Beautiful one day, perfect the next..

hello! finally got the patience to come back on here and right some updates! (just as well i wrote everything down otherwise i would never be able to remember it all!)


10.11.08



there was no oz experience buses running today so we had an extra day in Hervey Bay. Stuart, Adam, Oliver and I wandered into town to see what there was. Turns out there isnt a lot! It took us ages to find the town center, which is a combination of the heat and the really long, wide roads, everything just seems to take double the time. We went to Red Rooster for lunch, it was agreed that the taste wasnt as good as the pictures make it look. After that we spent quite a while wandering the local toy shop looking at all the millions of toys that ozzie children get these days! After we got back to the hostel we just chilled out in the hammocks for the rest of the afternoon, ate pizza, and socialised with the next lot of people that were about to embark on the Fraser Island adventure!



11.11.08

today the oz bus took us from Hervey Bay to Kroombit cattle station. We decided not to stop at 1770 or Bundaberg (home of Bundaberg rum) as we were starting to run out of cash.


Kroombit Cattle station is one of the oz experience compulsory overnight stops. Its not on the coast, its further west, into the outback, and you can tell. The ground is red, and there is nothing around for miles. There are different activities that you can choose to do here so you can get more of a feel for living in the outback on a farm - but they come at a price. We wanted to do the goat mustering, which is riding around on horseback rounding up goats from the many, many acres of land at Kroombit, but it was too expensive, most of our fellow back packers agreed! We did however, have a go at the shot gun, you got five shots to try and hit it the flying disks. Stuart got five out of five, and I got, well, lets just say I didnt do as well as Stuart! Another thing Stuart could master that I couldnt was using the lasso! (videos soon to come)


One of the included activities was the goat rodeo. For this, you had to get into a team of 3 (we had ollie in ours) think up a team name, all team names had to include something to do with goats, like, goat, kid etc. I thought up the fantastic team name, 'The Goat-ee's" For the goat rodeo, one person had to catch the goat, another tip it and the last had to brand it, then the team with the quickest time were the winners! Oliver was in charge of catching the goat, stuart, tipping it and i was in charge of branding. Our team was given a teeny little kid to catch, the problem with this is that the smaller the goat, the quicker they are! Surprisingly we managed it in 15seconds, and won the goat rodeo, most other teams were getting around 45seconds.



After a fantastic dinner, there was more activities! I had a lot more sucess with the whip cracking, I got the hang of it on my second go, stuart took several more tries. Did you know the sound a whip makes is not the sound of it hitting the ground, but the sound of it breaking the sound barrier? Im learning! The final task of the night was the mechanical bull, which stuart completely failed at and lasted less than a second! (videos to come at some point) Not long after we headed to bed, exhausted.


12.11.08


Today is the longest day on the road with Oz experience, Travelling all the way from Kroombit to Airlie beach, gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, which took 11hours. It felt like it took so much longer because for two hours one of the drivers played ABBA, safe to say the ipod was on straight away. We had two drivers this time round, one who had been doing the job for 6 years called Guido and another called Squatter, and it was his first ever time doing the drive up the east coast. We stopped for a barbie lunch at a lovely little area called Clairview, where there were lots of parrots flying around. It was the first time we had been in the tropics, and you could tell, as it was not only extremely hot, but also extremely humid.

Finally we arrived at Airlie Beach. The drivers had organised for everyone to meet in a bar/restaurant called 'Beaches' and because we were oz experience we got cheap, but very, very nice food, and also discounts on drinks. We decided to make the most of it as it was our last night with travel buddy, Adam, whom we've been traveling with since we left Sydney back in October. After Beaches we went to an Irish bar, purely because Stuart liked the name of it, 'Paddy Shenanigans'. Then we moved on to a place called Mama Africa, which the drivers had said was good, but i thought it was pretty strange, i liked the leopard print toilet seats though!


13.11.08

Adam left around 6am, after we said our goodbyes we went back to sleep and slept till the afternoon, we were both exhausted from our long day the day before. We got the bus and adventured to the local shopping center to get some food to last us for a while, that evening was just spent relaxing in front of the tv, which was in our room, for a change!



14.11.08 / 15.11.08

Today and the next were both just relaxing days, spent by the pool, and Airlie lagoon, which is fantastic, it even has barbeques on the grassy area with a view of the sea. We both think it made us love Airlie that bit more than we already had.

16.11.08



We checked out of our hostel, 'Koalas' nice and early before meeting up for our sailing trip on the yacht, 'Freight Train', I thought it was rather confusing calling a yacht a train, the sun really does get to the Australians heads! We also hired our stinger suits, which you are more than advised to wear because summer in the tropics is jellyfish season, and the box jelly fish is common. The stingers on a box jelly fish sting when it comes in contact with protein, which is found in humans, the poison that it induces can kill you within 12minutes. The suits stop the stingers touching your skin, and therefore not reacting to the protein and you dont die. So there was no way we were going without them!


Anyway, the boat was lovely, the lower deck was pretty cramped but it was alright seeing a most time was spent on deck. You were in barefeet the whole time you were on the yacht. Our first stop was at a bay next to Hayman Island, we put on our stinger suits and went snorkling at part of the Great Barrier Reef for the first time. It took Stuart a while to get used to it but he was swimming about in no time. The coral looked amazing and there were so many different kinds of fish, with so many different colours! We even saw a stingray. The boat stayed at that bay for the night and from the boat we got to see a turtle just casually swimming past. After the sun had set there wasnt much to be done on the boat. Some people were playing drinking games, but because Stuart sometimes gets sea sick, we didnt want to risk it. So instead we got an early night.


17.11.08


It was just as well we got an early night, because we had an early start. Didnt get much chance to wake up before we got to go scuba diving! We chose our boat purely on the fact that you get a free introductary scuba dive with it. The equipment feels extremely heavy our of the water, which is worrying because you think your just going to sink because of the wait the moment you hit the water. Thankfully you dont, the equipment is surprisingly weightless. Scuba diving was really strange, takes a while to get used to seeing all the air bubbles floating up past your face. While we were out diving we saw a big Maori Wrasse, which the diving instructor described as 'the dog of the sea' because it let you pat it, like you would a dog. Shortly after lunch, we stopped at a random bit in the sea to let people to jump in the water to cool down. People were doing backflips off the boat! We didnt really get much sailing done at the Whitsundays because of a lack of wind, it was all motor driven. As the Queenlanders say 'beautiful one day, perfect the next'.


Next stop was Whitehaven beach which is the 3rd best beach in the world, the sand is made up of 97% silica. Stuart and a few of the other guys on the trip flung a rugby ball about in the water for a bit and while they did so they saw a school of baby sharks. We lazed about in the water for a bit - way to hot to just lie on the beach. Although the sand was lovely, it was annoying, because it just stuck to you and because its so smooth its more difficult to get off.


That evening there was a stunning sunset, the colours were amazing, but once again, after the sun went down, there wasnt much to do so we headed to bed. It wasnt long before there was lots of loud cheering and clapping. Stu went out to investigate, he told me to come see quickly. There was wild dolphins swimming and jumping between our boat and the one next to us. It was amazing, they were about a metre away from us at one point. Eventually they went away and it was back to sleep for us!


18.11.08

Today was our last day on the yacht, woke up about 6. Not much happened today, we were aiming to be back to Airlie by 11am so the whole morning was taken up sailing back to the marina. We arrived back on time but we couldnt even handle the heat of the 10min back to the hostel and stopped of at the lagoon to cool down. Once again another Beaches night had been organised, this time by the boat companys so everyone got the chance to meet up again. We went along to prove we werent actually anti social, seeing as we hadnt been drinking or staying up that late on the yacht. It was decided that some of us would go for a barbie the following night. We also bumped into Tom, who we had traveled with on Fraser Island and some others we knew from the oz bus. Before we spent all our money at Beaches we headed back to our room and chilled out with our new room mates, Tori and Paul, both really nice people, and drank goon (really cheap wine) The couple are doing the same kind of thing we are doing, travelling the East Coast. They left on their Whitsunday trip a few days later.



19.11.08

Today was another sleeping day. We found out that everyone else on the boat had got a sleep when they got back to the hostel the day before, but we hadnt, so we were exhausted. We kept our plans and had a barbie up at the lagoon with a few of the others. It tasted amazing, although a seagull did steal one of the sausages.


-thats all for now, ill write more when i get the time to!

oh yeah, and leave us comments, we feel deprived!

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