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Published: January 20th 2008
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We started the next leg of our journey on a hot sunny day when we left Brisbane on the way to Noosa, about 1 hour and half drive north. On the way we did the Steve Irwin pilgrimage to Australia Zoo, which is located down the renamed Steve Irwin way!! We are not a big fan of zoo's but its just one of those places that you have to visit especially as we were driving past, and it gave us the excuse to go around saying "Crikey" all day!!!! We saw the crocs, snakes, kangaroos etc... they also had a tiger enclosure with a couple of tiger cubs about 6 months old... very cute but glad to be on the other side of the glass! We went to the Crocoseum to see the croc show were they brought out a few crocodiles which they teased with food... Terri Irwin was the presenter of the show on this day which we didn't expect. It wasn't quite the spectacle we thought it would be, but perhaps we had built up our expectations too much after seeing Steve Irwin on the Discovery Channel many times...
After leaving Australia Zoo we took the scenic
route through the Glasshouse mountains instead of going straight up the highway. It was a much more interesting drive and time for Elaine to take plenty more photos... From here on in it really felt tropical, sticky heat with lots of annoying mozzies that seem to like biting Elaine. We arrived in Noosa, situated on the Sunshine Coast, which is absolutely stunning and is home to many rich and famous. It really has everything from a gorgeous beaches, some fit for swimming and others just surfing, nice restaurants and shops and a national park on the northern tip. We did one of the coastal walks as we had heard it was where wild Koala's are normally spotted... and when we went we were in luck! We stayed with Jane, another friend we met on our Vietnam trip, near Sunshine Beach.. and what a location! So another big thank you to Jane :-)
While we were in Noosa we went to Fraser Island for a day... our initial idea was to overnight here but about a week prior they had actually had to close Fraser Island to tourists because of the bad weather with strong winds and rain. Half the
Frasier Island beach
Normally it looks a lot nicer apparently! beaches had been washed away in the rain so we thought we'd just go to see the high lights... unfortunately the day we chose was cloudy and by the time we got to Fraser the rain had started... and it rained for the entire day until we got back to Noosa! We still got to see the sights, as Fraser is a sand Island (the worlds largest) the beaches are used as the road and we drove along the 75 Mile Beach with the waves crashing right next to us. We went for dip in Lake Mckenzie, a freshwater lake in the middle of the island, and even though it was raining the lake was crystal clear and blue, we could only imagine what it would have been like in the sun. We also walked through the rainforest... its supposed to be wet in a rainforest so we couldn't really complain here. We saw some creepy spiders such as the Golden Orb and saw the home of a Funnel Web... this is the closest we want to come to that spider!!!!
From here we left Jane and Noosa and headed north to Airlie Beach. This was too long to
drive in one day so we stopped in Rockhampton for the night, where we caught up with more rain. Rocky is the beef capital of Australia, with more cattle in the surrounding areas than anywhere else... and they celebrate this fact with a giant cow on the main roundabout coming into the city. After seeing the Big Banana and Giant Shrimp already on this trip I guess we shouldn't be surprised! The next day we continued the journey up to Airlie where we were visiting the Whitsundays. We booked a trip on a racing yacht where we sailed out to Blue Pearl Bay on Hayman Island for some snorkeling. This was our first taste of what we can expect in the Great Barrier Reef up in Cairns, and we weren't disappointed as we saw loads of colourful fish... however, we did spot a couple of jellyfish and even though we had stinger suits on it was a bit nerve wracking. After we got out, we found out that apparently these ones couldn't kill you... we needed to look out for either the huge Box Jellyfish or the tiny, size of your thumb nail, Irukandji... these were the real deadly ones!
After a hour or so of snorkeling we were back on board the yacht for lunch, then sailed back to Airlie beach racing along like the pro's we had seen in the Sydney to Hobart race a couple of weeks earlier.....part of the day we got to help out and raise the head and main sails which was fun but hard work... saves going to the gym though!!!!!! The rest of the time we just sat on the side of the boat and tried to hang on!
The rain was setting in again when we left Airlie beach and headed for our final destination on the east coast, Cairns. The drive up was wet, however we made it it Cairns without much thought to all the pouring rain... once we arrived we turned on the news and the roads out of Airlie beach had been flooded later that morning and no one could get out! A cyclonic depression had developed and dumped all the water between Airlie and Mackay, and no one could get out for a couple of days.....we were very lucky again!!!!
Cairns is definitely a tourist town and the busiest places we'd been to in
a while. We booked ourselves on a boat trip to see the Great Barrier Reef which we'd been looking forward to and trying our hand at Scuba Diving for the first time. We boarded our boat and just as we were getting our instructions for the dive the boat turned and went back to the harbour. Even though the weather was good, that annoying rain and wind that seems to be following us had already made it to the Reef and it was too dangerous for the boat to go out. So we had a day lounging around Cairns before booking a similar trip with another company. These went to a different part and said they would be definitely going tomorrow... Luckily they did and we made it out the next morning. The crew kept warning us on the boat that it would be a rough crossing, but to us, we'd both had worse channel crossings going over to France, however many people didn't seem to like it!!!! No need to say anymore!!!!
Anyway, we got to try scuba diving and swam aound the reef for 30 minutes getting a close up view of Nemo and his buddies! However,
Elaine had to go back to the surface quite soon, as she had problems with her ears not equalising so just continued snorkeling instead. We went to a few different locations and the coral was stunning at each one and we saw many many fish including Nemo swimming in the anemone :-) We brought an underwater digital camera before we went on the boat trip and this was the first time we had tried it out. It felt so weird jumping in the sea with a digital camera but we got some great underwater shots.
From Cairns we fly to Alice Springs to see Uluru and Elaine's first try at camping!!!!!!! We are hoping the rain doesn't follow us to the outback!!!
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