Who the hell is Winston? I really hope Lyvette manages to locate Winston before she leaves because she genuinely loves him. She works for David Jones customer service and has to put a lot of her calls through to Winston in credit. And he’s the most helpful guy on the planet. Everybody loves him. Even I love him and I don’t even work with her. Nor have I ever spoken to him (but I’d like to). The problem is no one knows who he is and they’ve been in the job nearly four months. It’s even gotten to the point where the temps (the temps being Lyvette’s posse) randomly shout out his name and hope that he’ll look up. Time is pressing on and the quest to find Winston continues…

You’ll also be pleased to know that apart from the quest to find Winston we’ve moved out of our cockroach infested flat into a much better place where we can actually open the fridge and nothing flies at us. It’s a dream. I hit rock bottom when I found a cockroach floating in my cup of Yorkshire tea. Apparently they do live in kettles. That was it. I lost the plot, as I’m sure most people would when a perfectly good brew is ruined in such a distasteful manner. So we moved (armed with our disinfectant just in case). Our new room is great, no roaches and it even came with complimentary coat hangers so now we have excessive amounts. And a washing line (not in the room -on the balcony). Could life get any better?

From then on life has improved ten fold. We went to the Slip N Slide which involved throwing ourselves down a wet chute on blow up rings with a load of children. It was great fun, especially watching Elly (who appears to be the most accident prone person we have met) as she took out everybody within a four mile radius.

This day of fun ended with Lyvette, Rob and Google Olly (he works for Google) coming to my restaurant for an Indian and meeting my Indian family. Rob got that pissed he told everybody he founded Linkedin and Olly suddenly became the global manager of Google. Rob was sporting a very sexy beige jacket (because he’s the man) and later on when they ventured to the pub Lyvette heard the security on the radio “The guy in the beige jacket. He needs to leave. Throw him out”. There was only one guy wearing a beige jacket in Sydney that night. Or any night to be fair. This resulted in Lyvette and Olly taking said beige jacket, turning it inside out and carrying it around for the rest of the night whilst security hunted Rob and his beige jacket down. Apparently he lasted a while. But then he couldn’t bare to be parted from his jacket any longer and put it back on. That’s when they found him and threw him out. If only it was that easy to find Winston. But then, he probably wouldn’t wear a beige jacket…because let’s face it, not many people would.

I continued with my surf lessons and hit a man on the head with my board whilst Elly got pooed on by a bird and Lyvette rode a buffalo at the Star Casino. Myself and Lyvette went to Wollongong to visit one of my triathlon friends, Jacqui. She made us ride bikes and sent us home with a delightful selection of her clothes. We got in and hung them all up on our coat hangers. It felt so good. I developed a sore throat at 2am one morning and was found roaming the streets of Sydney wearing Harry Potter pyjamas and Lyvette got ID’d for a plaster. We were out and someone threw a glass on her foot:
“Can I have a plaster please? Someone dropped a glass on my foot and it’s bleeding”
“Have you got any ID?” What? Huh. Australia is backwards. Don’t worry about it, i’ll just bleed to death. My bad.

I went to the National Park very underprepared (standard) armed with only a small bottle of water, no map and no idea where I actually was. Leo was with me and he was as useless as me. After scaling a waterfall, being attacked by leeches and playing chicken with numerous lizards we headed back to the train station. With no water. In 30+ degrees. It got to the point where I nearly licked a puddle. Finally, two hours later, we saw the light of a vending machine at the station. I’ve never been so excited as we stood salivating and counting our last bits of change. Our excitement was something else. Then I turned my back for one teeny tiny second…

“Hev’s…..Hev’s……………HEV’S!”
“What Leo?”
“Well…Errrr….I dropped $1 under the vending machine and now I can’t reach it”
“YOU. DID. WHAT?!!!!”

W the actual F. Could he not see we were knocking on deaths door?! I wanted to scream at him like the cockroaches in my kettle. And the next couple of minutes consisted of two adults rolling around the train station floor fumbling around for a $1 coin and ramming our fingers under the machine in places they weren’t ever going to fit whilst hallucinating due to our severe level of dehydration. Eventually we gave up and by some miracle managed to scrape enough coins together to afford a can of Lift (that’s the Australian equivalent to Fanta Lemon). It was a good job as well, my mouth was as dry as Gandhi’s flip flop.

Then there was Australia Day – we celebrated this by playing lawn bowls. There were balls thrown everywhere, until the old people got fed up and removed them from the pitch (pretty sure that’s not allowed) and they totally interrupted our game. The night finished with Elly getting chucked out of the Pavilion and me being escorted out by security and then befriending a homeless man, making him walk me to the bus stop and tipping him $10 for his service after ensuring he took an oath to spend this money wisely and not on cigarettes. I then promised him I’d visit his sleeping bag in Sydney city centre. Meanwhile Lyvette was roaming around the Eastern Suburbs searching for Winston.

In other news we have now booked our flights to Adelaide. The plan is to go there then drive to Melbourne and up the East Coast. We’re excited to be back on the road again and continue to travel. As usual we don’t really have a plan after our flight to Adelaide…that’s pretty much where the planning ends, so we could end up anywhere. It will be odd after having settled in one place for nearly five months.

For the past week I haven’t had a day job so I’ve just been working in the restaurant for my Indian family and using the spare time to do exciting things like visit nudist beaches. Obviously this wasn’t intentional but the beach was beautiful. I wasn’t quite sure what to do when Naked Nick introduced himself and asked me to lie with him. I felt inadequately overdressed in a bikini, especially when he rubbed sun cream on my back. I spent the next hour trying not to address his testicles.

So the rest of this week is about preparing to leave and enjoying our last 7 days in Sydney. Rob’s throwing us a leaving party. He’s invited 48 people, none of whom we know. “Rob, can we meet all these people before we say goodbye to them?” Lyvette asked him. Apparently not, but it doesn’t matter because everyone loves a good party.

We also need to decide what to do with our copious amounts of coat hangers and throw out some clothes (not that we have many). I’m trying to re grow my toenail which fell off again (this happened after I fell asleep on the bus, missed my stop and had to walk bloody miles to get home) and Lyvette is using her time wisely in continuing her hunt for Winston…

P.s. I’ve included a picture of my toenail. Just for bants.

P.p.s. The white stuff in the corner isn’t puss it’s antiseptic cream (well actually hand sanitiser left over from India, but same same).