping! We were up at 6 am, out the door at 7 am, and then it was a series of buses, trains, and vans until we got to our campground at Pebbly Beach in Murramurrang National Park, about 150 km south of Sydney. The campground was pretty average--flush toilets but only cold showers, dirt tent pads, etc.--but the beach was amazing... and all ours! The wildlife was endlessly entertaining, too; wild kangaroos who let you pet them and their joeys, parrots of ten varieties, birds, wallabies, possums, and even a sand goanna meandered by us on the beach. They were all pretty intent on stealing our food, so we had to get a little aggressive in defending it... thinking of an instance where we had to poke a king parrot with a fork to keep it out of our peanut butter! And an attempt at a midnight raid of our food by a mummy possum... tsk. They kept us on our toes!

We had about four days camping; two were spent in transit, one day we (Sarah, Ola, and I) spent at the beach doing our own thing, and the other we went on a 15 km trek to a nearby town, lake, and shortish hiking trail. It was absolutely beautiful scenery!

For the sake of bandwidth (and my sanity), this is just a selection of my photos from camping... you can check out the rest in my Google Album. I love Picasa!