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Published: December 9th 2009
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Christmas in Singapore OK first off, apologies for all those that have been missing the blog updates or just thought that we were dead. The good news is we're not and we're still having a great time. Currently about half way down the east coast of Australia and melting in 38dg heat (from what we've heard it's not too far from what it's like in England??). Anyway, apologies in advance for how long this entry is going to be, as you can imagine we've been up to quite a bit!
Since our last update we left the Thai islands and headed north once more to Bangkok. A quiet (ish) night there and we then flew out to Singapore. We spent a mere 24 hours there so didn't get to see too much and the weather was pretty pants so all in all not that exciting. When we first got there we entered a bar (standard) and realised after a very short period of time we were the only ones there and this was a bar that housed many "ladies of the night"! Queue a very sharp exit and onto a big duck to look around the city. Basically this was a big ex-army
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Getting on to the duck tour amphibious vehicle that was made up to look like a duck and included a small camp Singaporean tour guide who got far too excited about the whole duck theme. After this we went to the airport and got on our flights to Cairns.
After a pretty easy 12 hour flight we got to Cairns and ended up spending a week getting used to the culture shock i.e. the extortionate prices that we will have to endure from here on in. Cairns didn't impress us all that much and we were dissapointed that they didn't even have a beach and you couldn't even swim in the sea. Bad craic. Spent a lot of time around the hostel and meeting new people. One of the nights we signed ourselves up for a pub crawl, because we're crazy and that, but I think that might be our first and last crawl on our travels. One of the games involved all the girls picking one partner. Let's just say it was like a PE lesson in school but we were the kids that couldn't play sport. After I got lumbered with a rather large lady and Joey a big strapping fella (no jokes),
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Bigger than the London eye - same rubbish weather we then had to throw (our in Joey's case, be thrown) around in several embarrassing postions. Not fun. Especially when trying to lift said large lady into my arms. Later in the evening I was also forced up onto the stage for a dance competition where the judges were all the girls. Let's just say dancing competitions aren't my forte and I'll be avoiding that situation in the future.
After Cairns we made our way down the coast to Mission Beach. En route we went to a croc farm and got to watch them getting fed and saw a load of other Aussie wildlife (see pics). Once at Mission Beach we booked ourselves up for a day of white water rafting which was absolutely brilliant. After an early start we got into our teams and set off on the Tully river which has plenty of white water! There were some pretty hairy moments along the way but we managed to stay in the raft the majority of the time! We haven't received the pictures that were taken that day but will try and add them when we get them. We also spent our time at Mission Beach playing poker,
having BBQs and making fires on the beach in the evenings.
After Mission we headed south once more onto Townsville where we got a boat across to Magnetic Island. Here we rented a barbie-style car and toured the island looking pretty damn cool. Plenty of nice beaches and bays to see as well as some pretty ugly looking Wallabies! After our island tour we were invited to play in a football match, Tourists vs Locals. Joey took up his position on the sidelines as manager pulling the strings to a fantastic 7-5 victory. The little kids we were playing against didn't stand a chance! 3 fantastic assists by Kilgour alongside a couple of calamitous defensive errors earned him a bonus point.
The next day we set off on the bus once more down to Airlie Beach and spent a couple of days relaxing by the lagoon and meeting up with past travellers while sampling the famous Aussie goon (box of cheap wine!). A couple of heavy nights and plenty of banter later we set sail around the Whitsundays for 2 days and 2 nights. We were on a fairly large sailing boat called the Boomerang with 30 other
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Joey unable to hide his excitement people (once the world's fastest boat don't you know). Had an absolutely amazing time as we took to it like fish to water by putting up the sails and making sure we didn't sink. We managed to do a spot of snorkling a couple of times and saw some pretty impressive fish (the best being the black and white hooped 'Darlo Fish' - self named obviously) plus a couple of Nemos and a huoige turtle chilling his beans in the ocean. We also spent an afternoon on Whitehaven beach, which was pretty spetacular, playing a bit of Grid Iron as well as the obligatory game of footy.
After getting off the boat and having another night at Airlie we boarded our bus and headed for a Cattle Station in Kroombit about 7 hours south. In between though we stopped off for a quick game of lawn bowls, as you do, and were pretty poor to say the least. We just didn't know our own strength. Gutter baaaalll. Once at the Cattle Station we donned our cowboy hats and handkerchief and settled down to some pretty amazing traditional cowboy food (basically lots of meat like goat and cow). We then
tried our hand at whip cracking before hitting the mechanical bull. After a 20 minute wait I took to the bull like a real cowboy before spending approximately half a second on its back and coming away with a rather sensitive groin-area injury. A night of drinking games followed before an early start and onto clay pigeon shooting with a big shotgun (always a safe combination). After teaching the pigeons a lesson we then went on to take part in a goat rodeo which involved man handling a goat by the horns before taking it down to the ground and prodding it with a big iron (not half as gay as it sounds). Next up was an hour and a half of quad biking around the 3000 acre farm. A lot of dirt tracks and some not-so-small jumps later me and Joe were sporting some rather dashing dust beards!
We are now in Hervey Bay waiting to go across to Frasier Island on Friday for 3 days and 2 nights 4x4 driving and camping out in the wild. After that we'll be heading to Rainbow Beach, Brisbane and onto Byron Bay for Christmas. We're both still hoping for a
white Christmas and are questioning whether we should put a couple of bucks on it!
Hope everyone is well where they are and apologies once again for the essay. If we don't speak before Xmas, best wishes from us both and hope you all have a great time. Don't be scared to leave any comments!
PK & JW x
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peter kilgour
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footie & pub crawls
Clearly your time at Cockerton Rangers has stood you in good stead, but you should have done more weight training!