Boat in harbour and Australia Day

It was a surprise one afternoon to come back to the village after a trip to the bush, and find a nice, white shiny boat in the harbour! It’s not often that there’s a boat anchored there.

It was a charter for surfer tourists. They stayed for a few days, travelled south and anchored again for a couple of nights on their way back north. I met the guys and the boat captain invited me over for dinner with them all on Australia Day. It was so amazing – who would have imagined that I would have an Australia Day BBQ with a bunch of Aussie blokes (and one woman, the captain’s wife) while out in the village! It was a great meal too – not your sausage and hamburger BBQ, rather steaks, fish and lobster tails!! Wasn’t the timing great!

It also looked really pretty at night with the boat lights reflecting on the sea. It’s hard to get a good photo at night, but I thought this one wasn’t too bad (taken from the beach).

Two special days

The 25th of January was ‘Burns Day’ and 26th of January was ‘Australia Day’.

At Ukarumpa, the Australians got together and celebrated Australia Day a day early, on the 25th. We had a BBQ and hung out together. There was a game of cricket happening too, but I just sat and talked with people. On the actual Australia Day, the 26th, my Christmas parcel from my family arrived finally! So Australia Day became Christmas Day for me again. I was glad that my parcel came safely in the end.

Burns Day is a Scottish thing, remembering the poet Robert Burns. I decided to have two people over for a ‘Burns supper’, which is usually a meal with haggis and mashed potatoes and Burns poetry recital. The two people I invited aren’t Scottish, but they have lived and studied in Scotland.

I made a haggis x meatloaf, mashed potato and sweet potato and cooked some peas. I read out the poem ‘Address to a haggis’ when I served the haggis, and later I recited the first stanza of ‘To a mouse’. You can find the words to these if you do an internet search.

Here’s our Burns Supper: