Australia - Byron to 1770

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Hello!

So after spending about 6 days in Byron (a little too long) we headed up to Surfer's Paradise in our group of 15, stayed in a really nice hostel spent a few days chilling out on the beach then upto Brisbane. Spent just 2 nights in Brisbane, nice city but not much to do and we needed to get a move on and get up the coast, it's a hell of a long way! Me and Sam left the others in Brisbane as they are all staying there for a while to find work. Spent a couple of nights in Noosa from which we did Australia (Steve Irwin) Zoo. Was pretty cool, saw lots of crocs, kangeroos and koalas amongst others. Shame he wasn't there to do his crocodile show tho, i always thoght he was a bit of comedy character but he actually did loads of conservation and pratically built the zoo himself. Apparently they now struggling without his deep wallet, thanks to all his shows and movies. From Noosa it was up to Rainbow Beach, a compulsory stop on our bus. Was pretty disappointing to be honest, didn't see one rainbow! False advertising if you ask me. We did get to be in a photo shoot tho, and got a free drink for it! We were just walking done the street and were asked to be in the shoot for this shanky newly opened hotel (The Plantation at Rainbow) for their advertising. Very nice place, better tehn the hostels we hae been staying in!

Next stop was Hervey Bay, from which we did our Fraser Island trip. It's one of the big ticket attractions of the east coast, except it chucked it down the whole time! Basically it's a huge island of sand and you get in a group of 11 people and take a 4x4 on to the island and drive around for 3 days looking at the sights, camping under the stars and haing a few drinks at night. It was really good fun, we had an awesome group. You have to be over 21 to drive, so there was just 4 of us who could drive. It was fun but driving 10 other people on sand is a fair responsibilty, the 4x4's are top heavy and there has been a few bad accidents recently, but it was fine. We went ot Lake Mackenzie, a fresh water lake where all the water is filtered by the sand, it was the clearest water i've ever seen! Some of the other highlights were Lake Wabby and the ship wreck of Maheno.

We are in 1770 at the moment, just for one night before moving up the Airlie Beach in the next fe days to do the Whitsunday Islands, one of the other big attractions on the east coast. Will update some time after that.

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