Revenge of the Killer Fish!

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G'Day,

We are now at Airley Beach, and are taking a 3 day cruise to the Whitsunday Islands starting tonight.

Since I last wrote from Sydney, we have done and lot of travelling and covered a lot of mileage (kilometreage?!).

After finally getting the van up and running in Sydney, we headed south to Melbourne and met up with a friend from Japan for a couple of days before giving our van a good test - the scenic Great Ocean Road. No problem at all - phew! From there, we headed up into the Dandenong Ranges to meet my aunt and uncle and numerous cousins who I had never even met before! It was cool to finally get to meet a whole different part of the family!

From Melbourne, we have been making our way north, stopping at surf spots along the way, and now dive spots. We also did a 4-wheel drive camping trip to Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world, and had a mad time driving on the beach (which is actually an official highway, when the tide is out at least!) and camping in a tropical rainstorm!

A few days ago we met up with Andrea, my friend from university, and headed straight to Great Keppel Island. It was absolutely gorgeous - white sands, bluer than blue sea, and swaying palm trees everywhere. The snorkelling was also really good. We hired kayaks one day to go out to a sunken wreck and jumped in to snorkel the area. Apart from the billion or so jellyfish, it was all going Ok until we suddenly ran into two very large and mean-looking fish. Unlike the usual fish reaction of running (OK, swimming) away, these beasts instead started to approach us with an evil glint in their eye (or so i like to believe). Talk about scared - I have never swum so fast in my life before! I think if we could have caught them and fried them up on the BBQ we certainly would have!

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