Airlie Beach

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So we left Hanoi late Friday night in October sometime (seems like such a long time ago now!) and flew to Bangkok. Spent an uncomfortable, but not dreadful, night on the floor of Bangkok airport then flew into Sydney the next day. Tired and hungry we landed ourselves on Joe's amazing Uncle Steven who we had a fantastic time staying with. It was great to be back in a normal house and they supplied us with lots of lovely food and drink, their house is also gorgously located right next to Kilcare beach and so our planned two night stay turned into four. We even managed to acquire a surf board off one of their surfer friends and spent a while failing to stand up.

On Thursday we went back into Sydney to pick up our campervan! We got it for a bargain price as the company wanted someone to take the van to Cairns. Since then we've spent every day driving for an hour or two in the morning, finding a nice beach, spending all afternoon on the beach and then driving for a couple of hours to find somewhere to park up and sleep.

We've been to loads of beautiful beaches - its incredible how empty most of them have been. Often me and Joe are the only people there. My highlight so far is our dolphin feeding experience in Tin Can Bay. We'd been told that you could feed wild dolphins there and turned up excitedly in the morning. Unfortunately us and half of Australia also had turned up and it was really busy. But, luckily for us, the dolphins swam up about three hours later than expected so, by the time they arrived, most people had left. Two beautiful river dolphins swam up to the beach and we could go in the water with them and hand feed them fish! It was such a wonderful conservation project - the whole thing started in the 1970s when the town looked after a sick dolphin that had been stranded on the sand. Since then the dolphin's pod had become used to humans and happy to swim up to the shore and feed. They dont let you give the dolphins very much food so they dont get dependent. The volunteers who help out are so connected to the dolphins - its really lovely.

We're in Airlie Beach at the moment - going on a snorkelling trip around the Whitsundays tomorrow which is really exciting! :D

xxx

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