Mel and Laura

We travelled up from Cairns for a night and two days to see Cape Tribulation. It is part of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area While there we went on a riverboat tour where our guide pointed out to us and expanded our knowledge on the various different kinds of wildlife that inhabit the area. Most notably we saw two crocodiles; a baby one and a large one that commandeers that particular part of the lake. He's called Scarface for obvious reasons and was probably at least 7 ft long! Pretty amazing. We stayed in a cute hostel for the night and the next day took a walk through the rainforest where we saw snakes and spiders and a beautiful variation of terrain. The snap happy A Level photographer in me got a bit excited and ... read more

We spent a few days between the beautiful Magentic Island and Mission Beach as just the five of us. We basically just relaxed during these days. Our hostel on Magentic Island was amazing. It was like something you'd expect to find in the Bahamas. Everyone stayed in little beach huts and you were literally right on the beach. It also had one of the very few bars on Magentic Island. Free Kayaking (or canaking as we dubbed it - a cross between canoeing and kayaking) was included in our stay so we spent a morning doing that. We went up to the shark nets to see if we could spot any (we couldn't) and toyed with kayaking around the cove to find an apparent nudist beach but decided to spare our eyes and tired limbs. Our ... read more

When we got to our next hostel in Rainbow Beach we went straight to a prep for our following adventure. The next day we were going to be getting on a ferry to Fraser Island. It is the world's largest sand island at 1630 km² and is a World Heritage site. We were put into groups of eleven and these were to be our family for the next three days. Our group consisted our group of five girls, three guys from Manchester, two girls from Essex and a guy from New Zealand who has done a lot of off-road driving (perfect for us as we were about to spent three days in an extended jeep, driving up and down beaches!). They all knew each other and we were all roughly the same age so we got ... read more

We arrived in Byron Bay after another night bus. We'd managed to sleep on this one on account of the many jumpers and make shift pillows we'd bought with us. When we turned up at our hostel early morning our friends were waiting there for us complete with another friend Claire who'd we met and travelled with in New Zealand. Our Hostel the Arts Factory was this really relaxed hippy commune style hostel. It was really open plan with a small lake and hammocks scattered about the place. They also taught digeridoo lessons and did circus tricks at night. There were lots of different options for sleeping, such as a campsite, normal dorm rooms, or a tent-like creation they called a 'pentagon' which is basically like a glorified teepee. We opted for the latter and then ... read more

We got to Canberra at 5am after our first trip on The Greyhound Bus (a hop-on, hop-off bus that runs 24 hours). In the interest of saving money we'd decided to take the night bus to save on a night's accomodation. Unfortunately, we hadn't been prepared for the air conditioning to be blowing full-strength all night and froze the entire way (we were in shorts and had no warm jumpers with us on the bus). We, therefore, didn't get much sleep. Hopefully we can blame this for what happened next. When we were in Melbourne we bought a really cheap second-hand Australia Lonely Planet, again in the interest of saving money. It was five years old but we didn't think this would be a problem. When we got to Canberra we consulted said guide book for ... read more