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Published: February 8th 2006
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Transport
This is our mode of transport down to Sydney Up early yet again to catch the 7am bus to Airlie Beach. We checked into Magnums and paid an few extra dollars for a private room, every now and then you need to do this just to get a decent nights sleep. Magnums is a lively hostel surrounded by trees and a small stream that runs by it, so the mosquito's were out in force again.. We were pretty tired and got an early night to make the most of having our own space again.
The next morning we headed to Abel Point Marina to catch our Catamaran for our trip to the Whitsundays. The Catamaran was nice, but not as nice as the one we had previously sailed on in Cairns, it was called the Camira, previously named Tsunami, but was renamed out of respect for those that died in 2004's disaster in South East Asia. The weather was a bit hit and miss as we sailed towards Whitehaven beach, one minute blazing sun then torrential downpours. The scenery was stunning as we passed all the smaller islands, we spotted loads of huge jellyfish on the way which was a bit worrying. We also seen a few turtles swimming
around which was nice as we hadn't seen any of these in the wild yet.
When we arrived at Whithaven the captain told us that we weren't allowed to swim from the boat to the beach, we had to take the dinghy from the back of the Catamaran in. The beach is beautiful with crystal clear water and blinding white sand. We had our stinger suits on again and swam around a bit before the heavens opened once more. It lasted for about 30 mins and before we knew it we had to board the Catamaran for lunch. The food was very good, a barbecue with all types of meat and fish with salads and free alcohol. We decided to go easy on the beers though as we knew we still had some snorkelling to do. This didn't stop some people though, they got stuck right in.
Next stop was a reef by one of the islands, everyone got there gear on and jumped into the water. We were a bit dissapointed with this particular reef though as it seemed to be mainly old dead coral, nothing like what we had seen up in Cairns. We had bought
an underwater camera with us too but didn't really get many good snaps as the water wasn't as clear and there didn't seem to be many fish around due to the dead coral. Laura had to temporarily go back to the boat to sort out a problem with her snorkelling gear too.
Then it was time to start heading back to Abel Point, so we all piled back onto the Catamaran and got stuck into the free alcohol with a load of other people on the trip. One of the girls consumed quite alot of wine and was trying to talk us into carrying on drinking with them back on land, we managed to avoid that one. When we were on the coach back from Abel Point to Airlie Beach she was sitting next to an Asian woman who couldn't speak any english and was trying to communicate with her in Thai, very comical.
All in all it was an ok day, the snorkelling was a bit of a let down and the rainy weather meant the scenery wasn't as stunning as it could have been, but was still great to get out and see the Whitsundays.
The next day we took a trip out to South Molle Island which isn't too far from Airlie Beach. We had the use of a resort for the day and had a picnic basket booked for lunch. Problem was as soon as we got onto the island the rain kicked in once again, typical. We had planned to play some golf and do some walks, but the rain just kept coming down. We ended up chilling out under some cover at the end of a pier where we were joined by lots of hungry parakeets. Although you're not supposed to feed them we gave them crumbs of biscuits which they ate from our hands for ages. We took a walk up to Spion Kop which is a look out point on the island when the rain eased off, and the minute we got back it started again, so we were lucky with that one.
We decided to get the earlier boat back to Airlie at 15:30 and sort out our bus to head down to Rainbow Beach the next day. As our bus didn't leave until 6pm the next day we had a night out in Airlie and spent
Whitehaven Beach
With our Catamaran in the background the next day sorting out other bits and pieces that needed doing. Sure enough as we were about to head to the bus station a torrential rain storm kicked in, we got absolutely soaked on the way down and had a 15 hour overnight bus journey ahead of us, bring back the sun !
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