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Finished off my time in 1770 with the best spent 50bucks ever!
At 2:30, Pilot Bruce strode into the hostel wearing pristine white shorts and a neatly ironed blue shirt complete with winged epaulets. It felt like that Officer And A Gentlemen moment and I half expected
'Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong' to start magically playing out of nowhere and for Bruce to sweep me off my feet and carry me out....well, ok, maybe it wasn't quite like that, and at 13stone I'd have probably given old Brucey a hernia. More sensibly, we walked over to his car and headed over to the airstrip....a field.
The plane was a hillarious 2 seater, only just bigger than a Tonka toy. We climbed in, taxied to the end of the field and zoomed off into the sky.
I've never been in such a diddy plane before and it was well wicked! It felt like you could do anything with it, it was so nippy. I asked Bruce whether I was in store for a loop-the-loop, but although he's a trained stunt pilot, he said the plane wouldn't cope with the G-forces - bugger. Still, the swoops, dives
and banks were brill! At one swoop we beat gravity and the entire contents of the plane, (me included!), shot to the roof!
The views were stunning as we circled around 1770 and Agnes Water, spotting turtles and sharks and flying by the Bustard Head lighthouse. After a little landing on a deserted beach and a piss-stop for Bruce, we jumped back in and, with guidance from de man, I grabbed the stick, put my feet onto the rudder peddles and started her up.
Clear prop., engine start
The toy plane started to trundle down the beach. I'd been briefed to pull up lightly when we hit the critical speed of 55 knots, (very Back To The Future!), and did so, sending us soaring up into the sky. It was mad! The adrenalin was pumping and the tiny plane being so responsive to my slightest movements made it feel like
I was flying, not the plane!
...
That afternoon I'd been chatting to a really lovely Swiss guy called Martin and come the evening we fancied a wee bevvy, so headed off to the local tavern. It's taken me 6 months to finally get to what I'd consider
a true Australian watering hole and 'The Agnes Water Tavern' was straight out of Crocodile Dundee. In one corner were a group of 5/6 huge, drunk, bearded farmhands complete with wife-beaters, (blue singlets), in another, high-heeled Shelias, dressed up to the nines with garish make-up collected in gaggles around the room, in the third, a large family with teen girls playing pool and on top of all this, incongruously, 4 bikini-clad babes in cowboy hats collecting glasses and starting drinking games with the multifarious masses! Amazingly in this hotpot of Aussie cliches, we couldn't have stood out more if we'd ordered glasses of Cinzano Fizz complete with umbrellas, so we armed ourselves with a takeaway box of Goon and left the locals to do their thing.
My bus wasn't due till 11:30 and a litre or 2 of white wine might make that 8hour journey to Mackay bearable. During the night of sitting outside, chatting to some lovely people, (3 lads: Owen(Irish), Stu(Scottish), Paul(Brummy), 2 girls: Gemma(English), Emma(Irish), 1 lad: Andy(Manc)), I found out that last night, while I was sleeping like a log, 3 Aussies had turned up at the hostel, helped themselves to the fridge contents and
started picking on 3 burly Canadian hostlietes...something that even I could tell wasn't a good idea. After a sever pummeling there was the typically laddish post-fight handshake and offer to stay for a drink that was turned down before the natives crawled back to their homes. I miss all the fun!
Having escaped all the ruckus outside, I didn't manage the same inside, as sometime in the middle of the night our dorm was forced to listen to the couple next door humping away, (we were only separated by a flimsy partition wall that didn't even reach the ceiling!). Groans, moans, 'Yes!'s, 'Oh!'s, we got it all, and it wasn't pleasant. On the subject, it's amazing how many people think that sex in dorms is fine. IT ISN'T! Ok, if the dorm is empty, but when there are other people trying to get some shut-eye it's just gross. No amount of duvet-covering or even the hanging of towels from the top bunk to hide the horny occupants of the bottom bunk will make it acceptable. Call me a prude, but nothing freaks you out so much as when your dreams get side-tracked by humping noises in the room, and
while still asleep you start having sexy dreams to match the sounds, only to wake up and find that you're mentally piggy-backing your erotic thoughts off some completely random strangers in the next bed!
Eugh.
Nuff said.
Dont do it kids.
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ItchyAdventurer
Adam Ross
Jealous!
That sounds amazing, you lucky git you. Stop having so much fun, your making us other travellers look bad!