Finally – a day on a beach!

If you can imagine such a thing, we were playing volleyball on the best beach in the world. I mean imagine the beach, not that I was playing sport, but maybe you have a point…

We’d managed to get up, shower, go out and have breakfast, pack, and be out of the Cairns hostel by 8.15 in the morning, ready to board the Greyhound. It was already quite warm, and we made the most of sitting outside the coach before boarding at the last moment. We settled in, with books, iPods and sudoku, and the trip passed quickly enough. By 3.00pm we arrived in Townsville, about half way through our journey, and had to switch coaches, and drivers, which turned out to be a shame. The new coach must have been one of the oldest they had, if you see what I mean. We were sat in row 2, and the AC was barely reaching us. Imagine what is must have been like at the back of the coach. Michelle hadn’t yet noticed, as she was in the middle of a hot flush herself – three blonde surfer boys had got on the coach at this stop, and she was still trying to look as if she hadn’t noticed. Still, I think it helped her get through the 5 or so hours we had left…

We arrived in Airlie Beach on time, to be met by a horde of backpackers eager to get on the coach. Little did they know they would roast. Incidently, what would be the collective noun for backpackers? A ‘dorm’? A ‘wasted’? Perhaps a ‘stirfry’? No. An ‘Ollie’ of backpackers. There always seems to be an ‘Ollie’, with his mates Jem and Seb. And they were always ‘So wasted last night, they can’t remember what they did…’ Bless.

When we checked in to the hostel, which overlooks the beach and the lagoon, we had been upgraded from just a room to having our own bathroom too. This is a nice luxury, and we are both thankful, having spent 11 hours on a coach. It turns out that the rooms are all part of a shopping centre, and we have to go through the Thai restaurant we ate in last week to get to our room. Which is a little strange. We venture out for food, and find that the town is much quieter, and consequently much nicer, than it was during our last visit. We are back in the room by 10.00pm, and fall asleep quickly to the sound of people cooking in kitchens.

At 5.30am we are woken by the sound of people cleaning kitchens, and drilling, and sweeping, and after half an hour of trying to get back to sleep we give up and get up. Just before retiring the previous night we had stuck a load of washing into a machine in the Laundromat downstairs, so Michelle went and moved it all into a dryer for half an hour before we went out for breakfast. It did feel a little strange wandering around at 7 in the morning, but there were so many people around we quickly forgot what time it was, and nearly missed our pick up time.

Today is our trip out to The Whitsunday Islands, and Shane picks us up outside the hostel to take us down to the harbour and board the ‘Voyager’, our boat for the day. About 35 people are with us on the trip, and there is plenty of room aboard as we leave the harbour on time, under the command of Captain Stefan and his crew.

We leave the closed in air-conditioned room downstairs and set up upstairs, in the open air. As we sit waiting for the off, I hear a familiar tune – The Church’s Under The Milky Way is being played on the ship’s system just before departure. I wasn’t expecting that.
Once the vessel has cleared the harbour walls, it speeds up and the breeze upstairs is fantastic. We get the feeling that it could go a lot faster, too. Every so often Captain Stefan tells us to look left or right at this island or that island, and Michelle is chatting with a bloke from Sydney, while I sit and watch the scenery. After an hour or so we reach our first stop, the world famous Whitehaven Beach. We are all issued with stinger suits, and told that if we go in the water we should wear them, and then we are directed off the boat via a ladder into the shallow water at the beach. Within three steps you are on the beautiful white sands. It is the finest sand you will ever feel beneath your feet, and a totally unique experience. The beach itself is over 5km long, and for about 20 minutes us, and our fellow travellers, are the only ones on the beach, and Michelle and I go for a walk along the water.

A couple have put on their suits and are in the water. The bloke beckons us over as we pass, so we put our suits on and wade into the warm water to stand beside him. We look down and see a large number of silver fish, nearly a foot long, with brightly coloured tails, swimming around us. There’s a moment, I can tell you.

We wander back and sit down on the beach, and official photographer Marie gets us to pose in the water for some pictures for which we imagine we’ll have to avoid the hard sell later on, before Carla, the crew member on the beach with us, talks us into playing vollyball with three others.

The ball ends up in the water a lot, and running in to get it is the only way to cool down, and before we know it the boat is back and we wade in and up to the ladder and get back on board.

Lunch is served, and the salads are excellent. We eat as we are taken to the second destination, Hook Island. Everyone gets off the boat onto a jetty, which leads to an undersea chamber, which is incredibly claustrophobic, but offers some great views of the bottom of the sea. We board another vessel which has a glass panelled bottom, and go out to see the reef, and some of the wildlife. We see parrot fish, sea snakes, turtles, and even Nemo’s cousin. Apparently. Although how they could tell, we just don’t know…

Back on Hook Island there is snorkling to be had, and Michelle decides to give it a go, but comes back early because she just can’t do the breathing thing. I had tried before, so knew I couldn’t get on with it, and relaxed on the beach as most of the others went out.

By the time we got back on board the photo’s that Maria had taken were being shown on a big screen, and with no hard sell at all, she handed out cards and told us to let her know if we wanted any of the pics. We loved most of them, and settled on three, which were not only really good, but cheap too.

The last destination was ‘Dreamland’, essentially a resort destination, so we swam in the pool and chatted with a number of our fellow passengers. I’d agreed to go on this day-trip to keep Michelle happy, not really seeing it as an essential part of our trip, but I had to admit that afterwards I would have paid the fee just to ride around in the ‘Voyager’, let alone experience Whitehaven Beach and see some amazing creatures in the waters. After returning to dry land we ate early and cheaply, before both falling asleep exhausted, again to the sound of diners and kitchen workers.

The next day was flight day, so we checked out, dumped the bags in storage and set off to try and book a car for a couple of days time from Brisbane to get too Sydney in time for Christmas with Kirstie and Manu. Not as easy as it sounds. As we keep forgetting, it’s Christmas, and apparently all the people that live here like to have a few days off too, and go home, and consequently all the flights and hire cars are booked up. Europcar has a car, but want to charge us $150 for the priviledge of driving it one way to Sydney. Michelle’s not having that, so we spend two hours trying all the other companies, with no luck, concluding that it’s either the expensive car or back on the greyhound. We go back to Europcar.

We manage to squeeze in some breakfast before being picked up to go to the airport for our flight back down to Brisbane. All the way through the process no-one looks at our passports, and after an hour or so on the plane we get off and walk straight into an arrivals lounge to be met by our friend Annette, and her two kids, Declan and Kayleigh. We’re staying the night with them, and once we’d collected all the luggage, we all jumped in the car and hit a traffic jam heading into Brisbane.

Tom was already home by the time we got to their house in Mount Gravatt, south of Brisbane, and we caught up on news before he and Kayleigh took us up to the actual Mount Gravatt, from which views of Brisbane can be had while avoiding the various mountain bikers, tourists and snoggers that inhabit the area after dark. Back at the house, a fantastic takeaway curry was had on the verandah, with a few beers and lots of chatting before we retired to our bed – a mattress on the floor in Declan’s room.

Before going to sleep I flicked through a book published by Tom and Annette’s friend, based on his hitch-hiking trip around Australia. For each hitch he wrote a short story about the people, and took pictures, and as soon as I find out what it’s called I’ll plug it here.

The next morning Tom had gone to work but Annette and the kids had plans for us. After toast, coffee and showers we jumped in the car and drove out to Daisy Hill, a koala and wallaby sanctuary in a national park. One koala was asleep in the centre, and another was spotted way up high in one of the surrounding trees. On the short walk around we came across a pair of wallabies, and trying to respect their habitat, watched them eat some grass and look around. Just at this point a family sat down at one of the many picnic tables in the clearing nearby, spread their food across the table, and the wallabies shot off. Not back into the undergrowth, but to the table, where the family ended up feeding them pretty much most of their picnic.

We wanted to buy lunch for our hosts, so we headed for the Alibi Rooms, where our friend James had left details of how to get to the other koala sanctuary. He’d also left instructions that we were to have a $30 tab, too – proving what a nice bloke he is – which we used to buy a selection of food for us, Annette, Declan and Kayleigh, before waving goodbye and heading back to the Bowen Terrace, where we started our visit to Brisbane all those, er, days ago, for a one night stay. Tomorrow we begin the trek down to Sydney, and Christmas on the beach. Yet again our hosts had been fantastic in giving up their time to show us around, feed us and let us sleep in their house. We already owe a lot of people a lot of return visits, and there was more to come…

That evening we walked down Brunswick Street and found an organic burger joint in Fortitude Valley called ‘Burger Urge’. Michelle wisely suggested we share a mushroom burger having seen the size of the plates of food coming out of the kitchen, and we still struggled to eat everything on the plate before waddling back to our room, which this time had French doors opening onto a balcony. We sat outside - me writing and Michelle reading - while possums and bats battled on the roof and in the mango tree which overlooks the garden. No, really.

The next day we met up with James again at The Alibi Rooms and had some breakfast before saying goodbye and getting the bus into the city. I called in to see a friend of Tom and Annette’s called Rick, who ran a second hand CD store in Queen Street called Egg Records, while Michelle went off to see the gardens near the central train station. Rick was way more of a music nerd than I could ever hope to be, sorted me out with some Church CDs I needed to complete my collection, gave me some tips on which bands to try and see in Sydney, and made me promise to go back soon. We had booked our car for 1.00pm, so we walked the length of Queen Street to the Europcar office, where we got upgraded (for nothing) to a brand new Renault Megane, with 10km on the clock. It only took me three attempts to get in the correct lane before we stopped going round in a circle, we picked up our bags from Bowen Terrace, assured John and Lauren we would be back, and set off for the M1 south.

Like we hadn’t driven far enough yet…