I'm back......!!!

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Howdy folks,

I'm back after quite a hectic fortnight.
As I mentioned last time we were due to head up to Coffs Harbour from Sydney and we duly rose at some ungodly hour to catch the 7:00am bus only to find that storms up the east coast of Australia (which we knew nothing about, just shows how little attention you pay to events while on holiday eh?) had flooded the Pacific Highway in numerous places and the Greyhounds could only get as far as a place called Port Macquarie. Being still half asleep we decided to hop on the bus anyway and get as far as we could. Arriving in Port Macquarie we discovered it was full of fellow strandees. The place was nice enough but didn't have a lot to do. After spending two nights there and with no sign of the Greyhounds resuming we decided to escape on the trains which were actually running (with old Intercity 125 rolling stock interestingly). In some places on the journey the railway embankment was surrounded on both sides by flood water!
Still we finally reached Coffs Harbour in the end which again was a pretty nice coastal town. We amused ourselves with some walks along coastline and bodyboarding.
After two days in Coffs and with the Greyhound services resumed we set off for Byron Bay. Byron was a pretty cool place but with time lost to the flooding we decided to only stay for a day and miss out Surfers Paradise (which seems like the Newquay of Australia to me) and head for Brisbane.
Brisbane itself was alright although we seemed to cover everything in a couple of hours of wandering around. With another day there we decided to head to the nearby Australia Zoo, run by the late Steve Irwin. The zoo was fantastic, with a cool croc feeding show and lots of cute kangaroos.
From Brisbane is was time to head for Hervey Bay and Fraser Island. As ever we plumped for the cheap hostel which turned out to be a load of converted caravans, not as bad as you might think though. From Hervey Bay we went on a 3 day/2 night tour of Fraser Island which was very good. We certainly ate very well and enjoyed ourselves greatly. Fraser Island is apparently the largest sand island (i.e it is made up entirely of sand) in the world but still had vegetation on it somehow (well I actually I do know how but I shan't bore you with the details). The weather wasn't the best but still we're used to that by now.
Onward from Fraser we travelled by a delightful 14hr night bus to Airlie Beach where we have just been on a trip to the Whitsunday Islands and been snorkelling on a coral reef. The Whitsundays are very picturesque indeed, the sort of place that actually looks like it does in the postcards.
We are heading to Townsville and Magnetic Island (plus another NRL game hopefully) next on the final stretch of our Australia trip.

I hope you enjoyed this whistlestop installment of my travels as much as I've enjoyed our whistlestop tour up the east coast so far.
Bye for now!

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Photos

Altogether now......awwwwww