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After an awesome 6 weeks, we've finally left Asia and are now in Oz. After more overnight travelling, we arrived in Cairns at something like 6 in the morning, I don't really remember, and headed off to immigration. Let the good first impressions of Australia start! Somehow, at two possible places to get stopped, we mananged to get stopped 3 times, and the final and in my opinion funnest time was the last, when they searched literally everything in all 3 of our bags....good times!
After that we headed off to the Calypso Hostel, where after trying to briefly battle the tiredness in the pool for a bit, we all gave up and went to bed, Si managing a hugely respectable 28 hours (more of a small coma than a sleep) and me and Bish only able to squeeze in about 22.
For the next few days in Cairns we mostly stayed in the hostel and looking around the town. The hostel itself was pretty cool, it was a kinda Jamaican themed hostel, and officially had the "coldest swimming pool in Cairns", which they proudly advertise despite it being winter.
They also had some cool themed nights, each with accompanying all you can eat buffet for $8, so needless to say that waas exploited.
Cairns itself was also quite nice, but there wasn't really much going on in the day, and the fact the weather couldn't have been more shithouse for the whole time we were there didn't help things.
In the evenings the town definitly picked up though! Most nights we'd stay at the (cheap) hostel bar til about 11, and then headed in to town with our dorm mates Sergio, Ralph and Christian (Swiss, Swiss and Liechenstein-ian). The two main bars were an awesome Irish Bar called PJ's, and also the Woolshed. Pj's was a cool bar because it occasionally had themed nights, which included a "Coyote Ugly" night and also "Pole Idol". We also met these two awesome Ozzies in there from Townsville, so we pretty much spent the night getting hammered with them.
After getting in to another Phangan-esque routine for about 4 days, we decided we'd go out on to the reef for a few days to do some diving. We ended up doing a 3 day and 2 night dive tripwhere we stayed on board the boat, and did 9 dives when we were out there.
because cyclone Larry had absolutely battered the area about 3 weeks before hand, and big storms were still hanging around, the ride out to the reef on the tiny day tripper boat was pretty sketch, and once we reached the bigger boat we were staying on the conditions hardly improved!
Weather aside though the diving was awesome. We ended up doing our advanced open water course which was ace, as it included a deep dive down to 30m, and we also got to do a night dive, where we just went around in the pitch black with only a little torch. It was easily the best dive we did though, and we even saw a turtle and another reef shark so we got pretty lucky. Except for a couple of other dives that went towards the course, we were able to have free dives. These were good because it was just me, Bish and si going down by ourselves and going wherever we wanted! Although in principal it sounded good, it ended up that in all but one occasion we got horrically lost and ended up almost beaching ourselves on the reef, and trying to swim back about 100m to the boat. And now we got the course done we're able to go down to 30 m by ourselves, and that smells like trouble to me!
After getting off the dive boat we spent one more night in Cairns before leaving on the Oz Experience down the coast a bit to Mission Beach.
Mission Beach would have been an awesome place to go, and most people seem to like it. BUT, when they were there it probably hadn't just been destroyed by a cyclone, so there was literally nothing to do there but to hang around the pool at the hostel. This was a pretty good thing though because the pool was one of the best I've ever seen. It was a huge kinda bean shaped pool with a volleyball net down one end and at the other there was a big wooden pole linking one side to the other. More or less the whole day was spent just pounding the hell outta eachother with some foamy noodle things, and suprisingly only minor injuries occured. The other cool thing was that we saw two Cassowaries, which are huge ostrich like birds about 1m high, and there are only about 500 left in the world so it was good to see them.
After only one night in Mission Beach we headed to Magnetic Island, where although it was a really nice place, it would have been much bettre had the weather been nicer. Throughout the day we decided to hang by the pool for a bit of a change, and we also got given some sea kayaks as part as the Oz experience package, so we bombed it around in the waves for a bit but ended upo just using the paddles as weapons on the beach...it got viscious!
In the hostels bar in the evening they had another theme night, but this one went down a pretty different road. It was ladies night at the bar, so for some retatrded reason the game was "dress some guys in girls clothes and have them mince about a bit". Shockingly one of the guys from our bus was realy up for this, and somehow managed to get more attention from girls after he'd done this than anyone else there! The nest day the bus group went on a bush walk for a bit, and despite the early start (and the walking) it was awesome. We had a couple of nature freaks on our bus and they managed to spot a black widow spider, and also two koala bears which were incredible!
Again we only stayed one night at Magnetic, and then headed to Airlie Beach where the epic adventure will continue...
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emm
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hi!
hi will, haha, you are funny when you write. this is the time when you rang us i think as you were about to go diving. =) this all sounds well fun! shame about larry really, but im sure it was still lovely. emma xx