Advertisement
Published: July 16th 2009
Edit Blog Post
In Cairns everyone told me that as I move down the coast it’s just going to get colder, but they were wrong. Airlie Beach is boiling hot. I felt like I was baking under the sun here.
The town itself is kind of like Cairns but a lot smaller. The whole town is basically one main street with just a few shops and hostels that run along it. There’s some residential areas behind the main road, but that’s about it.
The hostel that I stayed in is called Beaches and was another nice hostel. Clean, semi-decent kitchen and every room had a TV. On my first day there my roommates and me discovered that The Simpsons are on everyday at 6, which makes for some good chilling after a day down at the lagoon and before dinner.
The ride down to Airlie from Cairns was kind of brutal, but also not so bad. It’s a 11 hour bus ride, but I took an overnight bus which made it much more bareable. I had a couple of drinks with my friends in Cairns and then headed for the Greyhound bus stop, got on the bus at 12:30am and slept
most of the way down.
When I first got to Airlie Beach I walked into my room and there were a bunch of English people hanging out there. We started talking and found out that a bunch of us were going on the same sailing trip in 2 days, so I lucked out with getting that room. We spent the rest of the afternoon just baking in the sun down by the lagoon before making some dinner and then having a good night of drinking.
The next day I didn’t have much to do again so we went back down to the lagoon and I worked on my tan. I was getting really close to finally losing the farmers tan that I came down with.
The day after that we left on our Whitsundays sailing and snorkeling trip. That was amazing! We got down to the boat for 1:30 in the afternoon and boarded the “Habibi” which we found out stands for “my darling”. Once everyone was aboard and had a bed on the boat we spent the afternoon sailing and drinking in the sun. We finally dropped anchor just before the sun went down, and it
goes down fast there. Once it was down though you could see the most amazing stars. Because we were out in the middle of an ocean there was no light around us ruining the sky for us. The only time I had seen stars that nice was the night the entire eastern seaboard of North America had a blackout. We had a great dinner and then, again, spent the night drinking.
In the morning we woke up pretty early had breakfast and then set sail again. Our first stop was a beach called Whitehaven Beach. We took the little raft from the boat over to the beach and spent a few hours playing and hanging out there. It’s an incredible beach. The sand is pure white. We were told that the sand is called silica, which is very pure fine sand, and this beach was 98.9% silica. Apparently NASA took sand from this beach to make the lens of the Hubble telescope.
Next we sailed for an hour to go snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, which covers the whole Whitsunday Islands area. The water there was so clear and you could see so many fish, many of
which I’d never seen even in pictures before. I took some pictures with a disposable underwater camera there, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get them developed until I hit Sydney. Then we had lunch and went on another bit of a sail for an hour to a next dive spot. Once again I was amazed by what you could see there.
Some people had already gone back to the boat while I was still in the water and were shouting that they could see whales swimming off in the distance. I swam as fast as I could back to the boat. I was kicking so hard my leg cramped up. I got to the boat and was climbing aboard just in time for everyone to say, “you just missed them.”
We then sailed a bit further, dropped anchor, had dinner and spent the night having some drinks and playing games. We woke up early the next morning and headed back to Airlie Beach.
The sailing trip was awesome and I made some great friends from all parts of the world on that boat. Most of them were other backpackers, but there was one family
with their 16-year-old son on the boat from San Francisco, but even they were pretty cool. The kid had a Toronto Blue Jays hat, so we bonded.
I then spent one more night in Airlie Beach with some friends I had met there and the people from my boat. My last day I spent back down at the lagoon before I had to grab another overnight bus at 6pm to Rainbow Beach where I’m now sitting.
Tomorrow I’ll be going to Fraiser Island where everyone moving north has told me they had the best time ever. I’ll let you know how it goes soon.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.096s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 13; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0445s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb