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Published: February 3rd 2008
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Airlie beach is a big name when it comes to travelling the East Coast, so I was suprised to find that I could walk across the entire town in five minutes. There's absolutely nothing to do but sit around the lagoon (a huge swimming pool - you can't swin in the ocean here because of jellyfish), eat, and go out to the "nightclubs". The town itself is built into a hill and reminded me of Andrews pictures of the Italian coast. After spending Australia day sleeping and reading by the lagoon I was toasted to a bright crimson. Australia day seems to be reserved for tanning, drinking and barbequeing. When I went to my hostel I found out I was the only girl in a room of 7 guys from Melbourne who had known each other since elementary school (the youngest in the group was now 28). They had been sailing all day and we were all tired from the sun, so instead of heading downstairs to party and avoid the many fights that broke out over rugby, we played a few games of cards until late in the night. After swimming in the lagoon for the morning I said goodbye
stinger station
found every 100 feet or so along the beach to my new friends and headed to Condor, a multi-million dollar racing yacht. The Condor has won every major yacht race in the world twice, there's only one other boat on the ocean to boast the same record. Sailing for three days on the Whitsundays was amazing. The island chain runs straight through the barrier reef and is full of life. We saw tonnes of little fish, sea turtles, jellyfish, dolphins, sharks, and some kind of special eagle that the crew flipped out about. Our crew was made up of Auss, an old skipper who hated being called skipper, Craig,a headstrong ginger kid from Sydney, and Myles, a 19-year-old boy from Victoria BC. Myles and I stayed up until 2 in the morning the first night talking about Canada and the island. In the end we decided that even though Canadians spend half of the year enduring temperatures that most people wouldn't subject a bag of frozen peas to, Canada is still the best place in the world to be. We both had to travel halfway around the globe to realize how lucky we are to grow up somewhere that has surfing, snowboarding, skiing, kayaking, canoeing, scuba diving, hiking, climbing,
and about a million other things to do on any given day, and our county's not full of a bunch of poisonous stuff like Australia is.
We spent two days hoisting sails, swinging booms and all that other sailing-type stuff along with at least 2 hours of snorkelling everyday. We stopped off on Whithaven beach, which is 97% silica, sunglasses are necessary to look at the gleaming white sand. The beach is the 4th most photographed place in Australia and is also the breeding grounds for a number of rays. The manta ray nests just look like little holes in the beach near the tide line.
Every evening we dropped anchor in nice coves here and there and drink tea while the stars came out. On the second night I slept up on the deck of the boat because it was too hot down below. After I got over my fear of rolling off the edge in the middle of the night it was a great place to sleep.
The sail back to Airlie beach was intense, it had the boat tipped right up to the rails at a rediculous angle. The sun had baked us all in spite of
whitehaven beach
the fourth most photographed place in Australia (after the opera house, harbour bridge, and ayers rock) layers of sunscreen and no one had touched water - other than seawater - for three days, we were an attractive bunch. On land we all split up to become clean and civilized and were to meet up at the hostle bar in the evening. I had no where to put my bags since I was taking a 2am bus, so Myles let me store them at his "house" (shack where 6 sailors live). I pretended to be in the dorms of one of the other girls on the boat and was able to shower in her hostel. The night was spent celebrating until late (I left at 2 and everyone else was still going) and I caught the bus exhausted, tanned, and with a promise of free whale watching with Myles' dad. It was good to stay out so late because the next leg of my trip was a 12 hour bus ride to Cairns.
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