Hey everybody!

The last month was absolutely amazing and probably the best month on that exchange…so far!

At the beginning of the month I had school holidays, so it was a perfect start. I had holidays for two weeks and it was amazing. I stayed in Forster for the first few days and spent a lot of time on the beach.

I went surfing on one day and as I looked to the left, I saw a whale jumping out of the water. That was unbelievable, since I never thought that whales would be that close to where I surf.

On the next day I decided to go on a whale-cruise and it was so much fun. I really want to do it again someday, because it was such an awesome experience and the boat was so close to the whales. I took more than 300 photos (mainly of whales and dolphins) on that day.

The only bad thing were the Asian tourists that got sea sick and had to throw up.

I went to Woolgoolga in the second week to go surfing and it was probably one of the best weeks in my life. Surfing and skating pretty much every day! I stayed with two families that also have got kids (Jess Portsmouth and Ryan Williams) that are currently on exchange with Rotary, so it was a really relaxed atmosphere.

I already stayed at Ryan´s family on the district tour, so I already knew them pretty well. His dad had just come back from Japan the day before I came to their house, so he was really keen for surfing, which was perfect for me.

We usually had a morning surf, then had breakfast and a cup of tea in town, then went back to their house (which is next to the beach) and had another surf and then had some dinner and watched some surfing DVD´s afterwards.

Ryan´s parents told me on the district tour, that we could go camping on the beach (because they knew that I really wanted to do that someday) whenever I would come back to their place and so we drove to some place in the bush, left the car there and then went hiking till we came to an amazing spot where we set up our tents. Although I´m from Austria and have seen many good places to camp, I´ve never seen such a good one before!

The hike was absolutely beautiful because we could see the ocean all the time and there were hardly any people. We had to put our 20kg backpacks on our heads and cross a 1.50m deep river at one part of the hike, so it was also really exciting!

We could see a bush fire a few kilometres from our tent at night. That was also a new experience for me.

On the next day we walked back to the car, drove back to Woolgoolga (and almost hit two kangaroos) and then we went surfing again. At the end of the week I had rash pretty much all over my body, so after I returned to Forster it took my skin a few days to recover.

Back in Forster I started my Surf-Live-Saving training again and it still keeps me quite busy. But it´s a lot of fun and I really enjoy it.

The next thing that made me quite happy was a big skateboard-competition called "King of the Krater". It was announced for weeks and was a pretty big and well organized event with live-bands and all that kind of stuff.

I competed in the A-Group and since all the other competitors were really good, I didn´t expect too much. Anyway, I had some good runs and somehow managed to win the competition, so I was pretty stoked about that. The Mayor of Forster gave me my prize and then they took some photos of me for some newspaper.

I´m staying at my current host family for another week and then I´m leaving to one that lives right next to the beach, so it´s a perfect possibility for me to get better at surfing!

I guess that´s it for now!
Kevin