Tom's Oz Travels

Ouch…14 hours on a bus is a long time! It wasn’t the best start to the trip but to make it worse when we got there it was absolutely tipping it down. All through our breifing it was raining stupidly hard and we were warned to expect the worst.

But they couldn’t have been more wrong. When we got up (stupidly early…again!) the next day was a lovely day. We had met our team (Team D) the day before when we went through the briefing but we hadnt chatted that much. At the start there was 3 English guys including me and Rich, three irish girls, a german guy and an indonisian girl.

We first had to pack the car up and check we had all the equipment (and obviously stock up the alcohol). That took a while, we had some warnings and were taught how to put the car in 4wd etc. There was 6 cars in total, split up in to two groups. Each group had a lead driver who was our guide.

After all that was done, at the start it was looking like it was going to be a bit of a long few days, the indonisan girl had got an eye infection the day before but still decided to come….to the largest sand island in the world. Go figure, but when we were there it got even worse (supprise supprise) so her and her german boyfriend were dropped off in a hotel in the island and we started again. We quickly became the car everyone wanted to be in, extra space, awesome people and a nice loud stereo linked up to an ipod. Score.

We named our 4×4 the venga-bus, with the theme tune played quite a bit. I’ll give you an example of what it was like in our bus:

In our car was myself, Rich, Mick from Liverpool, Rosine, Joan and Aisling from Ireland and it couldnt have been a better group of people. We got a lot of comments from other cars how theirs wasn’t as fun as ours .

Driving around the island was so much fun and everyone in our car was a driver so it was good. When we got there we set up our camp and cooked ourself a nice steak dinner before drinking the lovely lovely goon all night long. Not the best feeling when we woke up the next day but a stop-over in Eli Creek (a fresh water creek on the island) for a quick hangover cure dip soon fixed that. Next stop was Lake McKenzie a fresh water big lake with the same type of sand that you find on whitehaven beach.

Then we went up to Indian Head to climb up and have a look:

Then from there to the champagne pools. They’re named that because when the water splashes up against the rocks it creates bubbles that look like a bottle of champagne being popped. Although the pools claimed my sunglasses it was a lovely area.

I have a lot more to say about fraser but i’m on a public computer and my times running out so i’ll finish it another day. But just a quick picture of our team D and the venga bus. Seriously such a great time, very hard to beat this week!

From Magnetic Island we had a 6 hour bus ride down to Airlie Beach. No dramas on the bus and the time went pretty fast, although still no DVD.

Airlie Beach itself is really small, but has our possibly the greatest happy hours of all time. The hostel we were staying in had a happy hour between 4pm and 8pm ($3 vodkas and $8 jugs of beer) and next door was from 3:30pm till 10:30pm. The best way to pass the two days we had till our boat.

As with a lot of places we’ve gone to on the east coast, Airlie Beach has a lagoon that you can stay by/swim in for free, so we spent a bit of time there, then chilled out for the night. We planned to sit and watch the last day of the Adelaide test but we won it a bit too early on in the day so we had no choice but to wait for the happy hour to start. 4pm came around and we went to the bar, it’s supprising how easily $3 vodka oranges go down! But it was a really good night.

But none of it compares at all to the boat itself. We went down to the marina at 2pm the next day and picked up our booze for the boat, a crate of beer each and a box of goon. I really can’t describe how much fun the boat was. The first day we sailed out to our first sleeping point, 4 hours in to the whitsunday islands. There are 74 islands in total in the whitsundays and they are all beautiful. When we got on the boat the weather was stunning, a running theme which we’re happy to continue with. The Skipper or ‘Lachie’ gave us our briefing and told us how for the past 100and something days they’ve had solid rain. Result! The weather kept up for the entire trip too .

We cracked on with the beers straight away and got a bit jolly meeting the other 20 people on the boat. As we reached our first nights resting point early we were allowed to go for a swim and on a small sand island to watch the sunset, so we donned our lovely stinger suits and went ashore.

I have so many pictures I want to post on here, but i’m on a public computer and it’d take ages, but this is the sunset we saw:

Not the clearest picture ever, but you get the idea. After that, a couple of beers in the sea and back to the boat for a bit of a BBQ and more drinking.

The second day is a day i’ll never forget for the rest of my life. Amazing, woken up at 6:45 (that bit really isn’t amazing but..) and we had some breakfast. After that we got our snorkeling gear and headed over to our first snorkelling point. I can now officially say i’ve snorkled the barrier reef and it is amazing. So many fish around, whilst we were swimming the guy who took us out was throwing fish food around us so they’d circle around and bump in to you. There was even a fish bigger than my arm that we could stroke as it went past. So much fun. And to top things off, once we got back to the boat we were told due to the weather / tide / wind we could go to a place they get to at the very most go 10 times a year! It’s very shallow so you see the colours of the coral straight up, but really the best part was that we got to snorkle and swim with wild turtles. Get in!

Can you believe this is the sea?!:

After the morning of snorkelling we went off to whitehaven beach, aptly named with it’s perfectly white sand. I can’t describe how good the beach / water looks so have a picture instead:

This is a lovely ‘treat’ we saw on the walk to the beach, litterally the size of my hand. Eww..:

The sand is apparently 85 silicon and doesn’t stick together, and if you’re so inclined you can even brush your teeth with it. But it’s not the nicest taste going! It squeaks as you walk over it.

The second night was incredibly fun. I met one of my new favorite people in the world, an Icelandic guy called Antone. I’ve officially heard the best line of all time. We were talking about Iceland and the various things people there eat / do etc and he mentioned that they eat Seal. And so, as i’m sure most people would ask I asked him what it tasted like. Without any smirking/irony or anything his reply was “Seal tastes a bit like Whale” and from that “They both taste like dolphin”. That was it, I was rolling on the deck laughing for the next 20minutes. We stayed up late with a few english guys, irish girls and the icelandic guy.

The last day we just had a bit of a snorkle and sailed back to the marina. Next stop rainbow beach for our 4×4 self drive tour….a 14hour bus ride away!

Right, i’m going to put up a seperate post per ‘adventure’ we’ve been on since my last post. Starting with Magnetic Island.

Magnetic island is about a 20min ferry ride from Townsville and is absolutley stunning.

We stayed at base hostel which was a really nice hostel, the only let down that our room wasn’t air conditioned, where as some others where, and the humidity and heat there was insane.  The water is a massive tease around the island as it’s clear and green but due to an insurge of jellyfish we werent allowed in even in the seductive tight licra stinger suits. But the pool at the hostel made up for it.

We had three nights on the island and a few days to explore, the first night we were there though, we were tired and didn’t get up to much. On the second day we hired scooters to nip around the island, incredibly fun. Rich on the other hand had a bit of a falling out with his scooter and they werent the best of friends. 10mins in to our first trip we stopped to get a drink. Rich didn’t quite put the stand on correctly and the scooter fell over with the seat open snapping it right off *whoops*.

A bit of playing around with it and locking it in to place we carried on. We toured the island and saw the various beaches etc. Again, Rich fell out with his scooter and whilst kick starting it didn’t quite hold the brake down enough and sent the scooter shooting off towards a jet ski rental shop.

After this, we went off to do the a walk up to the top of the island, but after another little argument with his scooter rich decided not to come. Luckily as I started, a Canadian girl from our room was there with some English people ready to do the walk, so I did it with them. It was a beautiful walk and takes you right round showing you the views of the island. And even better, there were a lot of wild koalas around .

Theres a sign at the start of the walk that warns you to look out for Death Adders, but we didn’t see any.

That night we played in the bar olympics and chatted with other people staying there. The next day we just chilled out in the pool chatting to everyone else, annoyingly we couldn’t find anywhere to watch the cricket apart from a petrol station, and you can’t really sit there for a day. The next day we got the ferry back to townsville and boarded our bus to Airlie Beach where we were to grab our whitsundays boat.