'Stralia

what is up! im do apologise for the 2 week break from blogging, but alot has happened in that time so it could be a long one.
since finishing my MSDT i started to relax a little bit, lisa came back to the island and poppy and mike moved into my house, so we all had some crazy good times including that tragic night in fish bowl where my jeans got properly ripped open and im pretty sure all the staff at bans saw my junk - lol.
i wanted to get some work in as an instructor before i left, so i did an open water and advanced course with two instructors called guy and bex, lisa was also assisting. we had the funniest group of students iv ever met in my life , 2 danish guys, an australian couple, 2 english and an argentine who all went on to advanced. they were fucking hilarious. we had some amazing dives with them , one particularly memorable one when we were on chumpon pinnacle, and i went to my regular shark spotting place and could see any (which i was pissed off about) then just as we were starting to swim off to look somewhere else lisa saw one in the distance, and we followed it to find 2 more, it was awesome, all the students got a proper good look at the bull sharks.
the last dive of the advanced course was highly traumatic to say the least. we dived a site called green rock which is a nesting ground for titan trigger fish (which are mean mo'fo's) there more scary than the sharks and im not even joking... in addition it was there mating season. the dive boat didnt want to go there but under pressure from a "senior instructor" we went there. there was a strong currrent and bad vivsibility and i was taking 2 students round the side of the rock, i was busy watching them instead of where i was going because i didnt want to lose them in the vis, then i swam into a trigger fish haha, it went mental, slammed into my mask and chased us 3 for almost a minute, the poor girl i was leading thought it had given up and stopped swimming while it was right behind her! luckily nobody was actually hurt but when we got back on the boat a fair few dives had bit holes in there fins... unpleasent.
back on shore was great, we signed them off and everything then went for a few heavy beers in the bar. fortunately it was open mic night, and these students of ours were ratassed to say the least, mel, the australian girl went up and sang genuinely well, then tor one of the danish pair did the single most amazing rendition of "fuck her gently" by tenacious D, whilst strumming a non chorded guitar - legend. that was a very dirty night on koh tao hahaha. as barney from how i met your mother would say "best night ever"
i was coming to the end of my stay on koh tao which made me sad, and i lost an extra day there because i screwed up my own flight times. so to celebrate the fact that i was going somewhere, i with the help of poppy and lisa, organised a boat trip to dive with the bull sharks at sunset while they would be out feeding .. everyone at bans thought we were mental so only 4 of us actually went diving in the end! that was sick though, speed boat out to the pinnacle, in the water fast as hell, then we hit about 20m , and saw no sharks.... which was odd, and then we looked up haha, there were loads of sharks just swimming right about our heads, there was one big bull shark below us, but it was such an amazing experience, on that dive we didnt actually see them eat anything which was unfortunate, but there were some heart in mouth moments when they swam straight at us, after the sun went down and the water turned to darkness we stuck right to the pinnacle and the sharks seemed to dissappear into the depths to sleep or whatever they do, so we went back to the boat - amazing dive.
i was riding my bike home and some fucking retarded guy ran across the street infront of my and smacked me straigh off it, this was practically on my last day, fuck knows how but i came of with literally no injuries at all, i pretty much landed on my feet, but the whole left side of the bike was more bent than gary glitter, the foot peg and the gears were bent into the engine and i was like ... oh fuck man, that guna cost me a bomb. luckily mike (bless his heart) knew a guy who owns a bike shop and they managed to fix it for free! good times.. that bring my grand total of koh tao bike crashes up to 3. bad times.
my last night was really fun, got to say proper good byes to everyone, it was really nice. that just left my final morning to sit around with the people closest to me on the island which was really important. then just really really heart felt good byes. kinda walk down the pier moment and dont look back because it would totally kill you =/ that was a long ferry ride away from paradise.
i stayed in a reasonable place in samui, it was in a terrible area though , couldnt do any shopping without getting molested my ladies of the night haha, bad times. ended up having dinner with an abnoxious english man from london, and a really nice dutch police officer who was also a travel writer, so between them i heard some very intresting stories!
the next day i flew from samui - bangkok, bangkok - sydney, sydney- brisbane, brisbane-townsville. long fucking day. when i arrived in townsville, everyone was fucking closed so i couldnt even get a feed, my laptop was dead cos i had no ozzy adapter, payphones wernt accessible and my thai phone ran out of credit. i got to my room in halls and there really really "basic" shall we say. so im moving out into a student house in the town over the next few days. so the first night here was horrible i genuinely for the first time every just wished that i was going to uni in london or something homely and simple like that. the next days got better though, met some really really nice people , mostly all americans because the australian students havnt really arrived yet, so the people here are quite nice, went out with 2 guys called ross and steve yesterday which was good banter, the clubs here are ok, pretty similar to oxford actually, accept townsville seems to be a bit of a military base so some of the "dudes" in the clubs are total cockfags.
anyways, going house hunting tomorrow and hopefully can sort something out.
i do apologise to everyone individually that i havnt sent half as many emails out as i wanted too, but basically my dell got totally fudged in thailand so it takes me about 45 minutes to write a facebook message.. one letter at a time, so its quite painful. hopefully ill get this shit fix rapido though.
anyways, i truely miss everyone back home, and everyone on koh tao.
Massive love
Ro