John and Kristin's Aussie Adventures: The Sunny Side of Life

As a whole, Port Douglas was a very different experience from that which we had in Melbourne. It almost felt like living in a different country since the scenery and lifestyle was such a huge departure. After 4 months of the tropical north we have deduced that we are not actually city people and much prefer the laid-back tropical lifestyle and endless days of sunshine. After a while you learn to wait, you learn to make the longer walk, you learn to relax more, you kinda start to care less about certain things. You start to become a lazy Australian (and you get a nice tan) :P

All in all, while the politics of working at Sea Temple could be frustrating to downright maddening at times, the relationships we formed and the experiences we had were once again worth all the trouble.

It's not everyday that you have the Great Barrier Reef as your backyard, after all. We were even fortunate to enjoy a few more trips out (one paid by Sea Temple!) to the reef and saw even more beautiful coral and marine life:

We even saw another shark!

In between our days of golf-playing, rum-making, reef-exploring, star-gazing, and beach-walking, and when we weren't busy at the Temple of Doom (as Sea Temple was often affectionately called) we even had time for a sunset cruise on a luxury catamaran with canapes and a nice bottle of wine (as a gift for John's birthday):

Rough life, I tell ya.

Port Douglas introduced us to a much nicer aspect of Australia, with much nicer people, I might add. In contrast to previous experiences of frustrations with working and living around the same group of people, our Port Douglas/Sea Temple friends were a fantastic, funny, laid-back bunch. From our young Sydney friends with their milk crate furniture, jars of dead animals, self-grown pot plants, and a penchant for dumpster diving, to our Melbournian friend who snatched marine creatures from rivers and put them in his fish tank, to our French friend who lived in a tent (and loved it!), to our Korean friend with her tequila shots and crazy driving, to our friendly Buddhist Kiwi friend with an amazing sense of humor and wit, to our Dutch friends with whom once or twice we would sit, chat, and drink with until 5 in the morning, and to every bonfire beach party or night out at the Iron Bar (though John and I were still old fogies and didn't go out that much) we thoroughly enjoyed our time we spent with them. We had fun to the very end when, on our last day off together, John and I met up with some of them at the resort pool and had a few drinks, lounged around and swam until the front desk manager caught wind and had our manager friend Nathan ask us to leave :)

I'll share with you just a few mementos of those exploits (as most of the time I didn't have my camera), it even includes some karaoke from our last night in good ole Port!