Sun, Sea, Sand and...BEER!!

G’day all!

It’s only been like two weeks since I wrote the last blog but so much has happened over the past two weeks that I have a feeling that this is going to be a rather long blog entry!

Last time I left you, I was in Airlie beach, staying in a rather nice hostel and I had been drinking with some Irish guys from my Oz Experience bus! The following day I woke up after the best nights sleep I’ve had so far because I was alone in a dorm for a night meaning no people leaving the dorm at silly times waking me up! Most of the day was boring just sorting out laundry and stuff for my Whitsundays trip. However, in the afternoon I had a voucher for a free didgeridoo lesson which I thought I may as well use. It was so much fun and I’m glad I did it. I have to say though that it really is as hard to play as it looks! I managed to play it with ease but the breathing technique is so difficult and completely different from playing any wind instrument! After the lesson, I went for a well earned beer with some of the guys I met at the lesson and inevitably one beer turned into many! However, I had to call it a night fairly early as I had to be up early to get on board a boat which would become my home for the next three days!

The following morning (1st December) I was up early and got on the bus to the port to board the ‘Southern Cross’ which was a former racing sail boat. We were given some fruit when we got on and then we introduced ourselves to each other. After about an hour of being on the water, we turned off the engine and put up the sails (which was pretty hard work) and went for a sail for a few hours. As I mentioned earlier, this boat used to be a real racing boat, so once the sails were up one side of the boat would tilt upwards which is the side we would sit on. We got to our first destination and went snorkeling around the reef for just over an hour. This snorkeling experience was actually better than the one I had in the Cairns section of the Great Barrier Reef! The coral itself was beautiful but there was so many more fish here and I saw and swam with two sea turtles! As soon as we finished the snorkel, we were given a much needed lunch before sailing around more of the islands until we reached our evening stop off. We anchored for the night and were given a ‘snack ‘ of nachos and then an amazing Thai curry for dinner! We were pretty lucky that the girl working on board our boat loved cooking and was very good at it. After dinner, we cranked up the music, got out the beers and had a small party on board!

The next morning, we were up early largely due to the sun and how hot it got where we were sleeping but also because the skipper decided to turn on the engine of the boat at 6am! We had breakfast and then set off to go to what is often called the most beautiful beach in the world, White Haven beach. I have to say that the beach did not disappoint. We got there and first went to a lookout point over the beach and the colour of the water was so unbelievably clear and next to it was the whitest sand that I have ever seen! We went down from the lookout point onto the actual beach and it was more like walking on talcum powder than sand. The sand at White Haven Beach is 98% silica so it is extremely fine and pure making it incredibly soft and it felt so good to walk on. The water itself was so clear and there were stingrays swimming around with us (apparently there was sharks too but none of us saw any). We spent a fairly long time at White Haven and the only thing that ruined paradise was the amount of boats that got there at the same time we did, the beach was way too crowded to fully appreciate it!

We left the beach and got back on our boat to have lunch and then move on to another place to go snorkeling. Once again, this was an amazing snorkel experience because we saw a reef shark, which are harmless to humans but the sheer size of it and the way it swam next to us was a breath taking moment. Following these two amazing experiences, we got back on the boat and sailed to our evening stop, had dinner and then spent the evening drinking! We were up much later than the previous evening but eventually everyone retreated to bed so I had to sleep on my shelf. I say shelf because my bed was literally like a shelf on the wall, I was so close to the roof that everytime I turned over my arms and even my head sometimes would touch it, but that’s all part of living on a boat!

On our third and final day, we were up early again and we went for an early morning snorkel where we saw hundreds of different types of fish but the water was a little cold in the morning so we didn’t stay in there for too long! The rest of the day we spent sailing and the skipper gave me a chance to drive the boat for a pretty long period of time! We got back in the late afternoon and after freshening up and having a real shower (on the boat we were allowed only a 30second shower in cold water) I met up with the people on our boat for dinner and some drinks. I think that I got very lucky with the group that I had on the Whitsundays because everyone really got on with one another and everyone made the effort to talk to different people so it worked pretty well! Most of the people on my boat left early from dinner as we all had buses to catch the next day but I stayed on with a guy from my hostel for what was meant to be one pint but became 4jugs of beer instead!

The next morning I was up pretty early again because I had to catch a bus. It was pretty weird because for that whole day I felt like I was still on a boat and walking on land felt really strange! Anyway, the 4th December was a pretty boring day because it was spent on a 10hour bus journey from Airlie Beach to a place called Kroombit which is a compulsory stop for those on the Oz Expereince bus. It was a stop that I was pretty skeptical about too because it was a stay on a farm/cattle ranch where we had to do certain activities. However, I was to be proved wrong by Kroombit and I shouldn’t have made an assumption about it before I got there!

Everyone got to Kroombit feeling a little tired and jaded after this marathon bus journey so we were given an hour to chill out before we had to do anything. We were then served dinner where the non-vegies got a horrible looking meal that they all loved and I was given some good old tortellini! After dinner, we were taught how to ‘crack a whip’ which I managed to do pretty successfully and then everyone was given a chance to ride the mechanical bull they had there. As much as I would have loved to do this, I had to say no because of my back and neck injury! After the bull riding, some of the younger staff from the farm decided it was a good time to play drinking games. I was horrified by this not because I don’t enjoy drinking games but because I always seem to lose them (people at Nottingham will vouch for that). However, we played a game called ‘flip cup’ which involved downing a drink and then flipping a cup and hoping it will land the right way up and then the next person on your team can drink, it turned out that I was the hero twice and the team was chanting my name (well It was ‘Lennon’ because that’s what was on the back on my England shirt that night!). After this most people got stupidly drunk but I just headed off to bed and I’m glad I did!

The next morning (5th December) we were woken up at 5.30am by the owner of the farm revving his quad bike outside our rooms telling us that we were all ‘lazy and he had been awake for an hour already’. Luckily we were given breakfast straight away otherwise there would have been several angry people on the Oz Experience bus! After breakfast, we had some activities that were arranged for us including clay pigeon shooting with a shotgun which was awesome and then the very interesting activity of capturing and branding a goat. We were put into teams of three and put in an empty pen, one of our team members had to go into another pen which had about 100goats and shepheard it out of there. We then had to pick up the goat and place it on it’s side and then had to pretend to brand it with a branding rod which was NOT hot! Luckily for me, I had this crazy English rugby player in my team who ran straight into the pen with goats, picked one out and flipped it. All I had to do was ‘brand’ the goat while the girl in our group did nothing! Our time was by far the quickest out of all the groups but it would be wrong of me to take any credit for it! It was definitely thanks to Richie that we won. After this rather strange but fun experience, we headed off on another long bus journey to Rainbow Beach.

Once again I was feeling pretty tired after this long journey but luckily for me there was a familiar face waiting for me at my hostel in Rainbow Beach and she even made dinner for me! I met up with Ali, a mate I had made in Perth and considering it was the last time that I was going to see her in Australia we decided to make it an epic night and we both ended up getting pretty wasted and poor Ali had to get up early the next morning to catch a bus to another place!
The next day (6th December) I intended on having a lie in but everyone in my dorm left at 6.30am to go to Fraser Island and they made so much noise! The air conditioning was also on a timer and it had switched off for the day already so the room was baking and there was no chance I was getting back to sleep. I got up feeling a little worse for wear or ‘sensitive’ as some may call it and after a shower I went for breakfast with a guy I had met the previous night. I had a free day in Rainbow Beach that day, but there is absolutely nothing to do there, the town is just one street of over priced shops targeting the tourists like me who are only there to go to Fraser Island. I had a safety meeting in the afternoon about our trip to Fraser Island the following day and I met the 10 other people who I would be spending the next three days with. The safety meeting itself was extremely boring but the guy that owns the car rental company (I’ll explain about the cars in a minute) was hilarious, he was an extremely eccentric Aussie guy who had some classic lines which I have started saying now. I don’t really know how to describe this guy but he truly was one of a kind!

From the safety briefing, I went to a huge sand dune near the hostel. It was pretty odd because you could walk from one end of the dune to the other and at one end was the sea and at the other was a forest. We stayed here and watched yet another beautiful sunset before heading back to the hostel for a $5 dinner! I had dinner with two of the girls in my Fraser Island group who I ended up becoming really good friends with and hopefully when we’re back in the UK we’ll all meet up! After dinner I had a few beers and then hit the sack early because I had to be up early the next day.

Ok, before I describe the actual Fraser Island trip, let me tell you a bit about how the trip is meant to work. The day before you head off to Fraser Island which is the largest sand island (meaning that there is nothing but sand here, no mud etc yet vegetation still grows) in the world, you have this safety briefing where you are put into groups of 11. Everyone who has been to Fraser Island will tell you that how good or bad your experience is purely depends on the group you have because you do pretty much everything together and you have to work as a team because there is no tour guide with you. In my group, there were 9 girls, myself and one other guy but we seemed to be the youngest group of the 5 that were setting off the following day. In your group of 11, you’re given a big 4 wheel drive jeep and everything you’ll need for the trip – food, tents etc. The company give you an itinerary but it is up to you and the group whether or not you stick to it, but once on the island it is about you and your group!

So the next morning, we were up early and after a free breakfast of pancakes we were ready to go by about 7am but we didn’t actually leave until about 10am because we had to load up the car and then the drivers had to get taught how to use the car. As much as I love driving, I wasn’t allowed to drive because I’m not 21 so the insurance wouldn’t have covered me to drive on the island. Finally, we left Rainbow Beach and got on a ferry to Fraser Island. It didn’t take long for the 5 cars to separate (there were 4 other groups leaving at the same time as us) but eventually we ran into them (not literally because that would have been a disaster) again on the beach when a jeep full of Irish people had lost a wheel… It could only happen to the Irish! We felt bad for them for about 5minutes before we headed off to Eli Creek for some lunch and we soon learnt what being on a sand island meant. Sand gets everywhere and we were literally having SANDwiches for lunch! After a few meals there, you get used to the crunch of sand in whatever you’re eating!

After lunch we stopped off at a really cool ship wreck on the beach before heading to a place called Indian Head. This was a really cool lookout point at the top end of the island where you could see into the water and see stingrays, sharks and turtles swimming in the sea! We spent about half an hour here admiring the scenery before heading off to find our campsite and set up camp for the night. We got to the campsite and it was getting dark pretty quickly so we had to put up the tents quickly and get cooking asap. By the time we had dinner it was pitch black and the only light source we had was one torch between 11 of us! After dinner we started playing drinking games and a lot of the group got pretty drunk. We met an Irish guy from one of the other groups who started doing impressions of Merv (the guy that owned the cars) and he was hilarious! Most ofour group went to bed early (probably the smart decision) but four of us stayed up and went and sat on the beach under the stars for an hour or so.

The next morning, we were up really early because of the sun rising and how hot it got in the tents by about 5am! We had breakfast, packed up the campsite and headed towards Lake Mackenzie where we would spend the day. The drive to Lake Mackenzie was amazing, it was through really thick soft sand, something that most people struggled to get through but we had a Dutch girl in our group who was amazing at driving through the soft sand and got us through it with minimal problems. A lot of other people struggled with the drive and I know of some groups that never made it to Lake Mackenzie, which meant they missed out big time. I said earlier about how amazing White Haven Beach was but honestly, I think Lake Mackenzie was more astonishing. It was a lake high up on the island with a beach and the clearest and purest water I have ever swam in. The water is so pure that you can drink it with no dramas. We spent the whole day at Lake Mackenzie and to be honest, I could happily go there everyday for a week because it was so amazing!
We left Lake Mackenzie in the late afternoon and headed to our campsite for the night. The drive back was harder than the drive there and we did get stuck twice and we had to push the jeep out of the sand which was fun but hard work! We got to the campsite and made some dinner and then the drinking began. I bought a crate of 24beers before we got to Fraser Island and I vowed that I would not be taking any of the beers of the island which meant that I had to finish them all that night. I finished them with ease but then two Irish guys asked me to help them finish all this Vodka Lemonade they had bought and after a few of those I was wasted. I went and sat on the beach with the two English girls for a long time. I saw at least four shooting stars that night, it was really quite amazing!

We went to sleep at about 2.30am and by 5am I was awake again (still a little drunk) thanks to the sun. We made scrambled eggs for breakfast and then drove around the island for a few hours before getting back on the ferry home. I have to say, that as amazing and beautiful as the Whitsunday Islands were, my three days on Fraser island have been the best 3days of my travels so far. I think this was largely due to the amazing group of people that were with me and I’m hoping that we will all stay in touch with each other for a very long time! I have failed to mention some key details about Fraser Island including there were no showers for us so we spent three days covered in sand, there were no toilets at the campsites we stayed at so everything had to be done outside and there were wild dingos roaming the campsites at night looking for any food they could find! As disgusting/scary as you think that all is, Fraser Island is a MUST DO trip on the East coast of Australia!

When we got back to the hostel at Rainbow Beach, I went for the most satisfying shower I’ve ever had. I spent the rest of the afternoon with Anna and Jess (the two English girls) and then in the evening the whole group got together and we made dinner together which was pretty cool! After dinner, most of the group went to bed as they all had buses to catch early the next morning but I had a free day the next day so naturally I ended up at the hostel bar drinking with people from my room. The next day was a pretty boring day, I spent the morning with the Fraser crew before they all left and in the afternoon I did the fun tasks of laundry, facebooking etc. In the evening, there was a bush fire about 20km away from Rainbow Beach which had burnt down some power lines nearby meaning a power cut for most of Rainbow Beach. I spent the evening listening to music whilst lying under the stars. It’s little things like watching the sunset and seeing the stars every night that makes me love Australia so much!

The next morning (11th December) I was up pretty early to go on a short journey (short being 3hours) from Rainbow Beach to Noosa. I got to Noosa, had a shower and then went back into the town centre for a walk around. I decided to go for a walk in the National Park which was beautiful! I took the longest walk and I had been walking for almost 2hours when my worst nightmare occurred… I was walking on the footpath minding my own business when something moved about half a meter in front of me. I looked down to see a brown snake about 4ft long slithering right across my path. I swore so loudly that it scared the snake, the snake looked at me and was probably as scared of me as I was of it and it quickly slithered off. I stood for about 10minutes calming myself down and convincing myself to carry on. I eventually did continue with the walk, but I was walking incredibly quickly and not really taking any of the scenery in because I was so scared! I made it back to the town with no more snakes being spotted and I went straight to the pub for a beer to calm myself down. I stayed in town for a while and met up with Anna and Jess, who were also in Noosa, for a very tasty and cheap Mexican meal. We were joined by a Swedish guy who I had met in Cairns and been running into everywhere I had been since. After dinner, the Swedish guy and I went back to our hostel and the girls went to theirs and we ended up drinking with some crazy Aussie guys!

The next day (12th December), I was up early for a day that I was very excited about, a trip to Steve Irwin’s zoo – Australia zoo. I spent the day walking around with two Scottish girls that I had met in Rainbow Beach and I have to say the three of us were extremely disappointed by the zoo. It was just like any other zoo, there was nothing special about it apart from the pictures of Steve everywhere. We went to several shows and they were so bad, it seemed like a bunch of pretenders trying to be Steve Irwin. I saw loads of cool animals but they are animals that could be seen at any other zoo. I guess I just had such high expectations for the zoo and they disappointed big time! I would like to have seen what the zoo was like before Steve died, because I’m sure everything would have seemed a lot more authentic when he was around!
I’m currently in Byron Bay and tomorrow I head off to Surf Camp tomorrow for one night, so in my next blog installment (whenever that may be) I’m sure I’ll have an interesting story to tell about my surfing experiences!

Other than that, I’m home in a month now so I’m on the final straight of my trip which as you can imagine I’m not happy about! I hope all is well back home!

Mihir