My New Home Is Darwin Australia

"Tie me Kangaroo down sport"
this is the title of a very famous Australian song and i bet you can find it on You Tube, so here i am in the far North of Australia in the small tourist town of Darwin. It is very smart and clean and full of tourists, Jeez i hate tourists, I flew in yesterday at 4.30am with no sleep on the flight from Singapore, my body clock had died, it doesn't know what time it is, i have had valium the last 3 nights and I was awake at 3am, I will probably get a good sleep tonight, I had a walk round town yesterday so i could do some shopping and get my Visa Label applied in the Immigration office they have in town, the central business district as they call downtown is tiny, maybe 400 meters long, plenty of bars and clubs that are open all night, there is no beach in CBD as it is a rocky peninsular,

her am I at the seafront, note only a grassy park and no beach, the beach is 5 Km away



The biggest problem here is trying to find some acommodation, this is full tourist season and everything is full, I am having to beg my company to give me some money to buy furniture so i can then rent a nice place without have to rent a tourist place, which are overly priced and not very nice. I have to open a bank account and provide identity checks and gawd knows what other things, maybe a urine sample, to then be allowed to use a an Australian bank, it is tricky as i am living in the shittiest hotel in town, we will see how it all goes today, but at least i am here and could be here for a long time.

Down on the Costa Rican Farm

I have spent a long week getting ready for a trip to Florence in Italy to sort out my next Job. It could be a long job and in a very nice location, I cannot discuss it much as it is almost completed but I don't want to tempt fate with talking about it too much other than to say I am pretty excited about it and I could end up retiring on this one. As i am flying out Tuesday morning we decided to go out for the day to a petting farm, it is a large franchise place not really a farm but a glorified theme park, I wasn't excited but for the little girl, feeding pigs and goats and horses is all great fun, she even had a ride on the ponies and this was a first for her

Emma riding the Ox



I dont mind feeing the animals but sometimes i get dragged into events as I stand out so much in the crowd, I am tall thin and white, most locals are short fat and brown usually with a huge hairy caterpillar on the top lip, so I got dragged into chasing a piglet around a course to win for England, very funny to watch I suppose, I didnt win, my pig was drugged and wouldn't run



The horses were the best part of the whole place, some huge horses and many with foals, tiny donkeys and all sorts of ponies and shetlands and miniature horses, Emma has just learnt to understand the that males have hanging parts and females dont, so she was very happy to tell everyone which horse was male and which was female, all by looking between the back legs of the animals, it was hilarious.
feedign the piglets was also a very amusing part of the day, the pigs were clever enough to realise that if they bit hard and pulled they would get the bottle all to themselves, stealing bottles was so funny, the look of shock on the faces of the kids and the women was so funny.

Clowns in The Gymn

I may sound like a smart ass but I really think most folks who go to the gymn would be far better off just eating less. I have started going to the gymn again after about 1 year absense and perhaps it is the gymn I am going to but it is full of fat women who are just pissing about, not sure if they are kidding themselves about losing weight or really trying to lose a ton of fat hanging like a sack of potatoes over their waistline, if you can call it waistline. This is where i am feeling lke a smart ass, who am I to call them a fat ass, I have just discovered a beer gut in my shirt this last year and I am trying to get rid of it, but these poor women are deluding themselves that the silly exercises they do is actually having any effect on their huge legs and guts. The squeeze a large ball between their thighs, they use weights that are probably smaller than the sandwiches they eat for lunch. The swing their legs about during the kick boxing class. I am amazed by the sillines sof it all and the gymn owners willnot turn away good money from these eggs on legs. There are young girls who have neve done any exercise in their lives and have to get the coaches to create a special routine for them, doing silly leg and abs exercises that will do nothing for them, EAT LESS YOU FAT BASTARDS, there is nothing easy about losing weight, it is hard work and if you are just pretending to do some hard work your just wasting your time, just cut the calories, as my old dad used to say "You never see fat folks in Africa", he did have a simplified view of life, but he is true, eating fried rice and beans, with deep fried bananas is not the way to lose weight and this country specialise in frying all known foods to man, tastes great but you can see the cellulite popping up as you swallow them. I have no answer to these poor misguided souls other than your kids still love you but stop wasting your money and plan a proper diet and stop looking silly in the gymn and get off the machines that I want to use.

Disco in My Bedroom

We went to bed very late 2 nights ago after surfing the net and watching a movie i had downloaded, we both slumped into my floating cloud of a bed and was hoping to fall alseep straight away, the light went off and i closed my eyes only to find i could see flashing disco lights through my eyelids. I thought i was imagining things, i opened my eyes and saw nothing, closing them again only for the lights to start up again. This time I also heard a faint buzzing at the same time, I opened my eyes and saw a neon green flashing light hovering around my bed going round and round in circles, what could it be, I then heard the typical buzz and bash of a fire-fly bouncing into the ceiling as it tried to find a way out, i had to put on the light and spent 10 minute in a futile attempt at catching the bug, it would crash down onto the ground and then scurry away under some furniture, i gave up and tried to get back to sleep but i was all excited about the bug escaping, i half expected the thing to start buzzing about again but it didnt, I took ages to get back to sleep and about 3.00am the little girl came into the bedroom and awoke us both claiming she had a nightmare, so she was invited into our bed, a bad mistake, as all parents know, kids have a way of flailing about in their sleep and Emma is no different, she slapped me and kicked me for the rest of the night, I was a wreck the next morning, I still have recover form all this missed sleep and I only have 10 Valiums left, what am i going to do.

Life Is a Beach

Well I am trying to recover from my trip to the beach over the last weekend, We went to the caribbean as usual, as it is peaceful quiet and cheap-ish, prices are going up everywhere. I wanted an air conditioned cabin as i had just had 7 weeks in Australia enjoying the A/C. We had 4 people in the cabin, and the A/C was not controllable, it was either too cold or too hot and rather noisy as it was a window rattler type, so i slept very badly, this wasnt what i wanted as I was still recovering from my jetlag, but the place was fantastic as always, it was unusually sunny for the rainy season and very hot, we all got a burn in the sun, the little girl had a surprise for us, she can swim really well and was very confident in the pool, i was shocked as she was chasing me round the pool. we took a long walk in to the national park called Cahuita Maritime park, i think,

In the national Maritime park in Cahuita




There we saw spider monkeys, howler monkeys, and capuccin monkeys, a racoon and an aguti, a small long legged rodent, supposedly nice eating but i wouldn't attempt it, In our cabin we saw many birds including the Black Hawk and Osprey flying along the beach, many hummingbirds and lots of others bay breasted wren, and a black cowled oriole and finally a black headed Jay, the little girl is also taking photos now as she finally understands what she is meant to do with it.

Picture taken by little girl, Emma the Tinker



We also were adopted by the cabin owners cat, it was the sweetest little thing, a little wild but it was very friendly and came round looking for food all the time and slept there nearly all the time and laid down in the strangest cat way i have seen in a long time,

Crazy Cat



We also found the roads to be in very good condition, which is a novelty, they are usually broken on the smaller roads so you have to slow to a crawl to bounce in and out of the holes, but we had a fairly good run, this is due to the president getting rid of the corrupt road inspectors who were taking big bribes to say work was done when it quite obviously hadn't been. He fired all the inspectors and told all the contractors to work properly or never to work again in Costa Rica, it certainly did the job. While we were driving back we stopped in a little roadside food place, we ate like lords and spent $16 for all of us, and i read the local paper, it was full of deaths, car crashes, husband killing wife, drug dealers killing each other, children drowning, it was depressing, Like so much of the third world death is a daily occurance and has to be avoided like not going hungry or finding work and somewhere to live,