Australia

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Today’s our last day in Oz, it’s flown by!!! We have had a great few weeks and with the ease of travel over here it’s felt like one long beach holiday! We enjoyed Surfers Paradise, although we were surprised by how built up it was when we arrived, not expected the towering skyscrapers, endless shopping malls and theme parks, rather different to Byron Bay! The beach there is beautiful and the spit is great for surfers, especially beginners like us, we had more lessons but think we’re at the point we just need to practice, will have to get the trusty surfboard out at home when we return! We had a particularly random night in Surfers when we went out on the backpackers pub crawl, we were given glow sticks, cheesy school ties and driven on a big party bus into town, it was definitely the closest I’ve felt to being on an Armageddon pub crawl since I left uni! Once everyone was picked up from their hostels we began with bowling which was a complete free for all as everyone was already pretty drunk. We then went round numerous bars and clubs picking up our free drinks and slices of pizza along the way, meeting lots of random people!

After Surfers we drove to Wet ‘n’ Wild, a huge water park where we happily spent the day sailing down slides in inflatable boats and rings, luckily by this point the rain that had been plaguing us had gone and we had a beautiful day. The relaxed feeling didn’t last long as we then drove to Brisbane and arrived as it was going dark, wouldn’t have been too much of a problem until we realised our map didn’t have any of the roads on it and we hadn’t brought directions to our hotel, in fact we weren’t even sure about the name having booked in haste in our last day at Surfers! After a very stressful journey and managing to hack off pretty much every driver in Brisbane we eventually found our hotel. As it was a weekend city break we decided to treat ourselves to a serviced apartment and took great delight in our huge room, balcony and kitchen, they even had a gym, yay! However by far the most exciting thing was that we had our own washing machine and dryer- that’s when you now you’ve been travelling for a while, there should never be a need to be excited about washing clothes!!!

Brisbane was cool; we took ferry over to the CBD, chilled out drinking coffees in the main square, shopped and danced the night away in the evenings! After we’d left Brisbane we headed to Australia zoo which is owned by the Irwin family. It is so much better than most zoos in the UK as you can really interact with the animals and I loved cuddling koalas and kangaroos and the giant tortoises were amazing! The crocs were pretty scary and I’m glad I’m leaving Oz having not encountered one in the wild!

We then headed up to Noosa which is a lovely town and we did some more surfing and chilled out on the beach. Wish we’d had more time there as was a good place to hang out. We then drove up to Hervey Bay as we had a trip booked to Fraser Island the next day. Fraser Island was great, I wasn’t sure what to expect, we had always been going to take a self drive tour bur after hearing one too many negative reports and fearing we’d be stuck with 18year old backpackers and doing all the driving we decided to book a guided trip instead,. We went with Cool Dingoes that were great and it was good to have a guide and learn more information about the island. The lakes, rainforests and many, many miles of beach were amazing and we had a great couple of days. We stayed in cool little lodges and spent the evening playing a ridiculous drinking game which involved impersonating pigs, chickens, singing national anthems whilst doing press ups, hopping up and down and many more ridiculous antics! This was much to the amusement of everyone else in the bar!

We only stayed one night in Hervey Bay on our return as we needed to drive up to Airlie beach for our Whitsundays trip. We slightly underestimated how long the drive would take and spent 10hours on the road and as it went dark we had a very near miss with a kangaroo, good job as after seeing them at the zoo I would have been very sad to hit one!
We took a 2night trip aboard the sailing boat Boomerang around the Whitsundays. The Islands are beautiful and we had a really relaxing couple of days. The second night as we sat watching the sunset with a mug of rose I thought how amazing the trip was and how I’d always remember this when we got home. We met some lovely people on the boat as well.

Airlie beach was great but again we had little time to chill out as we had to head up to Cairns for our boat trip to the Great Barrier Reef, cue another day spent driving! We went out with pro dive for a 3day 2 night dive trip where Jonny completed his advanced open water course. I spent my time leisurely snorkeling and dived on a really amazing section on the reef too. It was a fantastic trip, the reef was amazing and we saw so many different types of fish and coral as you would expect along with sharks and giant turtles, one of whom was 140years old, amazing, they are so elegant in the water and I was amazed to see them swimming past! The boat itself was luxury compared to the Boomerang, instead of having no space and the smallest double bed in the world we had our own cabin and loads of room to relax on the ship. When we returned to Cairns we all went out for a meal which quickly descended into a messy night out after Oscar form the boat ordered a jagaer bomb round- I’d never seen this before and was very impressed with the domino effect the shots made as they toppled into glasses of red bull.

We are now in Cairns airport waiting to fly to Hong Kong for the weekend, Asia is going to feel so different after Oz and NZ!

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