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What Farrah Did Next

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Hello everyone!!

This is my last email to you from Australia! Im afraid that I have decided now to go home and face English weather, doom and gloom 🙁 But at least its almost Spring and the clocks go forward soon 🙂  Have thoroughly loved my time in Oz and the last 3 weeks have been just bloody amazing! I have spent time in Perth with my old school friend Ben and his lovely lady Kris, met up with another old friend, Tracey who moved out here and is now married with kids, let Andy and Frank look after me, been kidnapped by drag queens (er yeah Im in recovery as I write hahaa) and seen parts of Australia many Aussies have never seen!

First of all I made the decision to stay and make use of my working visa. Unfortunately, despite many cups of coffee, phone calls and me practically forcing my way into production companies for a ‘chat’, TV work is extremely thin on the ground in Perth. Yep, I could have gone to Sydney, where a friend gleefully managed to land a top job within days of stepping off the plane, but in my eyes, starting again in Sydney just wasn’t something I felt 100% about – its a big city and learning to make friends again, build contacts up from scratch, etc… I just didnt feel it was right for me right now when I do it so much in London and I just felt more comfortable doing that in Perth but Sydney is TV central…However, right at the 11th hour I managed to land a shooting gig on a zombie movie and luckily my availability fitted in with them so yippee, I have Australian experience to slap on my CV as well as stuff covered in green body paint and strawberry jam. Yum!

Due to lack of work I decided to be creative with the time I planned to carry on in Australia. I decided that staying in Australia indefinitely by means of getting a day job wasn’t what I wanted to do so rather than sit around waiting for work in the time Id given myself, I headed off to the Outback! Yep, almost 2 weeks messing about in Alice Springs, camping out under the stars without a tent in Uluru and then living underground in Coober Pedy. A very fun experience. Alice Springs was full of flies and has a dry river running through it! I made some great friends in my hostel with whom I went out partying, culminating in being thrown out of Lasseters Casino and so returning to the hostel and making use of a cheap bag of goon (errrr!) which resulted in sore heads the next day. Many Aboriginals live in the Alice so I took the opportunity to use the Cultural Centre and find out more about Australia’s indigineous people but somehow ended up learing more about the Muslim Cameleers who came from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to creat the Ghan railroads that run through the middle of Oz. I also walked right under the web of a golden orb spider and they are bloody HUGE!!!! It didnt scare me although it did freak me out – its so big, I was just in awe of it, its about the size of my hand. Seeing it ensured that any other spiders I saw from then on would not be a problem because they’d never be as big as that one, euuurrrgghh!

My trip to Uluru was totally amazing. I slept out in a sleeping bag in the middle of nowhere, had ants crawl on me, mosquitoes bite me, frogs jump on me, wind howl at me, rain pour on me… and I loved it!! There were some girly girls in our group who didnt want to pee in the bushes, moaned a little about staying in a creek with no facilities and slapped full make up on at 5.30am. They were really nice but they really stood out – the rest of us just got on with it! We did stay in some campgrounds so we had access to kitchens and showers and we all made dinner together every night and Im proud to say that I now have a great little group of friends who I hope to see again when we’re all back in Europe.

Uluru has real holy significance to the Indigineous people but it wasn’t until I did a 10km walk around the base did it really hit home how spiritual it was. Yeah you see pictures of it all the time but not until you get there does it take on meaning. We watched sunset and sunrise over the rock, hiked through Kings Canyon and Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) and had some very crazy fun in Coober Pedy where Opal Miners have made a killing! We ended our trip through the red centre in Adelaide and with my new friends went to see some of the Adelaide Fringe Festival. I did plan to meet up with Craig the rockstar and Lili from my earlier visit but we both ended up being so busy!

“There’s big rock in the middle of Australia? You’re shitting me!”
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=230372&id=535680087&l=6f4ef4f9f6

And so back to Perth to get ready for the return to England. I have thought and thought about staying on but my reluctance to go to Sydney and lack of work in Perth doesnt give me a heap of reasons to stay here especially when I am running incredibly low on funds and am hitting my last $122 as I write – Of course there are a number of people and things in England to come back to!!! – I have made some tremendous friends here, experienced some really magic and special things, revisited other friends and discovered  how hospitable and laid back the culture is here and for that, Im so grateful, you all know who you are. Im sad to come home and have had many propositions from the gorgeous gay friends I have made offering marriage so that I dont have to come home (hahahaha) and as my beautiful drag queen friend Maddie told me…”Just click your heels together and think of us…you’ll be back”…

And so people, that is the end of my travelling for now but as always, watch this space…
Farrah xx