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On Wednesday it was still rainy and I could feel my cold developing into flu but we couldn’t spend another day bumming so we headed back into the city. We decided to climb the sky tower - by climb I mean pay to use the lift. It is 305m high and contains the tallest post box in the southern hemisphere (unfortunately we didn’t have a postcard!). The building itself is very thin leading up to a wider bit at the top which has binoculars placed all around it. We walked around it for a while spotting all the different sites and then went to the cafe and had a beer and a glass of wine overlooking the whole city. That evening we had re-arranged to meet our friends Sarah, Carley and Chris; they arrived with their ... read more

Australia Zoo was really good; they have a really good crocodile and snake collection (obviously!) and elephants and tigers too. They also put on a show with birds and crocs and stuff - that was pretty cool. We also got to feed and pet some kangaroos and koala bears which were super soft! Andy had to go back to the car for the camera and on the way he saw Steve Irwin’s wife and daughter Terry and Bindi! It was quite sad walking around the park and seeing all the Steve Irwin stuff; as you walk in the door there is a massive bronze statue of him and all his family. There is a whole section of the zoo dedicated to him; it is full of messages from people all over the world, and paintings and ... read more

We stayed in a place called Rockhampton last night, it is known as the beef capital of Australia; there are over 1 million cows in the surrounding area. The evening was pretty uneventful; we just pulled up at a caravan park for the night so I’ll just move on. Today we went to the Bundaberg Factory and it was wicked! Bundaberg is an Australian made rum that we have been drinking since we got here (Bundy and coke), and we love it! When we saw that Bundaberg was only a little out of our way on the map we thought we just have to go there! The tour was really very good; we got to see all working parts of the factory and so we were not allowed to bring any mobile phones or anything with ... read more

I have not been keeping up with the diary over the past few days so I really will have to remember what I can. We set of for Cape Tribulation, which is just north of Cairns, on Sunday and it really is cool there. It is another national park but it is rainforest and along the beach you can see where the GBR begins so they say it’s “where rainforest and reef meet”. On the first day we just checked out some of the beaches and then cooked up a BBQ together. It was really scary because we had to walk through rainforest to get to the public BBQs and that was all fine at 4pm but by the time we were walking back to the car it was dark and you could hear all ... read more

Day 29 We picked up our new camper today and it is another Sandman! We are loving it! We picked the camper up at about 10am and then drove back to the hostel to pick up Yassine, Jackie and Tisha and we all headed out of town to the “Crystal Cascades” which is an uphill walk (only about half an hour) with a series of waterfalls to look at and pools to swim in as you go. As Cairns is in a tropical area the waterfalls are in the rainforest so all around us were the tallest trees and we saw some lizards and huge spiders and the birds were calling out all over the place, it was really fun. There was also an area where you could swim to the other side of the river, ... read more