Trip Notes

Somebody on the trip compiled a bunch of the videos people took. It's about 4 minutes and located here: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=42NvB09noy0

So our trip started off, at around 330 am as we headed down an empty open highway towards Fraser Island. We boarded one of the first ferries over to the island. The island is part of Great Sandy National Park and is the largest sand island in the world and a world heritage site. It had some pretty amazing sights and beautiful beeches and rainforests. Travelling around Fraser is pretty hectic. The major "highway" on the island is the beach! You just cruise along the sand ...during low tide only. And avoid one section that doubles as a airstrip - we had no idea until the plane came! Since you're advised to not swim in the ocean there becauseof sharks, we went swimming in two of the inland freshwater lakes -Lake Wabby and Mackenzie. Wabby is the one that is beside a massive sand dune in my photos. Every year the wind moves the sand towards the lake and it loses about 1-3 meters inwards each year. It was a pretty relaxing way to kick off the trip.

Our next stop was in the town of Agnes Waters and 1770. They are two tiny towns side by side. It's a pure surfer/beach town. They didn't get electricity until 1984!!! Some guy named "Ron", used to ride to Bundaberg once a week to pick up fresh foods, such as milk. Anyways, we hired out some surf boards and hit the beach. At night we went to there one bar, and oddly they were hosting a ping pong tourny. We thought what could be more fun. Turns out we were the least skilled people in hte tourny. It was like the olympic pingpong trials were taking place in 1770. We were back out on the water early next morning to get some surf in before taking off down the highway again.

We made a one night stop in Airlie Beach. There wasn't too much going there unless you are doing boat trip out the reef or whitsunday islands. We did spend the afternoon and fired up the barbie before leaving. Public barbeques is a fantastic thing! You can find them in almost every park or public place that I've been to. After Airlie we didn't know where we were going to stop. Then we saw a random highway sign for a national parkwith camping sites. So we decided to stay. Turned out to be one fantastic choice! The swimming area was called "paradise waterhole" and it was an area of a small river that widened out and got really deep. We just hung out there. Played in the water chasing fish and turtles and as you saw in the pics, worked on our flips. This was just a great day as we were in the middle of nowhere enjoying untalked about Australian outdoors.

Our next stop brought us to Mission Beach. It gots it named because it was a small town with some other name until it got devasted by a hurricane about 80 years ago. At which point people rallied together to help rebuild it "mission" style but there was no religious involvement. And for some reason the name stuck. The campsite we stayed at was meters from the beach. And the beach was awesome. It was like 50 meters of sand deep that was just perfectly flat. We stayed there for a couple days, kept ourselves busy by playing beach cricket and cracking open fresh coconuts- which is not as quick or easy as we had hoped. But still fun and delicious!


Anyways its time for state of origin - a rugby league battle between queensland and new south wales to determine which is the superior state. Clearly there is no doubt...go QUEEENSLAND! Tomorrow or the next day, I'll follow up iwth the next part and detail our amazing trip to the reef.