Chillin'

Saturday July 7th

We deliberately didn't do much today, given that we were tired and given the temptation to rush straight out on a trip to the barrier reef. Instead we unpacked the cases a bit and found our feet, quite literally in Ella's case because we finally give in and bought her a pair of Crocs, which she's modelling in the first photograph. I hear the kids in the UK are wearing them this summer (which is surprising because they're a bugger for letting in water), but the Aussie kids have been wearing them for years.

The clothes in our suitcases felt even more damp in the context of a nice dry hotel room so I draped them wherever I could find space in the hope they'll dry out enough for us to wear them over the next few days.

We had a wander along the esplanade at lunchtime, through the touristy market selling an assortment of brazen Australiana, including canvas bags with aboriginal prints and hand-crafted glass necklaces and baby clothes with prints of kangaroos all over them. Then we stopped for a while at a water park on the seafront where Ella went splashing around with the locals, a significant number of whom were aboriginals or Torres Strait Islanders - not a situation she'd find herself in in the uber-smart eastern suburbs of Sydney but a situation I like because I think aborigines are beautiful and I could look at them all day. The kids are canny though because even with my long-distance lens they seemed to know when I was about to capture them and managed to look right down the camera almost every time.