Alright, so it’s time for an entry from Cairns, the last destination for me this summer. It’s amazing how fast ten weeks can go by. It is Wednesday afternoon and this morning we took our final which completed the last part of the class, so now for the next few days it’s pure fun (not like the last 5 ½ weeks haven’t been though). I’m sitting in my hotel room in Cairns looking out our huge windows which overlook two mountains which run into the ocean, dotted by boats and seagulls competing for fish. The clouds are drifting in the distance and will slowly overtake the peaks of the mountains. The overwhelming sight of the mountains and ocean is so calming, the boats and clouds move by but each morning the mountains remain. I feel like this is the perfect place to end my summer of travels at, and although I’m sad that it’s almost all over, there’s a larger part of me that can’t wait to get home and see everyone again.

So a quick recap of the events that have happened thus far. We had our final presentation for class on Thursday and it couldn’t have gone any better. My group presented on how to provide aid to developing nations and what problems and solutions are facing these countries. We were only supposed to go for about 12 minutes and we ended up going about 30 minutes, but I don’t think the professor minded at all, which is a good thing. As I went through the PowerPoint and talked about all the research we had done, I realized how much I have come to care about this issue over the past summer; I have a feeling my thesis topic is going to be an easy choice. After the presentation, we had the rest of the week to finish up our business in Sydney. That night I went to the Opera House and watched Morrison play Schifrin. It was made up of the Sydney Symphony, James Morrison on trumpet, Ambre Hammond on piano, and Lalo Schifrin conducting. Schifrin is the guy who composed the theme song for Mission Impossible, which yes, they played as the final song for the night. The next day we walked in the morning on top of cliffs for 2 ½ hours which overlooked the ocean and then hung around the city for the rest of the day. On our final day we managed to hit every corner of the Sydney we could and ended up going on a ferry ride to a beach called Manly, we felt we had to go simply because of the name. On the ferry ride back, Dave and I sat outside at the front of the boat. Two minutes in to the ride, it began to rain and everyone deserted us to head inside. Being that it was our last day in the city, we decided to stick it out in the rain. Eventually one other group joined us outside, turns out they were three extremely drunk men (now it was only 6:00pm at this point). We naturally struck up conversation with them and then one of them decided that the view just wasn’t good enough for him. He proceeded to climb over the guard rail, climb to the very front of the boat and swing about the flag pole. One slip and he would have easily slipped off the side and in to the water, but somehow he managed to hold on and eventually was called back inside. Sydney always finds a way to impress me. The next day we were up and at it early and off to the airport, where we later arrived in Cairns.

Cairns is a small (at least in comparison to Sydney) tourist town. We are staying at an incredibly nice hotel (I guess they wanted us to leave the country with a good impression, I’m not complaining) and we are in walking distance to everything in the town. For the first two days, myself and two other guys Dave and James, went around to find a dive company. Seems it’s not too hard to find one, so we ended up booking with a group for Friday to Saturday. We will have a total of 7 dives and one of them will be a night dive. For a guy who had just got his certification and has only dived in muddy, cold quarries in the middle of Pennsylvania; this is going to be quite the experience. We will be living on the boat and hopefully I don’t get sea-sick, we’ll see how that goes. I also found a company that I can rent an underwater digital camera from so I will have some pictures to post as well. Tonight we are looking into trips in to the rainforest and bungee jumping and skydiving, it should be a fun night. Yesterday we went and visited a Sugar Mill which really wasn’t too exciting because they cancelled our tour. However that meant that we had more time to spend at Port Douglas, another tourist spot with an incredible beach. Other than that and our final, we have been doing a lot of ultimate Frisbee (which we added a rugby rule in to which makes the game ten times better, Vaughn and Keith, I’ll have to teach you when I get back) and Volleyball and the pool. It’s been an awesome end to the trip and once again I have some free time to journal and write stuff.

If there’s anything I learned from this trip, well actually there’s a lot of things I’ve learned, but one of those things is that it’s important not to let the busyness and craziness of our everyday lives get in the way of allowing us to spend time on the important things. For me that’s been taking time for prayer, or taking time to write down my thoughts every now and then. Or even just going outside and starring at the stars on a clear night. Some times we forget about our priorities and it’s easy to get mixed up. Even here in Australia, right after I had spent so much time thinking about this in Africa, I managed to forget to take time out of my busy schedule. In some of my earlier blogs I talked about the book that I was reading “This Beautiful Mess,” some times the mess part can get so big and distracting that we forget about the beauty among it. Every now and then God just has to place a big mountain outside my window so I remember. This trip has been full of experiences like that, where God is just placing beautiful and amazing things in my path. Well, it’s soon time for me to go, but I’m sure there will be blogs to come, especially with my schedule over the next few days. I will try to make time to write, see everyone very soon!