Day 10 Back to Christchurch today! We’ve already done most of the cheap options available in Christchurch, so it would have been good if we could have skipped it but never mind. We arrive in the afternoon and after getting some supplies in, we head over to the local museum. Not usually our cup of tea, but our bus driver told us it is meant to be really good, and it’s FREE. The museum is actually really good and there are lots of things to see. Greg is delighted when he comes across a speedway section edicated to the Kiwi speedway [View Full Entry]

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Day 1 - Sunday 28th June 2009 - Christchurch Woke up to the sound of someone incessantly buzzing the flat door at 5am today, and just as I am about to go crazy and shout to them to give it a rest, I realize it is our taxi driver for the airport! I had set my alarm for 4.30am but must have slept through it and have visions of Tasmania all over again… We run around like crazy and grab our suitcases- no time to wash or even brush our teeth, and it’s probably just as well that we both slept [View Full Entry]

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Time to leave Airlie Beach and head for the Outback. We leave the hostel at 10am and make our way to Mount Surprise (roughly a ten hour drive) As we leave Airlie, we meet Stefan from our cruise and say goodbye to him as we head up north. En route, I make a phone call to a working backpacker hostel in Innisfail, and shock horror, they advise us they have work for us starting this Monday. Good news as we could do with the exrtra cash but we’ll see what happens. As we make our way inland, our first stop is [View Full Entry]

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As we arrive in Cairns we decide we need to look for work asap as we are running out of money. Greg gets offered a few dj shifts in a nightclub and I have an interview with the Hilton, but it is clear we are unsure whether Cairns is for us. The weather is gorgeous and sunny, but there is not a great deal to do in the city itself. We also felt that the road trip from Sydney was such an awesome experience, that when it came time to find work in Cairns, we had ran out of energy and [View Full Entry]

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Day 16 Get up early doors to catch our boat, The Avatar for our 3 day 2 night Whitsunday Island Tour. The Whitsundays are a group of 74 Islands located on the Great Barrier Reef, off the east coast of Northern Queensland. We manage to get a reasonable sleep even although there was some idiot playing his guitar until 2am. We arrive at the marina on a beautiful winters day, with the mercury reaching approximately 26 degrees, and are ready for our adventure. After a spot of lunch, we head to our first snorkeling spot. We are told this is merely [View Full Entry]

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Mackay - Airlie Beach via Cedar Creek Falls We wake up early today as we have two skylights in our room without any curtains covering them, so it proves impossible to sleep once the sun rises. I managed to get quiet a good nights sleep and would have slept right through if it hadn’t of been for Greg sleep talking saying “We are going to go on loads of big rides tomorrow.” Have a bit of a freaky moment in the hostel when Greg spots a guy in our hostel who had been watching the Rangers v Dundee Utd game next [View Full Entry]

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Rockhampton - Mackay The Queen’s birthday today, not that I would have ever known, apart from the fact it is advertised everywhere, and for most Australians it is a public holiday. So let’s start off with a morning riddle. What do you do when you have a stomach full of meat from the night before? Well, pile more meat on top of it of course! We have a sausage sandwich for breakfast and it sits there like a lead balloon. Back on the road again, feel like the littlest hobo at the moment - “Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down, [View Full Entry]

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Hervey Bay - Rockhampton A long drive again as we drive 380km from Hervey Bay to Rockhampton. The journey nearly doesn’t start at all after Greg whacks the car against a high kerb on the way into the supermarket car park. In typical Nikki style, I take a bit of a strop as I panic Greg has wrecked the tyre and we will have to buy a new one. Luckily it is okay, and we continue on, albeit in silence for the first hour as I try to calm down. Things get a bit hairy for poor Trixiebell as we get [View Full Entry]

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Day 10 The sun is shining this morning and it is really hot so we take full advantage to top up the fading tans and head down to Hervey Bay beach. The tide is out so we stroll along the sand and see armies of little blue crabs skittering along the beach. As soon as you get close to them they disappear down into holes in the sand. There are loads of little rock pools too with fish in them- I try to find nemo but he must be sleeping or something. All this sunbathing makes us thirsty and there’s nothing [View Full Entry]

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We are up and out of the caravan for 7.30am this morning so we can go and hand feed dolphins at the local bay. I am a bit apprehensive that they will actually appear, but sure enough when we get there, there are 3 indian pacific dolphins gliding about in the shallow water, about 3 metres from the beach. There are a few other people standing in the shallow water with the dolphins so we climb in too, even though it is pretty cold! The dolphins swim by about 1 foot in front of us and we can see all the [View Full Entry]

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