Last days in Oz

Originally I planned to arrive in Airlie Beach and book myself on to a boat trip leaving the next day so I'd have time to visit a few more places up the coast afterwards, but I got a little side tracked by sun and beer and the chance to relax after the camping trip and bus journeys. I largely blame Andy, Rich (both from Bristol) and Kirk (from Canada) for my inertia, my excessive beer drinking and my continual pie eating that have been the main activities I've indulged in since arriving in Airlie. But I also have to credit them for making me laugh the whole time as well, so its been well worth missing out on couple of other beaches I could have visited.

Its far too easy to lay about and drink and chill in Airlie Beach, a lot of people I'd spoken to hadn't been to favourable about the place, saying the only reason to go there is to go on one of the many boat trips around Whitsunday Islands, but I quite like it. Its a nice sized holiday town with enough bars and shops to keep you happy for a while and the hostel we stayed at had a few swimming pools in the grounds and due to the lack of beach at Airlie Beach (don't ask....) they have built a huge man-made lagoon by the sea.

hotting up

After the overnight 13 hour bus ride from Hervey bay we checked in to a hostel and I decided to get a few hours sleep, later I found the lads lounging by the pool, or rather in the pool, you can certainly tell your getting closer to the tropics up this way, it was very very hot. In the evening I went over to the lads room and we sat out for a few hours having some drinks before heading out to the bars. Due to keeping an eye on the budget all the backpackers tend to end up drinking cheap wine that comes in 4 litre boxes, otherwise known as goon. Its very very cheap and pretty nasty, but I definitley drank worse when I was a student. My first night out in Airlie and I managed to come home with a grazed knee from being tripped over in a bar (I was holding 2 drinks at the time and made a determined effort not to spill them and so couldn't put my hands out and went straight down on my knee and still managed to get half a glass of cocktail on my head.....), and also a cut ankle thanks to Andy elbowing me in the face and knocking me to the ground in the middle of the street.....nice. We'd been told that Airlie was 'mental' at night, but the bars were fairly relaxed, the clubs do tend to be a bit of a meat market although not nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe, although on the second night we did witness some very vicious looking female jelly wrestling in one place....... Kirk and Andy did some dancing for us at Beaches bar and we took some photographs of the sights of Airlie Beach by night on the way home, including a man passed out on the pavement and various people stuffing their faces outside the pie shop.

under the weather

On the second day I started to feel a bit run down and not very well, but after a day of relaxing by the lagoon and a box of nurofen I managed to get myself ready for a night out. We'd gone out pretty early the night before and a lot of places were fairly quiet, so we sat out at the lads until about 11pm drinking beer and the cheap and nasty goon, which also involved a lot of slapping (of the bag not me), and then set off to a few bars that were much busier later at night and I even managed a bit of a dance in Mama Africa's, the only real club in Airlie. After that we went back to the lads and finished off the beers in the fridge, watching the rain pour down. It all caught up with me on Friday though and I spent the whole day lying in bed with the air conditioning blasting away. Its really hard to get any proper sleep though as the other people in the room are coming and going all day, but I just felt too ill to go anywhere and just needed to stay out of the sun but couldn't help feeling terribly guilty for wasting a whole day in bed. I felt a bit better later on and headed to the lads with my medicinal bottle of whiskey, the same one I'd bought in Calafornia and drunk half of in New Zealand, it has served me well! Rich was having a night off the booze due to some hideous looking tonsilitis and so we sat and chatted with the increasingly drunken Andy and Kirk who were intent on building their wall of beer before setting off for more dancing. A few other people turned up to check into their room, including Belgian David from the Ivory Coast who was booked onto the same sailing trip as me the next day. During the day the lads had hired a 'Moki', a golf buggy style mini-jeep thingy and so we took it out onto the streets at night to drop Kirk and Andy off at Mama Africas and to buy some pies from the wonderful pie shop next door as my appetite had come back (so the diets going really well as you can tell......).

night callers

I got myself an early night in order to make sure I was feeling better for my three day sailing trip, as it turned out everyone in my room was getting an early night too, which was pretty unusual as most of them crawl back into their beds at about 5am normally, but it meant everything was nice and peaceful and quiet for a change........that is until there was a knock on the door at about 3.30am. I slowly started to wake up and could hear more knocking, but everyone semed to be ignoring it figuring it would go away if no one got up but the knocking kept going, and then I realised who it was. I couldn't decide whether to get up and answer it to make them go away or just try to ignore it and pretend it was nothing to do with me, just as I decided to get up I heard the word 'Anna.....' coming through the door in a Canadian drawl and I leapt to answer it before everyone knew it was my embarrassingly drunken friends waking everyone up. I answered the door to a completely naked Andy and Kirk who were having a swim in the pool and wondered if I wanted to join them. After much shushing from me I managed to convine them that an early morning dip wasn't going to make me feel any better and they ran off to leave to me to go back to bed and prepare for the evil stares of my room mates in the morning.

we are sailing.... eventually

I felt much better the next day and three days later than planned I was finally off on my Whitsunday Sailing trip on the Pride of Airlie, a catamaran boat of some sort. I had gone for the slightly cheaper trip where you stay on the island instead of on the boat, I wasn't sure how happy I'd be sleeping on the water in the cramped little cabins. There were 31 of us on the trip in total, about 5 blokes and 26 women not exactly the odds I'd hoped for but mostly a really nice group of people. We set off in the afternoon and sailed straight over to South Mole island, it took a couple of hours and it was so peaceful just sailing along sitting on the deck of the boat looking out at the islands passing by. I love being on a boat, with the breeze in the air to cool you down from the baking hot sun and that feeling that you could be anywhere in the world. We arrived at the island and most of us went straight to the resort swimming pool to cool down, there were 3 other girls travelling alone, Zoe, Clem and Fancessca and we got ourselves a mango daquerie and sat out on the pier as the sun went down.

Our accomodation on the island is away from the main resort and there's also a bar there just for these boat trips, we went down for dinner and another boat that had set off the night before joined us for the night before heading back to their boat to sleep. We played some drinking games and there was a bit of half hearted dancing but mostly people just sat back and chatted and relaxed. We had to be up at 6.30am to get ready for breakfast where we were joined by a whole load of beautiful brightly coloured parrots, everyone was loving them until they started to land on peoples heads and tried to steal the food and more and more of them arrived. We got back on the boat and set off for Whitehaven beach, the famous white silicon sand beach seen in so many photographs and often voted one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. We were dropped off for only 2 hours to relax and sunbathe, but with no shade at all we were more than happy to get back on the boat when the two hours were up and try and hide from the sun for a while. The beach was gorgeous, I've never seen white sand like it and the water is so clear, its streches for about 14 kilometres but there was hardly a soul there, just the odd boat trip like ours.

back in the sea

Back on the boat and we sailed on to Cateran Bay, the boat anchored up and we were ready for snorkelling. Mark the skipper took groups out on the dingy and dropped them off in the water, its not an area with a beach and so you are just going in the deep water straight from the boat. I hadn't been sure all along whether I'd be able to have a go at this. I love snorkelling so much but I hadn't been in the sea properly since Boxing Day, only having paddled up to my knees by this point or sat in the shallows. But the crew were really good and made me feel really relaxed so I donned my very attractive stinger suit (to protect us from the jelly fish) and gingerly got in the water. It felt a bit strange and it took me a while to relax in the water but eventually I started swimming around and having a good look for the fish and coral, when it dropped away and became too dark to see what was down there it freaked me out a bit, but for the most part I really enjoyed it and was so proud of myself for doing it.

Back to South Mole Island for a quick daquerie and shower and then down to the bar for dinner and drinks again. We were joined by another boat this time, the one that Andy, Rich and Kirk had booked onto that had left Airlie earlier that day. There were more people on their boat than the night before and so after the obligatory drinking games and swapping of clothes organised by the staff everyone was in a bit more of a party mood and a couple of mental Swiss girls kept dragging everyone up to the dance floor all night. Andy showed off his suprisingly good breakdance moves, Rich was going to but had some excuse or another and decided he'd probably just show Andy up.... They left to go back to their boat at 12ish and I discovered that everyone else on my boat had already gone to bed so I sat up with the crew and the bar man who supplied us with free drinks for the rest of the night. We had a french captain drving the ship who was worryingly drunk by the time I went to bed at about half two, I left him with Natalie, one of the hostesses and hoped that he got some sleep before having to sail our boat again at 8am the next morning.

a fishy tale...

On the last day we went to Hayman Island and stopped off at the beach to do some more snorkelling over the coral, the Whitsundays are on the edge of the great barrier reef and so the snorkelling is good but it wasn't as impressive as in Thailand last year, but I still really enjoyed it and spent ages swimming around and saw lots of different kinds of fish and one HUGE fish, about the size of me without the legs.....I think, although its hard to judge under water.......

We had a last few hours on the boat back to Airlie Beach. I loved stopping off at the islands and snorkelling, but nothing beats just siting out on the deck sailing along on the blue seas. The trip was so relaxing and in such beautiful settings and I was really pleased to have got back some of that wonderful feeling of swmiming in the sea with all the amazing fish, although I was quite sad not to have seen one of the turtles usually spotted in this area.

the final leg

Back on dry land we were all grateful to unpack and have a shower and then we met up for drinks and dinner. Quite a few people headed straight off on the bus to another part of the coast, I stayed in Airlie yet again to meet up with the lads the next day when their boat got back in and also to try and get a proper nights sleep, but after a few drinks at Beaches I tried to go to back my room and there were some people in the pool having a late night swim and it didn't take much to persuade me to join them for a quick dip and then I decided it would be a good idea to go out again to Mama Africa's. Some folk from Scotland who I'd met earlier in my dorm were out as well and so we had a bit of dance, and then yet again I was reminded of my age when a group of 18 year old Australian lads on a holiday to celebrate a mates birthday started chatting to me and then found out how old I was, they looked appalled and quickly ran away....

I spent the next day by the pool with the hostess from my boat, Natalie and some other girls who work out here. The lads got back in the afternoon and the goon came out again and I joined their boat load of people for drinks at the various bars along the road. Rich and Beth (the hostess from their boat) decided to drink their body weight in beer and collapsed early on, me Andy and Kirk managed to make it all the way to Mama Africa's and had some very expensive shots of some kind or another and ended up joining Natalie and some others in the pool until aout 4am. The next day I had to check out of my room at 10am and spent the day with the lads by the lagoon waiting to get the 8.30pm bus up to Cairns, my last epic bus journey along the coast. Rich and Beth were feeling better after having passed out early the night before and started drinking again in the afternoon and Rich decided it would be a much better idea to get the 2am bus instead, it turned out to be a good decision as we nearly didn't get a place on our earlier bus. We'd all booked that morning and when we got on there was no record of us as you have to book 24 hours in advance apparently, but there was just enough room to squeeze the 3 of us on.

I like your little Hilton...

The bus was packed and me and Andy had to sit right at the front behind the driver, it wasn't too bad for me, but Andy and Kirk are about 6 foot 4 so it was a pretty uncomfortable 11 hours on the bus. I felt exhausted when we got to Cairns at 7am in the morning and the rather posh mini-Hilton of a hostel told us we couldn't check in until 2pm unless we payed for the night before, even though my money had nearly run out I happily paid just to be able to get into a proper bed and get some sleep. So we checked in and the three of us collapsed in our room straight away. We'd had our doubts as to whether Rich would make it on the late bus but he turned up in the afternoon looking a little worse for wear, but it wasn't long before we were down in the bar again and the jugs of beer started coming. It was my last night out on the coast so we treated ourselves to yet another box of goon to drink while we were getting ready, the hostel was pretty plush and we had our own balcony to sit out on arguing over which music to listen to as usual with Kirk interupting the ipod mix to put on his Pearl Jam and occasionaly Garth Brooks....

After a heated discussion about equality and politics between myself, Andy and Rich, we went out to the 'legendary' Woolshed club where we decided it was better to drink more beer than to argue any further. There was the typical backpacker crowd enjoying a 'best bum' competition that the girls seem to be so keen on entering, mind you if I had bums like theirs I'd probably enter too.... But it was a good night and a good laugh, although the place itself wasn't great, I'm always at least 5 years older than everyone else (including Andy, Rich and Kirk) and start to question whether I should really be doing this at my age! But I had a bit of a dance and yet gain tried to keep up with the lads beer drinking, which considering they are all over 6 foot is quite a challenge. Thankfully there was no pie shop nearby this time. Andy and I headed back to the hostel and Rich and Kirk followed on bit later and scared the life out of us by creeping in the dark and turning the ipod on full blast.

So I woke up on Friday to my last day on the coast, I wasn't really ready to leave and there were lots of places on the coast I hadn't managed to see on my 4 week time limit and my slight side tracking at Airlie beach. We had a wander round Cairns, which didn't really grab me to be honest, but its more of a place to use as a base to see other places and to head out to the Great Barrier Reef and it has a good night life, all very geared up for backpackers. I was sad to say bye to the lads as well after spending the last couple of weeks travelling with them, I'd had a really good time and I'd not laughed so much in ages, it's strange to be travelling alone again.

incy wincy spider

I got my flight back to Sydney and had a lovely weekend with Lou and Dom and the rest of the folk at Yanko Ave. On the Saturday afternoon I met up with Farrah and Carwyn in Coogee for a drink and we did the coastal walk to Bondi, there was a sculpture exhibition set on the beaches and along the coast running from Tamarama beach up to Bondi and it was a lovely way to spend one of my last days in Sydney, although I was sorry to say goodbye to the lovely Farrah and Carwyn but I know I'lls ee them in London next year. I finally got to see a really big spider on my second to last night in the country. We'd been out for drinks on Saturday night and back at the flat I spotted it on the wall, it wasn't a full sized huntsman (Chad had found one of those on the ceiling above his bed a few nights before) but it was either a baby huntsman or just another kind of very big spider, but I stayed very calm and helped Dom catch it using a measuing jug (a glass was much too small) and we had a good look at it before he put it outside. Lou and Dom treated me yet again to a fanstic meal on the Sunday night and then very early Monday morning I had to say a sad farewell to Lou and Dom droped me of the airport ready for my flight on to Vietnam. I'm hoping that by the time they come over for a visit to England I'll be able to repay them for how generous they've been to me, although that would mean having an actual proper job and house sorted out for about 6 months time so they may have to wait a while longer I fear......

flying solo

It feels a bit strange to know I'll be on my own again flying off to somewhere new after spending so much time with Lou and Dom and making so may friends in Australia and having had the lads with me to keep me entertained with all the banter, but I'm very excited to be going to Asia again and discovering a whole new country. There's so much of Australia I didn't get to see, I never made it to Melbourne which I really wanted to and there's the whole West Coast and places in between, but I'm glad I didn't rush around too much and I feel like I made the most of my time there and really enjoyed the few places I did get to see. And now I have nearly a whole month to enjoya culture hit in Vietnam which can't be bad!

---

---