In an uncharacteristic display of generosity, our tour guides Brent and Lisa allowed us all to have a lie in on our final morning on Daydream Island, before crossing back to the mainland and being taken for breakfast at the local botanical gardens - or at least, that's what they clearly wanted us to think. Personally, I reckon there simply wasn't an earlier boat, and they just wanted it to appear as though they were feeling bad about all the early starts we had been having to put up with during the tour so far. We didn't have much time to stop anywhere on the way from Daydream Island to Rockhampton - we paused briefly to stretch our legs at the small towns of Mackay and Tooloomba, but mostly we just spent the day on the coach. Unfortunately, when we finally arrived at our destination, one of the women in our group, Irene, managed to break her leg when she fell down an embankment. This meant that we had to deviate from our planned route in order to drop her off at the local hospital before going on to the hotel, and after she had been examined by a doctor it was decided that she would be unable to continue any further with us. What with people leaving and joining us at various points along the way, it was almost starting to feel as though we were taking part in one of those reality TV shows where people get booted out or leave due to injury and whoever is left at the end is the winner. What must have made the accident a double blow for Irene was that she had only had a few days of the tour to go before she was leaving anyway to fly on to New Zealand for another tour there. We never did find out how well she recovered or whether she ever got to New Zealand, but we hoped that they would somehow manage to put her leg in plaster and allow her to carry on with crutches.

On arrival in Rockhampton, we pulled up outside a place with the magnificently over the top name of the Aboriginal Dreamtime Cultural Centre, and this is where Irene ended up breaking her leg. The experience at the cultural centre was actually broken up into three sections (a bit like Irene's leg, some might say), and the group was immediately split up as soon as we got through the door as though we were schoolchildren on a day trip to the local museum. It was at the boomerang throwing show that Irene had her accident - although not, as you might expect, due to a boomerang coming back and hitting her. What actually happened would probably have been funny if it hadn't ended up being so serious - she was standing on a grass verge overlooking the display area, watching a guide demonstrate the correct way to throw a boomerang, when she decided she'd like a better look and took a step forward, totally forgetting that she was standing on the top of a verge. After rolling head over heels down the slope and landing in a heap at the bottom, she was immediately very keen to let us all know that she was fine and that we shouldn't fuss over her, but changed her mind a few seconds later when she found that she couldn't get up. While Irene was carted off into the building and fussed over whether she liked it or not, an Aboriginal guide showed the rest of us the correct way to throw a boomerang so that it comes back rather than disappearing into the distance - contrary to popular belief, they don't just automatically return to your hand by magic simply because of the shape. There is more than a little skill involved, and if you don't throw the boomerang correctly then it will stubbornly refuse to come back, often ending up knocking spectators over like skittles as happened on more than one occasion when our group began to give it a try. Dad nearly hit the wife of our laughing policeman friend Arno in the head a couple of times before Arno, holding his chest and roaring with laughter, called out "Third time lucky". Boomerangs, by the way, do not have to be bent - this is a popular misconception from the west. In fact, they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be used for anything from hunting to beating drums to close combat. The curved boomerang we are most familiar with is more correctly known as a returning boomerang - it is used, among other things, as a hunting stick which can be thrown vertically to travel in a straight line and take down a kangaroo, or in a curve to disturb the branches of a distant tree and scare the birds into flying into a net.

As well as spending our time throwing bendy sticks around, we were also given a demonstration of how to play the didgeridoo from a white guy who claimed to have spent a couple of weeks learning the art from a full blooded Aborigine. It was never really clear to me, given the number of actual Aborigines at the centre, why we weren't being shown this by any of them, to be honest. The guy who gave us the demonstration seemed quite smug about the whole thing, and took great pleasure in handing the instrument over to each of us in turn, smirking as we made it emit various farting noises, and then taking it back and showing us again how it should be done. Since the art of playing the didj has a lot to do with being able to breath and blow at the same time in order to maintain a constant sound - an art known as circular breathing, and requiring the ability to keep air in the cheeks and replenish it through the nose while blowing with the mouth - there wasn't really much chance of anyone picking it up in the time we had. We just patted ourselves on the back for being able to get any sound out of the thing at all, and looked at our teacher with disdain as we left the room.

The third and final area of the cultural centre was more of a museum of Aboriginal history - although, in the typical Australian style of making everything as high-tec as possible in these places, this was done through a combination of visual displays and animatronic exhibits which would suddenly leap into life as you approached them and scare the willies out of you. You could always tell who was on our tour for the beaches and who actually wanted to learn anything, as a number of people from the coach were in the habit of walking straight past anything which looked as though it might be anything approaching educational. Ironically, it was usually the younger members of the group who stood around carefully reading the little information plates and pressing all the buttons, and the older ones who made their way straight through to the cafeteria - so the next time somebody of an advanced age decides to tell you that people just don't want to learn anything like they did in their day, give them a smack from me!

The main topic of conversation at dinner, of course, was the position regarding Irene and the news that had been relayed to us by Lisa at the hospital that she would not be able to carry on with the tour. Also, a rumour had started to circulate that Brent had been to a doctors appointment earlier in the day while we were at the Aboriginal Cultural Centre and had been told that he was too sick to go on with the tour - according to the rumour, AAT Kings were saying that they would fly a new driver in to replace him in the morning. I don't know how these rumours get started, but this one turned out to be something of an amalgam of Chinese whispers which had been going around the group for the last couple of days. Brent had been feeling a little under the weather since we arrived on Daydream Island, which was why he had arranged a doctors appointment in the first place, and a number of people had commented on how pale he looked before taking it upon themselves to discuss his supposed medical problems with everyone in sight. When Brent turned up later, he explained that he had simply been advised that he might like to rest up for a couple of days but that he had not liked the idea and said that he would carry on. This got a mixed reaction, from those of us who cheered and expressed how happy we were that we weren't going to lose him, to those who obviously had images in their head of him collapsing into a coma at the wheel and the coach driving straight off a cliff. Some people were clearly still a little suspicious of Australian coach drivers, having obviously not forgotten the experience of being driven across the desert by our first driver, Mike, with a knackered suspension, a story which I will relate in more detail at a later date.

We stopped just after breakfast on that day at the Tropic of Capricorn and crossed from Australia's tropical zone, where it was currently the wet season, into the sunny temperate zone once again. After everyone had piled off of the coach, had their photo taken against a signpost as though they'd never seen one before, and piled back on again speaking in hushed tones about how wonderful it all was, we headed for Rockhampton Zoo which was to be our main stop of the day. I think most of us were a little surprised by what we found there - when somebody tells me that we're going to the zoo, I have a general tendency to stifle a yawn and imagine animals stuck in cages pawing at the windows and wondering where the majestic plains of Africa have gone all of a sudden. I'm not a big fan of seeing animals locked up, but Rockhampton Zoo was probably the least zoo like zoo I've ever come across. For a start, the place had areas dedicated to the conservation of endangered species, and all the animals seemed to be from Australia rather than having been snatched from their native countries. Furthermore, the zoo seemed to prefer the idea of providing large open spaces in which the animals could wander rather than cooping them up in cages, and as such, Rockhampton Zoo came across as more of a bunch of fenced off pieces of outback than a traditional zoo. It also meant that we were able to just walk around among the kangaroos and dingoes and they would come right up and nuzzle against us rather than assuming we were nasty humans who were going to slap them in a cage and run away. That's not to say, of course, that we could just go wandering into the crocodile enclosure, stroke one under the chin and say "who's a little croccy then?" - obviously, a certain amount of common sense has been employed in deciding where the public can go, but it was nice to be able to interact with most of the animals.

Because many of the species in the zoo are nocturnal, they have "houses" to which they can go and sleep during the day - which means that a lot of people walk around wondering why so many of the enclosures are empty. At night, the zoo operates special after-dark tours when it will take visitors around and let them see creatureswhich they may otherwise never encounter, which would've been a great addition to our trip were anyone to have thought to ask us in advance if this was something we might like to do. I do realise that there is a certain amount of irony in travelling half way around the world to a country which probably ranks as the highest on the planet for natural diversity, and then looking at native animals in a zoo - but where else on a limited tour like this were we likely to see dingoes, crocs, cassowaries, emus and any number of incredibly strange looking birds that, frankly, it scared me just to look at. One thing that it really made me certain of was that I wanted to come back to Australia one day, stay in the rainforests, explore the bush and see all of these animals in the wild - and, of course, that's exactly what I did. The downside of an arranged coach tour, of course, is that you can't just go off and do your own thing.

Our lunch stop was in a little town called Gin-Gin, and a rather incredible thing happened there. One of the older English couples on the coach decided on the spur of the moment that they wouldn't join us in the cafeteria where AAT Kings had already arranged for us to have a meal - instead, they would spend the time looking in the windows of the small local shops and then pop into a tea shop for a quick drink on the way back to join the rest of us at a pre-arranged time. After spending half an hour pottering around trinket shops and going "ooh" at things in windows in that way that you're allowed to do after you've passed a certain age, they chose what they thought looked like a charming English style tea shop and went in. As they were standing at the counter waiting for their order, somebody tapped them on the shoulder and said "hello, mate", and they turned around to find themselves face to face with their next door neighbours from back home in England, who they hadn't even realised were going away. Apparently, their neighbours had hired a car and had been on the way from Sydney to Cairns when, on a whim, they had decided to stop in the delightfully named town of Gin-Gin and look for a nice little English tea shop. Now if there's anyone out there who still doesn't believe that it's a small world we live in, then I'm the king of Denmark.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.