For those of you who don’t know, this is Bella. She is the solitary living creature on this earth who depends on me for life. Poor thing. Over recent months, Bella has become even more temperamental than usual. She’s always been a drama queen (I wonder where she gets that from?) but while previous dramas have usually involved her escaping (despite her home being the rodent equivalent of fort knox) now it’s the opposite. She’s taken to stopping movement all together. Now even the smallest change in temperature sends her into hibernation. Or as we like to call it ‘eventual death’. Yep, Bubs is the Britney Spears of hamsters. If you don’t give her attention, she curls up in a ball and plays dead and you wonder how long it’ll be until her dreams become reality.

See hibernation isn’t very good for hamsters, so I’ve spent a lot of time cooing, placing her by radiators and trying to make her lick drops of water off my fingers. Bella has been in and out of hibernation for the past few weeks, causing me and my housemate to wonder how long she had left…but yesterday – by moving her to the kitchen table, where apparently the temperature is a bit more to her liking – she finally came back to life. For how long? Only time will tell. At just over 2, she’s an old lady now.

You’d never know it from the way she plays up for the camera, though, would you?

I promised I’d talk about Cairns to round off the ‘Gemma went to Australia and all I got was this lousy blog post’ fandango. So here goes…

Cairns was probably the best place we stayed in terms of the sheer amount of stuff we did and saw. As it was our last destination, we’d planned to relax and we did spend a fair amount of time in the pool at the hostel (yes, our hostel had a pool!) and watching really bad films while the rain poured down outside. But we also did so much.

Our first trip was to Kuranda, via the skyrail, a huge cable car that goes up through the rainforest to the village at the top. Jo had organised this day specifically so she could take me to the butterfly sanctuary at the top, but to be honest the butterflies almost paled in comparison compared to the trip up and back down again. Going back, we went on the Kuranda scenic railway, which you can see in the picture above. We pushed to boat out to go Gold Class, which meant free champagne to sip as we watched the world (and the waterfalls) go by. If you ever go to Cairns, you absolutely have to do this trip.

Finally, there was the biggie. The big boat trip to the Great Barrier Reef. I knew we were going to have a good day when one of the crew greeted us with “G’day my little ocean princesses”. After three days of on and off rain we got the one gloriously sunny day, and it was fantastic. We’d originally planned to just snorkel – both of us are pretty proficient – but when they started talking about diving, we just thought to ourselves ‘when will we ever be here again?’ and had to give that a go too. Obviously since it was my first dive, I was only 6 metres down and I spent most of that time trying not to kick myself to the surface (oops) but once I settled into it I did see some amazing stuff. Sadly no reef sharks made an appearance, but we did see a sea turtle (You can almost sense them looking up at you and thinking ‘duuuuuuude’), stingrays and every fish you can imagine. I also stroked the inside of a giant clam, which I doubt many people can say they’ve tried.

Now I have the post-holiday grumps. And writing about it doesn’t help. So I’m going to shut up now…