Wow soooooo much has happened since the last time i wrote! cyclones, power cuts, floods, rodeo's, mechanical bulls, shotguns, lagoons, truck rides, and sooooo much more, its hard to know where to start!

Ok, lets start at the beginning.......so last you knew we had had an awesome day in a barbie car on Magnetic Island aka paradise. Well, on the tuesday we all got the ferry back across to Townsville and hopped on the Oz bus with driver Guido (who by the way was really really funny.........'awesome!'). We were headed to airlie beach, which unfortunately was quite a boring journey as was straight along the bruce highway passing pretty much nothing. The only two places we passed through that were worth mentioning were the towns of Ayr and Bowen, which is the main mango producing town (and yes they had a big mango there.......remember the 'big things' that i mentioned before?!), and it is also the town where the film 'australia' was shot, hence why they have 'Bowenwood' painted on the side of a building at the top of a hill....their claim to fame!lol!

So anyway, eventually we arrived at our hostel 'beaches' in airlie beach whihc is where we were due to catch our boat out to the whitsunday islands and the great barrier reef on friday, a trip which we had booked and paid for from home. On arrival though, it was apparent that due to bad weather and the threat of a cyclone many boats were being cancelled, but we just had to wait and see. Now the only problem was that most days it was a case of 10minutes sun and 10 minutes rain constantly, and the thing about airlie beach is that once you have walked the one street, and been to the lagoon, there is really nothing else to do! So after finding out on thursday that our boat was definately going to be cancelled, and also being told that the cyclone was due over the weekend but we could not get a bus out until monday, we really had nothing to do but to sit and wait to get battered by the cyclone! Washing all done, books read, and last blog updated, it turned out to be quite a boring few days, the highlight of which was a bus trip to the supermarket where we stocked up on food for in case the cyclone hit!

Come saturday, the cyclone Ului had gone back up in strength to a category 3 out of 5 and all windows were being taped. Mid-afternoon and management came in telling us that we needed to be evacuated to another room upstairs because there was a strong chance that our room would flood. Settled in to our new room for the night.......myself, Katie, Gillian, Lucy and Kate all got set for what was expected to be a long night, keeping updated on the news. About 11.30 we lost television signal and the weather outside was already pretty bad with palm tree branches already flying around. Not long after, just before midnight and all power was lost......with nothing else to do, we decided to try and get some sleep whilst we could. Awake on and off throughout the night because of the winds and rain, we all woke up in the morning to find that the cyclone had hit and gone without really affecting us personally, other than a puddle on the floor in our room!

When going outside the damage became more apparent.....no power was expected for at least a few days, nowhere was open at all, the was debris everywhere, and sure enough what had been our dorm room the night before, had flooded with water and mud. Whilst the hostel were quick to get clearing up etc, we were given no information on what was going on, and with neither power nor signal, we could not get in touch with anyone either. Not really sure where the day of sunday went, and sunday evening was spent in our dorm room, us five and two guys Kyle and Liam (who had been on our bus previously), with torches on from when it got dark about 6.30pm, playing uno and the names game. At 10pm, we finally decided we'd had enough of surviving in the dark and all went to bed, ready for our early pick-up in the morning.

That was two days ago now, so still much more to tell but that's it for the minute........will explain the rest tomorrow form our next location, Rainbow Beach.

miss you all so much, and love you all lots and lots xxxxxxxxxx