Thursday, March 19, 2015

Hello Australia

It's hard to believe that we arrived here 5 months ago. In many ways that time has FLOWN by but we accomplished so much, especially in those first few weeks that it seems like forever ago now!

After a completely uneventful journey, 3 flights (Dar Es Salaam-Dubai-Perth-Cairns) we arrived in the early hours of October 10th to start our next big adventure. We're very grateful for the in-flight entertainment which kept the girls completely amused the whole way and on arrival we obviously looked like we fitted in, because going through duty-free in Perth we were greeted with "Welcome Home! Hope you had a nice holiday!" (Little did they know!)


Those first few days were a bit of a blur as we struggled to adjust to the time difference, which was 7 hours ahead of Tanzania. However on both days at the weekend we were able to catch up with families who live in Cairns. One who work for MAF here (having previously lived in Dodoma before our time there!) and another who we've known for years, it was great to have the chance to catch up properly after quite a long time!


Mareeba (where we live now) is about a 50 minute drive up through the Kuranda Range and rainforest and then inland across the Tablelands (up in the distance of this photo!), so on the Monday, after a few days to adjust we headed up to look at schools and houses ... and also to meet up with another family that Jenny knew from her Dodoma days the first time round who are now serving MAF here. 


By lunchtime though, it was clear that something wasn't right with Mark and so a trip to hospital was in order to find out what was wrong. (We were already grateful for the medical services that would have been much less accessible had we been in Tanzania!) We were then sent back down to a different hospital in Cairns with more equipment where Mark was being tested for fluid/blood clots/tumours on his lungs and where the girls had to leave him late at night hoping that he would come home safely in the morning.


Thankfully it turned out to just be fluid (pleural effusion), which while excruciatingly painfull, was not life threatening and Mark was returned to us in a taxi at 4:30am the next morning but was really sick for the next few days. Our well laid plans to find cars, houses and sort out the endless paperwork that comes with arriving in a new country just had to wait. (As an aside, at his follow-up appointments and x-rays several months later, he was given the all clear once again!)

By the end of that first week, we'd restarted the settling process, albeit at a slower pace and bought a car, registered some of our paperwork and secured a place at school for Abigail (among other things!). But by the Sunday we decided to give ourselves a break from it all and did something just for fun and completely touristy, a trip on the Skyrail and Butterfly train, above and through the rainforest.







It was just what we needed and we lots of fun together. The photos above speak for themselves. Not quite how we'd envisaged our first week to go but you just can't plan these things!