At Melbourne airport waiting to board our flight to Kuala Lumpur and through to Nairobi and our safari adventure honeymoon. It feels great and a bit strange to finally be on our way after so much planning and preparation but we’re both finally starting to get really excited! I’ll try and update a bit if I can, but internet cafes might be far apart in the african wilderness. (we didn’t bring our mobiles so contact us via email, this webpage or for emergencies Blake at flightcentre-Elwood)

It’s probably been one of the coldest christmases in Melbourne/Victoria in a long time with the temperature not even reaching 15′C, and clouds and rain, which almost made it feel more like christmas for me…

We have upgraded our technology section this year: I gave Bec and iPod nano and we got money towards a new digital camera which I bought today on the Boxing day sales. We got the new Panasonic-TZ1 and after playing with it for a while today it seems really good and easy to use so hopefully we’ll get a lot of great pictures from Africa to show you all. It’s a fairly small camera with 10x optical zoom, which was the part I really liked, and it also takes descent movies of unlimited lenght and with zoom! I might give you a better review when we get home if I can be bothered

update 27/12
Some parts of Australia actually had a white christmas!!! In the victorian skifields snow fell on both christmas day and boxing day with around 10cm of snow on the ground in some places (more than in many areas of Sweden this year…)

I’ve also added some photos from christmas eave in the Photos section

Less than a week till christmas but with 25′C and sun it’s hard for me to get into the christmas spirit (I’m really starting to get a hang of the kite-boarding though). Christmas eve we will spend in Geelong with Bec’s mums side of the family (as they are german they celebrate christmas eve) but both Bec and I are working the rest of the days (I’m on 24h callout duty) so we’re basically just looking forwards to heading off to Africa on our honeymoon in a week and a half So Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone!

There are lots of bush fires around the country at the moment and summer has hardly begun, today melbourne is covered in smoke from fires up in the mountains east of us. Visibility is down to maybe 500m when it’s at it’s worst and I can feel the smell as soon as I woke up this morning. So far not many houses has dissapeared but aroung 750 000 Hectares (or coming up towards 1.5 million soccer fields) have been burnt down and still afet two weeks the fires continue. They stardet as a lot of individual fires after a thunder storm, (here they have “dry thunder storms” = no rain) but have merged into a few massive fire fronts, see pictures