First Visitor to Mareeba!

While our second set of visitors have just left ... back in December, just over 5 weeks after we moved into our house and even before all our belongings arrived, we welcomed out first visitor to our new home here in Mareeba. The house was all a bit upside-down and having arrived from Tanzania with 4 simple suitcases, we were living with all kinds of things begged and borrowed ... but it worked and Nana came to spend out first Australian Christmas with us!

As you can see our Christmas decorations were small, understated and mostly from the local charity shop (whilst our others things were still on a ship on the way!) ... but fun nonetheless!

While we weren't able to answer half of her questions about how things work over here or about where different things are ... we were able to explore with Nana and try and work out the answers together!

Abigail started her month long Christmas holidays just 2 days before Nana arrived and so we had lots of opportunities to explore our new 'home' town and area with her. While Mareeba itself pretty much shuts down for a couple of weeks over Christmas with businesses and shops closing, all the local touristy things were thriving and so we had the chance to visit some of them with her.

We had lots of crafty fun at home too with all kinds of projects ... and lots of water fights to cool down, in the garden, in the sea, at the pool, at a local creek and a trip to Green Island, as it was so stinking hot!

 

But one treat that wasn't available to all, was a chance to go up in a MAF plane over Mareeba, while one of the training pilots was keeping his hours up. It was a short 20 minute ride but gave us the chance to see our new home and the surrounding area from the sky.

We also celebrated our first Christmas here during Nana's stay. After early morning pressies, we took a trip to the park and even spied a couple of kangaroo's off in the distance! Yes, really!

With limited kitchen equipment while we waited for our container ... we went for a more simple option for Christmas dinner! A BBQ, seemed to be very fitting for where we are now living, followed by a meringue tower! Very different from anything we have ever had before on Christmas day and a lot of fun!

It is safe to say, as well as exploring with her, we made lots of memories and we had lots of fun with Nana over our first Christmas in Australia. Early in the new year, Nana flew back home and then we properly started the task of settling into life here in Mareeba!

Time to 'potter' once again!

Since that first slightly off-kilter week (Hello Australia), it's crazy to think that six months have passed ... in that time we have achieved so much.

We've pretty much completed all the practical stuff from finding a house, buying cars, getting driving licenses, enrolling in schools, opening bank accounts ... to making friends, finding a church, joining a gymnastics club and working out the new 'normal', to name just a few!

We've also just about finished that stage of settling where we felt we were literally haemorrhaging money, having had to find everything from clothes pegs to washing machines, from rubbish bins to beds, from herbs and spices to dining room tables and everything else in between. We've been learning how to get a good deal by bartering in the retail stores and finding what else we can get hold of and alter from the charity shops (or Op Shops as they're known here!) ... as the cost of living in a First World Country on a MAF wage takes some adjusting to!

There weren't a lot of options property wise in Mareeba but the one we found was a little gem. It's actually the manse of the Uniting Church (not the church we have settled in) and is quite central to the town but tucked away from the main street. It came part-furnished which was wonderful and put less pressure on us at the beginning and is less than a kilometre from the school we enrolled Abigail in and round the corner from the supermarket (very practical!) and McDonalds (which the girls want to visit WAY more than we actually do!).

At the beginning of February, exactly as planned, our container of belongings arrived ... thankfully it was nothing like the stressful experience we had last time round getting it all to us in Dodoma! So while we've still have bits and bobs to do ... it definitely feels like home now!

 

The girls are loving school and kindy. Abigail is at St Thomas of Villanova which is a Catholic school. It's quite small, which is great for her and in some ways there are many similarities to CAMS in Dodoma, still with quite a strong Christian influence. Naomi's Kindy is on a 5 day fortnight and she LOVES her teachers and all the stuff they get up to! Both the school and kindy are in walking distance and so the girls scoot to and from school, with Jenny, almost every day!

Mark's working hard in the hangar and has even already done a short stint (a week!) in PNG helping out the MAF programme there with a wing modification (more about that in a separate post)! Jenny has also started working in the hangar part-time as the Communications Officer and is enjoying being part of everything that goes on in the hangar and helping others to feel the same as part of her role, because unlike the overseas programmes, MAF in Mareeba is less of tight-knit set-up.

We have also celebrated our first Christmas here, while Nana was visiting (more of that in a different post too!), started getting to know the local area with little trips out as a family and enjoying that settled feeling of just pottering around the house and garden doing little jobs and feeling 'normal' again. That is something that we have been longing for, for the last couple of years with no stresses of things like ... will we get our visas? will we understand enough of the language? when will our container be released? will our MAF base close? which MAF programme will we move to? will our container survive another trip across the world? will the mountain of paperwork we have to complete be enough for another visa? will we all be OK learning a new culture again? will the girls adjust to more goodbyes and starting again?! As you can imagine that list is endless and the majority of the items are now redundant ... a BIG weight off of our minds, allowing for the pottering!

One added bonus since we've been here was the arrival of ZBZ. This was the plane that Mark was part of the team doing the first avionics upgrade in Dodoma and also that he did the last engine change on. ZBZ left Dodoma for Uganda while we were still in Tanzania and earlier this year it flew the mammoth journey all the way from Kampala to Mareeba, so that it can now be used by the MAF programme here in Arnhem Land. Two Swiss pilots, one of whom often used to sit round our table for dinner in Dodoma, flew the 15 legs over a week, so the photo below show plane, pilot and engineer reunited! Exactly a year before all 3 were based in Tanzania, now there is one in Uganda, one in Mareeba and one, soon to be in Arnhem Land!

We needed to get some new family photos recently ...  so what better a backdrop than ZBZ before it heads off once again!