It's been a busy coupla weeks - world cup dramatics, travelling north and south, some new technologies at work and a small, but significant, surf.

Gutted that England fell out of the world cup on penalties. Again. We watched the game at a pub in Manly, Sydney, and I must admit that I was a little tipsy by the time we kicked off at 2am. My voice was hoarse from cheering, my "proud to be English" wristband proudly waved aloft all night. Oh dear. Not sure I should show my face in that particular pub again....

....the weekend in Sydney was great, otherwise. Met a great bunch of people at a friend's 30th, and hooked up with Jez 'n' Kez, who we hadn't seen since Nepal 6 months ago. Although it was cold and fairly grey, we had some good harbour moments, enjoying the sunset a couple of times and taking the ferry from Circular Quay to Manly and back again.



It can be a pretty spectacular city, but when we got back to Brisbane it felt comfortable to be back amongst colourful wooden queenslanders, and to be out of the endless traffic! We gave Mike and Al a bit of a hand with their final clearing out as they prepared to set off back to the UK.... and Mike leant me his surfboard and a wetsuit, which I put to good use and rode my first wave :) It was a fairly big day at Manly, and I'm not used to either surfing on my own or surfing a beach break. I'm quite proud of myself just for heading out into the surf, and very pleased with actually riding a wave. I'm less pleased with the fact that I had put the wetsuit on inside out, and so the ankles were bagging out with water and weighing me down!

We arrived back in Brisvegas late on tuesday night, and I was back at the airport at dawn the following day to head north to Mackay for a few day's work. A bunch of stuff that I suspected might go wrong, did, and then a bunch more stuff that I had no idea could go wrong, did as well. And in fact, all the wrongness made for a challenging, and therefore satisfying, few days. I came out of it feeling on top of things, despite not having achieved most of the set goals for the trip. My impressions of Mackay are pretty vague, but some key things were that opposite the airport there are sugar cane fields, and that looking along a side street running off the main street you can see the edge of town. It was nice to be in a popular pub in a small Queensland town to watch the final State of Origin match of the series too.