Another long long day

It's been quite a rough week.

SO so busy in the office, half the hassle is just calling clients to let them know we are busy and not able to help them any time soon. Supprising how many say.. "okay, thanks.."

It didn't help that I've had a cold for some of it which always makes me feel a little overloaded and wanting to curl up and sleep.

Still, the week has ended and the weekend starts here. Sadly the plan for tonight is to collapse infront of the TV with a DVD and an early night. How exciting!

So to make this boring post a little better..

I boarded the plane in London, I was excited as this was a new type of job for me, it was last minute and it was to a new country! YAY.. This was 4 - 5 years ago when I was still learning.

The flight was to Sau Paulo in Brazil. I was a little nervous about the place, but eager to give it a try. The flight was around 12 hours I think.. but that passed quite fast. Landing I was found by a guy who works for my company and he "fast tracked" me through customs with a wave of my passport. The que was HUGE and I got some serious dirty looks, but I was being lead away...

I never got to see any of Sau Paulo in the end as I was immediately thrown onto a domestic flight to Belem via Brazillia. It was at this time I realised.. English is NOT spoken in Brazil! I never thought about it before.. I had travelled to spain before, many times infact.. so I tried talking Spanish.. Well that worked.. kinda.. but people were fairly quick with me! I had no idea why.. but just accepted it.

Flying into Brazillia it was very odd. the capital city. it seemed small and all to neat. The roads were all grass and tree lined and more, they were all in very straight squares. I was a little wierded out and was glad when we took off again to Belem. Here was more exciting.. an old city on the banks of the Amazon river and the Atlantic ocean.

I was greeted by a guy with a deep sun tan and a baseball cap. He had a big smile on his face and I knew thing were going to go well. I was taken to the Hilton hotel in the centre of town and given a room. I collapsed.. It was a very long day.. I knew I needed to go early the next day.

So the next stage was to get up early and head out to the airstrip again. This was a little more interesting. The drive through town was very exciting in my people carrier. No one spoke engish again.. but I was okay with it. The first leg of today was getting into an old propeller plane that held maybe 14 people. This was also amazing.. the view out the window was teriffic, I could see amazonican rain forrest as far as the eye could see. I remember smiling and wondering how I got to be here doing this as a job.

Anyway, we landed in a small airstrip in the middle of the rain forrest. There were maybe 4 - 5 wooden houses around the strip but NOTHING else but forrest and noises. We disembarked and went to one of the houses were we were fed some lunch as we waited for our helicopeter. I looked around the area amazed at the place....

To be continued..

travelling abroad.

That I want to got out of this miserable country and find some warm weather for a bit. I saw a photo of a mountain range is a hot country earlier today and it made me feel like I wanted to be there. It was like a sudden flash of "that would be good to relax". A moment later I thought "I would only want to be there with one person at the moment too."

All in all I am feeling drained and it's only tuesday this week. I was concidering going home for a weekend this weekend.. just to get out the country.. but I can't justify it as I will probably be working over some of the weekend anyway.

So...

When I was in Australia, one trip I went on was to sail on a 87ft Super Maxi racing yaght. It was in the Whitsunday Islands which are between Cairns and Brisbane.



The vessel was called "The Condor" and it was a lovely yacht. I was able to take the helm on a few occasions and it was terrific, so responsive. However for the most part I was a grunt running the winches and hanging over the side when sailing fast. Only thing that agnoyed me on the whole 3 days was that we were given a chance to race another ship, but because someone onboard had caught sight of a dolphin, half the crew decided to leave the race and check the dolphin out instead. It irritated me a little bit especially as the dolphin disapeared immediately afterwards.

Anyways we sailed for 3 days from Airly Beach around Hamilton island and stopped off at a few beaches for snorkling and chilling time. I had an amazing time and I look forward to maybe going there again.

The YACHT was being run by 3 full time crew (skipper, cook and first mate). Then there were 12 brits all from mixtures of places and genders and two dutch girls. We got on alright. 4 of the brit guys were friends from home and were terribly chique. I was there on the 6 weeks holiday alone and this worked best in most cases, in this case, I was an outsider.. Despite this the other guys were great and it was a really good time. So relaxing!

I remember one evening watching the Nectoluca in the water sparkling as we drank wine and got hammered.