Blogs from Airlie Beach, Queensland, Australia, Oceania - page 12

In my childhood, Sundays were dedicated to completing chores, finishing homework, and I often found time in a mess of stickers and stationary to write to my pen-pal, Cheree. In the background, my Dad would blast his great 70s and 80s music through indestructible speakers from his college era. The song that really made him belt it out was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young “Southern Cross.” Appropriately, I had this song ready to jam through my IPOD at any time. Really, the song is about a break-up, but throughout this adventure I couldn’t get that song out of my head. After leaving Arilie Beach, I badly wanted to call up my Dad and tell him that I’ve just spent two nights under the most brilliant group of constellations, including the Southern Cross. &l... read more

So got myself up to Airlie beach via Hamilton island on the whitsundays, to be met by rain, well tropical warm rain, however not good for sailing trip. Still it was perfect so that i could catch up on admin and downloading pics etc. Two days later the sun shone just as i headed out on the Powerplay catamaran for the 2 days sailing around the whitsunday islands. The crowd onboard were fun and the nice too. The sailing experience was nice all in all and Whithaven beach did live up to its world class beach status. The weather luckily was perfect for sailing and sunbathing, so no complaints there. Made some lovely new friends onboard and had a great time. Thoroughly enjoyed watching the dolphins swim around the boat at night. It was magical. However, ... read more

Hi Everyone! After the bus fiasco I was feeling terribly homesick and cried to Anton, saying I wanted to get the next plane home. He managed (once again) to calm me down and put everything into perspective and I felt much better. We got on the 1pm bus (horray!!) to Airlie Beach and made it to Airlie without a hitch (phew). We had booked into a Youth Hostel Association hostel and were really pleased to find it clean and very pleasant. Our room was small and a twin (with some bed moving, we made it into double) but it had air-con and we only had to share a bathroom with one other double room. After a good nights sleep, we got up and, as we liked the hostel, we decided to become YHA members (as we ... read more

G'day from sunny Oz! Sorry for the long gap between blog posts - we've been busy busy everyday pretty much it seems! But Australia has lived up to expectations so far - we started in Cairns about 10 days ago and are now further down south in Airlie Beach for a few more days. Cairns was a great place to start as we were thrown straight into crocodiles and spiders in the rainforests (not literally). Unfortunately (or luckily in my opinion) we didn't see any crocs in the wild, but did see some in the animal sanctuary - Rich held one! We did a great day tour where we got to swim in waterfalls and lakes up near the rainforest - and the tour guide had a brilliant concept for the day: swim, eat, swim, eat, ... read more

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 ... read more