East Coast of Australia

Matt and I have been very busy these last few months.
We quit our jobs 2 months ago and went on a 6 week, 7183km road trip up the East coast of Australia. We got as far north as Cape Tribulation. The idea was to get a little sunshine in before our trip to Japan (2nd winter in a row… *sigh*). Highlights of roadtrip:

- Breweries: Townsville Brewery, Blue Sky Brewery – Cairns, Murrays Brewery, just north of Newcastle. Lady at Murrays gave us a free taste of all the beers they had there (in a shot glass). There were so many delicious beers!

- Byron Bay lighthouse walk. Saw shit loads of whales! They were so cool. We saw a mum with her two kids, they got real close to shore, we could hear them breathing. We stayed at this really cool hostel, where the room was more of a canvas tent than anything. Cheap food, and free music.

- Steve Erwin – Australia Zoo. Uncle Ken got Matt and I tickets to the zoo. It was pretty damn good. My fave was the tiger talk, and the random lizards everywhere.

- Glasshouse mountains. Would have been nice to climb up one of them, we were on a tight time schedule though.

- Awesome rainforests, vines, ferns tall trees, general greenery, huge bats, tonnes of birds and wallabies – Daintree NP and Mary Cairncross Park.

- Day long boat trip around the Whitsundays. So good! Beautiful beaches! The most awesome soft white sand I’ve ever come across. (Whitsunday islands 34)

-Following GPS directions

- Walking/bussing around Magnetic Island. There was this old world war two fort which was really cool, some koalas on the walk up, and these tiny brown chocolate bats in the powder keg room. Had a swim at this really nice quite beach.

- We saw a freakin cassowary driving to Wallaman Falls! We saw the cassowary warning road sign, and it ran out on the road right behind the sign, that never happens! Apparently there’s only a little over 1000 left in the wild, we were really lucky to see it.

- Cairns festival, free flea circus!

- Scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef – we did a three day dive trip with Pro Dive. I did a two day learn to dive course, and Matt did a refresher. Matt did 11 open water dives and I did 8 in total. I didn’t really love it all that much, people are meant to be on the surface of the water, not underneath it. Going down the first few times was really awful for me, I got used to it after a while though. I hadn’t been drinking enough water though, and ended up being really dehydrated by the last day of the trip and had to miss out on one of the dives. We did get to see some really freakin’ cool shit though: turtles, reef sharks, seas cucumber, sting ray, giant clams, nemo (aka clown fish), 10 millions types of different fish of all different shapes and sizes. My favourite fish was the unicorn fish, and a massive school of these huge bump fish.

- We also went scuba diving at a 100 year old ship wreck, the S.S.Yongala. Meant to be a great dive, coz all that’s around it is sand, so all the sea life just hangs around this ship covered in coral. We saw some great shit, massive manta rays and eagle rays, leopard shark and a moray eel. The only problem was that the dive company was super dodgy, didn’t give us dive partners, didn’t do buddy checks on our equipment before diving, really old shitty rusted out transport vehicle with no seat belts, didn’t give a shit about the well being of anyone on the boat except the single female. I asked to go up, coz I was cold, and it took the guide 5 mins to scribe a message to the single female to see if she wanted to go up, and another 7 or so mins to get to the surface. The water was super rough and I got really bad sea sickness, voming all over the side of the boat. Really shit waste of 250 bucks. Oh well.


- Cairns, thirty degree weather, good/cheap hostel, hippy shops, delicious Mexican restaurant.

- Scenic Railway and Skyrail. Cool long gondola over a whole bunch of trees, and scenic railway to get you back, few walks/waterfalls on the way. Very nice.

We flew to Canada last week. We're here so Matt can get his working holiday Visa for Japan. Pain in the butt we couldn't get just get it in Australia. We've been saved a lot of the cost for flying all over by the generosity of this wonderful family, who are friends with Matt's mum, who work for air Canada. One member of the family flew all the way to Australia to come and get us so we can get the reduced rates. We're very grateful, such a wonderful/generous thing to have done for us.

We'll fly to Japan in late November. Fingers crossed all goes well.