Behold, a mightly sea serpent!

There was that time when a group of us got lost in the Australian wilderness after dark and thought we might never see the light of day again. By a group of us, we are talking an American girl I had met in the Red Center earlier on the trip, a French girl she had teamed up with along the way, and three Aussie guys who were working in Kakadu National Park in Northern Australia, where this little adventure took place. Us girls had rented a car and decided that road tripping through the enourmous Kakadu park was the thing. When we met the guys, we teamed up and they offered to take us to Jim Jim falls, a beatiful pearl of nature, and frankly that sounded like a really good offer, so we took them up on it.

Getting there was no problem, just a drive and then a hike through steep forrest landscape (on an extremely sloping hillside), then crossing mighty rocks thrice my size and beyond. Pice of cake, right? Well, when you can see, it's doable. When you can't...well...less so.

It took us a few hours to get to the waterfall and by the time we got there, to be honest it was almost getting dark already. That didn't seem to bother my travel mates though, who insisted on a swim. I skipped, sensing we really ought to start getting back if we were to avoid having to find our way back through the pitch black darkness. So I waited for my friends to take a "quick" swim (yeah, right!). I put myself to good use though, guiding them as they swam away from the river snakes I found also inhabited the water. See that's the kind of insight you gain when you - unlike your friends - can stand high on the rocks and see what is actually in the water (didn't someone at somepoint make a joke that in Australia everything is always trying to kill you? That joke seem to have become an internet sensation. Now I understand why).

And this is how it looks it broad daylight. Lovely, when you can see!

But with my help my friends managed to escape the jawsome river monsters and made it safely back to dry land (here's the thing: don't tell them you are guiding them away from river snakes - they tend not to like hearing that!). By the time they had dried up and gotten their clothes back on, it really was getting dark.

We started making our way back, but sure enough, before long it was pitch black dark and we had to feel our way through the forrest, constantly holding on to a tree or crawling over slimey rocks on the forrest ground, since the angle of the forrest ground was something like friggin 90 degrees - ending with a gaping abyss and a two meter drop! We contemplated trying to make our way down to the river instead of trying to find way through the forrest. Most of us decided against it, as they guys insisted alligators inhabited the river, so the river bank was not the place to wander in the dark. I'm not sure the forrest full of ginourmous sized creepy crawlies (because Australia) was such a nice place either, seeing as we had to touch and grab hold of everything to avoid falling over the cliff. But somehow that became our route.

Funny enough, the Aussie guys seemed to be freaking out the most, while my American friend and I, in particular, stayed quite calm (me probably because I was chatting loudly to get my mind off the present scenario, much to annoyance of our French friend who seemed a little more nervous). I don't know how my American friend managed to stay so calm. Maybe she was secretly Lara Croft or something.

We lost track of one of the Aussies, as he single handedly decided that the sloping forrest was murder and instead wandered down to the river. Or maybe we just lost him because it was dark. Who's to say? We did find him again though, when he let out a loud shriek and came jumping back across the ground (who'd have know a guy that size could reach such a high pitch?!). 

Eventually after a few hours, we did make it back to the car, feeling like we had just passed the ultimate test of survival and scored an A+ that would have made Bear Grills very proud of us!

There was that time I was evacuated from my Sydney hostel along with all my fellow backpackers because someone had set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night. To be fair, this isn't actually that unusual an event (that's hostel life for ya!), but I was no less thrilled to be woken up in panic in the middle of the night and escorted outside in the cold (no it is not always nice and warm in Australia, it can get quite cold in the south in winters, and this was August!). So there we all were, lined up outside whatching the hostel staff jumping around to try and get the situation under control. Some of the backpackers had been smart enough to take their duvets with them, so they could keep warm. I hadn't been quite as clever and was shivering from the cold. Still, I suppose I was better off than the group of guys who were standig in the street - for some reason - stark naked, dancing around singing "everyday I'm shuffling...". I guess they must have been drunk. Or just Aussies.

There was that time I went bush wandering by myself in the Australian outback. In hindsight, this probably wasn't very thought through, as the idea that I might get lost and how I would get back if that happened didn't once enter my mind - to be frank, I had time on my hands and just thought "I'm gonna walk out into bush, that'll be fun!". I wasn't really lost while heading out - the big red rock the outback is so famous for stood towering over the horizon and could be seen from just about everywhere (unfortunately, the same couldn't be said about my camp, I would come to realise later), so I just set out, heading toward the rock. That rock didn't look far away at all (hint: it was!). After wandering through the outback for well over an hour, chasing a rock on the horizon that just didn't come any closer (!), I eventually decided to head back to camp. See, this was the point I realised that "hey, where did the camp go?", because failing to realise what even Captain Obvious would have know long before me, my camp didn't tower over the outback the same way the rock did (no s**t, Sherlock), and as such it had gone missing from my view when I turned around to walk back in the opposite direction. Wups!

I really had no choise but to try and make my was back in the direction I believed was the one I had come from. This turned out not to be an easy task though, as every dry tree or bush looks surprisingly like the next one when you don't have a big landmark ahead of you to follow, so losing your direction was more a given than an accident. Eventually, I did find my way back to camp though. Taking only three hours to cover a distance I had covered in about an hour on the way out. No biggie. It had really been part of my plans all along. Seriously.

There was that time I went skydiving in Cairns. This was my second skydive, but because it had been years since my first skydive in Thailand, I was surprised to not really feel nervous at all when the plane left the ground and the jump neared. Unfortunately I would realise that my instructure was quite the sexist jerk, who thought it absolutely appropriate to spend the flight time making snarky sexual remarks in the reign of "I know you're from Denmark, but please try and keep your legs together for the duration of this short flight, he he!"  Really, dude?! It didn't really get any better when I asked him, if we were attached yet (we were doing a tandem jump, after all), and his genius response was "oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?". Not cool, dude, not cool. But I guess you want to be careful not to mess too much with the guy who's responsable for keeping you alive, so I let the remarks slide (hey, once we were free falling he wouldn't be able speak anyway, so nevermind his filthy mouth!).

Once we finally jumped, I had 14.000 feet of open air to enjoy on my way down, giving me about 60 secons of free fall before the parashoot unfolded. Beautiful! And also, the instructure had stopped talking by then. Lovely.