The end of the road

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As I'm sure most of you have heard by now, our trip is coming to an end quickly. Today is our last day in Australia so I will be seeing you all very soon!
Since we got back from New Zealand we have been constantly on the move trying to do and see everything we wanted to. Our first weekend we went to Noosa and relaxed by the beach for a few days. It was nice to get back to the heat after freezing in NZ! There was a surfing competition going on while we were there as well so that was cool to check out. Next we went on our highly anticipated trip to Fraser Island. As soon as you step foot in Australia everywhere you go people are trying to sell you tours to Fraser Island and the Whitsundays. So naturally we bought the first package someone tried to sell us way back in Byron Bay and left the dates open so we could do it later on in our trip. People talk up both of these trips so much so we had really high expectations going into it. Fraser Island is the worlds largest sand island and has tons of fresh water lakes on it. We got put into groups of 11 people and hired these massive 4wd trucks to drive around the island on. We camped out for 2 nights and checked out the island during the day. It is a really beautiful place but our trip didn't go as well as we had hoped. Our group just wasn't mixing very well... And we had a bit of car trouble. We awoke after our first night in Fraser, ate brekky, packed the whole truck up (which is quite the process I must add) and all piled in only to find out that our car wouldn't start! So we had to call the mechanic and after a couple hours of waiting in the heat on the beach he finally arrived. This wouldn't have been so bad, lying on a beautiful beach in the sun, but we couldn't go in the ocean to cool down because there are too many sharks and the current is way too strong so needless to say we sweated it out. Once the mechanic finally arrived his genious idea was to tow our truck with his up over a sand dune back onto the beach. The rope ended up breaking 5 times and on his last attempt it actually flew back and smashed his rear window! It was quite the scene. Anyways, eventually our car was back in business and we were on our way. Unfortunately it was our only full day on the island and we didn't actually get going until 2 so we were pretty rushed. Regardless the sites on the island were gorgeous and we even saw a dingo which are actually a big problem on Fraser. The rangers continually remind us of the 9 year old boy who was killed by dingos a couple years ago so we don't leave any food around our campsite. After Fraser, we went to Airlie Beach where we did our sailing trip around the Whitsundays. This was more successful than our fraser experience. We had a really good group of people on our boat and the weather was perfect for us. The first day we sailed to the island we were staying on and partied all night with the people on our boat and the following day we spent a couple of hours on one of the worlds top 10 most beautiful beaches, Whitehaven beach. It truly was beautiful mainly because there was no development on the island and the sand was so white and soft it felt like flower to touch. We saw a massive python on the island too... I'd show you a picture but once again my camera is out of commission. I know.. just my luck. Anyways, Dayna and I decided it would be a great idea to swim back to the boat which was floating about 100m off shore. What we didn't realize was that the current was extremely powerful. Dayna being a really good swimmer wasn't having too much trouble but I on the other hand was swimming forwards but actually moving backwards. Everyone was back on the boat by this time and thought this was just hilarious. They had to send out the dingy to rescue us. How embarrassing! The rest of the day we spent relaxing on the boat while we sailed back to the island. There weren't as many people partying the second night but there was a good group of us who didn't let that stop us. We played some interesting drinking games that I can't really mention on here and ended up partying to the wee hours of the morning. The next morning as we are walking down the jetty (dock) I look to Dayna and say is that our boat sailing away!? Sure enough it was - we had missed it! Luckily there were 2 boats so we hopped on the other one. Funny enough there were 7 of us who had missed our boat and the majority of them were the ones who had been out with us the previous night. Once we got to the spot we were going snorkelling we transfered back onto our boat, put on our sexy stinger suits and hopped in the water. I was pretty disappointed with the snorkelling as you couldn't really see too much of anything except when people were throwing bread at you and all the fish swormed at you. It was quite scary really. Because we were dissapointed with the snorkelling in the Whitsundays, we decided we better go on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef once we were up in Cairns. We went on a 2 day snorkelling trip to the reef where we slept on the boat. This trip was a lot more high class than the Whitsundays which really was just a big party. We got served amazing food and lounged around on the sun deck when we weren't in the water and we got to go snorkelling 4 times a day at 3 different places on the reef. We really wanted to try our hand at scuba diving while we were in the best dive location in the world so we splurged and paid for an introductory dive. They were really nonchalent about the whole thing but we were actually pretty nervous to sink to the bottom of the ocean where there are sharks and all that fun stuff. Dayna was more scared to do this than jump out of a plane from 12 000 feet. Regardless our guide gave us a quick demo and down we went. He took me down first and left me down there hanging onto a poll while he went back to the surface to get Dayna. It was hard to get used to the breathing and how to equalize your ears b/c of the pressure and being down there on my own I was freaking out a bit. But, you get used to it really quickly and being surrounded in this whole other world you forget all about being scared. The best way to describe it would be to say that we felt like we were in Finding Nemo! It was actually the most amazing thing I've ever seen and nothing compares to it. I was fascinated by everything around me. Tropical fish swimming everywhere with massive colourful clams and plants and coral! Seeing the reef and the amazing world under the sea made our trip complete. We had now travelled all the way up the East Coast and had done everything we had wanted and more. We flew from Cairns down to Melbourne where we had a lot of fun. It's a really nice city but we were freezing down there and were happy to get back to the sun in Syndey which was our final destination. We spent the day at the beach on my birthday and went out with Jessie and Tiffany's boyfriend John at night. It was a messy night with everyone buying me shots and such but we had a blast. It was definitely a birthday to remember. And now here we are the day before we leave and looking back on this trip I can honestly say that I had the time of my life. I couldn't have asked for a better person to travel with and I wouldn't want to do it any differently than we did. I'm sad that this is all over but it's time to join you all back in reality!


# of days away from home - 157
# of hours spent travelling by bus/plane - 135
# cameras broken - 2
# of shoes lost/broken - 4
# of boxes of goon drank - don't even want to know
# of books read - 5
# of boys that caught my interest - none of your business!


Thanks for reading and see you all soon!

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