Australia - East Coast

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On arrival into Cairns airport we were greeted with a friendly "G'day" from the security man, and happily settled into our hostel, the infamous Gilligans. We spent our first few nights in Australia drinking, naturally, and had a great time meeting new people in Gilligan's own nightclub. The highlights of our nightlife had to be playing a crazy game of 'Bogan Bingo', driving round in an open top party bus, and watching too many wet T-shirt competitions! When we weren't hungover we managed to spend a day at the lagoon (in the north lagoon's tend to be favoured over the ocean because of the crazy amount of sharks hanging around), and we did a day trip to Atherton Tablelands. Here we walked through the rainforest, swung on vines, and swam in a couple of freezing waterfalls; singing 'Mysterious Girl' in Millaa Millaa Falls which is where Peter Andre filmed his music video.

We stopped briefly at Mission Beach which is basically deserted, just a huge stretch of empty beach. We went wallaby spotting and saw loads chilling out in a paddock because their homes had been destroyed by the cyclone. We also saw a cassowary, which is an endangered huge bird that can be very dangerous. From here we travelled south and got the ferry across to Magnetic Island. We had a beautiful beach right on the doorstep of our dorm room. The only downside of the hostel was the possum living by the outdoor toilet block, when we went to brush our teeth it scared us and we got some funny looks as we started screaming and running for our lives! At Magnetic Island we also went to the Koala Sanctuary and had a fun day holding lizards, snakes, baby crocodiles and of course cuddle a koala.

Our next stop down the coast was Airlie Beach. We roomed with a couple of Aussies who decided to show us how they do it and cooked us an amazing BBQ by the lagoon. We went on a 2 night catamaran trip round the Whitsundays, on the 'Clipper' a renowned party boat. We had a fantastic group of 52 people and got to know each other very quickly by playing some unusual drinking games on both nights at sea, involving Vegemite, snorkels, oranges and a fancy dress box... However at midnight the music stops, the lights go out but everyone continues to party in the pitch black on the deck of the boat. You get a phenomenal view of the night's sky, I've never seen so many stars, so everyone tends to drink and stargaze for the rest of the night! In the daytime we went to Whitehaven Beach which is the most spectacular beach we've ever witnessed (and we've seen a fair few gorgeous beaches in the past few months!) The sand is amongst the highest quality in the world, pure white and ridiculously fine. It's so soft that it feels like you're walking on flour, you can polish jewellery with it and it apparently makes your teeth 2 shades whiter! So we spent a good few hours playing on the beach, swimming, and forming multiple human pyramids. We did some snorkelling on the Whitsundays, meeting Elvis the extremely friendly giant fish that comes up to the boats to be stroked. We also had some fun going down the slide and jumping from the top deck into the sea, although we had to wear stinger suits because it was just into jellyfish season. When we got back onto dry land we did the obvious thing - an afterparty with everyone on board.

We spent a couple of nights in 1770, named so because it's the year and place that Captain Cook discovered Australia. There wasn't a great deal here but we did a surf lesson in horrendous conditions, the waves were crazy so it was difficult to manoeuvre around however Sarah managed to stand up while Vicky knee-surfed. From here, we bussed it down to Rainbow Beach in order to get across to Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island. We did a 2 night camping trip that involved convoys of 4x4's offroading around the island, going to various attractions. We swam in lovely Lake Wabby as well as the Champagne Pools, which is a part of the ocean that's sectioned off by rocks, unfortunately Lake MacKenzie was closed due to wildfire. We also walked up to the viewpoint Hook Point and saw the famous beached shipwreck. The nights were spent cooking on camping hobs in the pitch black, we cooked steaks and potato salad from scratch for our group, which I must say was delicious! We then got on the Goon (very cheap, nasty boxed wine for those that haven't had the pleasure) and played drinking games before staggering back to the tents. Unfortunately our camp didn't have showers or toilets, at night we were encouraged to wee on the beach and take somebody with us because of the wild dingoes roaming the island. Again we got to know each other very fast by communal weeing together in the early hours of the morning.

We then stayed in Noosa, a chilled out beach town with a very hippie vibe to it. We hung out at the beach and also spent a day visiting Australia Zoo - Steve Irwin's own. This was a fabulous day encountering all of the usual zoo animals as well as the Aussie critters, the best bits were a crocodile show in the croc-o-seum, and sitting down with the really friendly kangaroos that you can stroke, cuddle and feed - they're so mellow it was awesome. We got to watch Steve Irwin videos on the bus there and back and we waved at his wife and children who were working at the zoo. We had one night in Brisbane just to check it out, a pretty nice city but nothing particularly special, in fact the 'haunted' hostel was probably the most interesting aspect of our stay. We went on to the Gold Coast, to Surfers Paradise which is like a mini Vegas full of theme parks and decent nightlife. We weren't in the mood for rollercoasters so we met with our Irish friends from the Whitsundays boat and had a couple nights on the piss. Luckily we had good company but Surfers Paradise was full of a lot of young arrogant Aussies (mostly underage) drinking in the hostel hot tub and shouting from their balconies. We did have one awesome afternoon-evening spent doing goldfish racing. There's 2 channels of water, you choose your goldfish and then race them by blowing bubbles behind them using a straw! Vicky proved pretty pro at this, winning our bar tab for the afternoon and getting to the finals of a $650 jackpot - unfortunately we just lost out!

We crossed from Queensland to New South Wales which meant that the time went an hour forward on our bus journey, arriving into Byron Bay. Byron was a really nice seaside town and we spent our time chilling out at the beach and exploring the town. Sarah did another surf lesson in much better conditions and had great fun, standing up a decent amount of times until the first surf injury occurred with a sprained ankle she soon relied on piggybacks to get up and down the stairs. One of the best features of Byron Bay was the nightlife, with just the 2 of us in a 10 bed dorm we were the hosts of drinking games each night, proving to be extremely messy - especially when the Fraser Island crew showed up! The local bar (Cheeky Monkeys) was pretty small but fitted in every traveller in Byron, leading to the tabletops becoming a dancefloor. This place was pretty fun for the full moon party but not a touch on our Thai experiences.

The next and final stop was Sydney and after a horrific night bus journey in we were looking forward to a bit of downtime in the hostel, this was pretty unlikely though considering the hostel was an absolute dive! Although a shocker of a place we did meet some really lovely people but being a city where people tend to be coming or going we didn't really get much chance to make too many new friends. Our first day where we felt alive enough to venture out we headed to the city centre on a free walking tour, this was really great and would recommend that anyone going to the city went along, we saw all the sights and really got to grips with the place (handy considering it can be a bit bewildering). The other days in Sydney were so sunny, when the sun is out in Sydney it has to be the most gorgeous city, so we did a hell of a lot of sightseeing... mainly the circular quay area which we both fell in love with (opera house/harbour bridge) and Manly beach. At this point in our stay Kirsty (our Bournemouth girl) showed up having moved to the place a few weeks earlier, so with a penthouse suite and a new friend we had a tour up Sydney harbour bridge, a lovely day down by the sea at Bondi and a bit of a party night in Kings Cross involving X factor contestants, Brazilian drummers and a few drinks too many.

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