Koob's New Zealand/Australia Adventures: The Final Week

Here I am, final week, one day of work left and only 2 days left total. My final week hasn’t particularly gone as originally planned. As I think I mentioned in the last blog, I spontaneously joined in on a 3 day boat trip with a couple guys from work as they were short one field person. Monday and Tuesday were the most gorgeous days EVER. Well at least they were the best in the past few weeks. Perfect temperature/weather and the ocean was really flat. The project I was helping with was deploying underwater recording devices in a bunch of different areas. Each was out for 45 minutes, so it was a lot of putting them out, switching the cameras, and putting them back out. Pretty simple and the videos are cool. They are looking at species composition and abundance between marine parks and control areas around Moreton Bay. We were on the eastern side of Moreton Island, so not inside the bay.

The 3 days we were out there FLEW by. Oh! On Tuesday we saw so many humpbacks! I think we saw some every 5 minutes at one point during the day, so awesome :) There was one whale that was ~30m away from the boat and did a spiral breach! SO AMAZING. I’ve never seen one breach that close much less a spiral one. Of course I didn’t grab my camera on the way out to the bow, assuming that it would just come to the surface and go back down a few times. But even so, one of the guys on the trip took a video on his ipod, hopefully he will send it to me. Later that day we saw another humpback a bit off the stern do 5 breaches in a row. FIVE! Crazy.

Last night a co-worker and I were invited to dinner with the masters swim coach and his wife. They cooked us an awesome South African dish, SO GOOD! It was a good night. I’m really going to miss them. :( I’ll just have to come back soon I guess. I potentially might be going to Byron Bay on Saturday with the coach depending on how a few things pan out in the next day, like packing. Haha

Oh! I think I forgot to mention in the last blog. Last week there were like 3 koalas around work all at the same time. SO CUTE! I took like 100 pictures. I’ll include one below. We sat there and watched one for like 20 minutes attempting to get from one tree to another on a branch. I thought he was going to fall like 5 times (it was really windy), I was a bit nervous. He was ok though, after his failed attempt he just sat there staring at us. Sooooo freakin adorable. I wish they were in the States. Also, I’m going to miss seeing cockatoos in the wild, not with clipped wings in cages. It still catches me off guard when I see them flying around.

This has definitely been an experience and adventure of a lifetime, that’s for sure. I’m torn about leaving, but definitely ready to go home for a bit. It will be interesting to see if I need much adjusting or if it will all snap back quickly. One of the weirdest things will be the driving but a few car rides and drives should fix that pretty quickly. I might freak out a little bit though, so just keep that in mind if I start hyperventilating in the back seat (just kidding). I will be happy to go back to the prices of things, especially groceries, but not so happy that taking $100 bucks out of the ATM will actually be $100, not like $120.

I’m not really looking for the travel back though, apart from potentially hanging out with Liz in Auckland. The rest of it is going to be pretty sucky, hopefully I will somehow be able to sleep on the last leg of the trip though. Overnight flight post an already 30 hour travel ‘day’. Oh dear, I would hope I would sleep. I’m really hoping that customs in the States won’t be too bad, I’ll have to go through it in NZ too so I’ll probably be pretty fed up with it at that point. I guess I’ll see what happens! Let’s hope it all goes smoothly.

Fun Fact:
There are apparently more than 150 million sheep in Australia, only 20 million people. And they poke fun at the Kiwi’s…