Thursday 9 October. We left the feather duster, hung up the French maid outfits and gave the Sheraton the finger as we drove out of Port Douglas and headed to our most northerly destination on the East coast, Cape Tribulation. We drove through endless fields of sugar cane before crossing the crocodile infested Daintree River on an old rickety cable ferry, then drove the hour or so through thick rainforest until we reached Cape Trib. We walked along the beach and ...

Monday 11 August . The horrible alarm clock burst into life at 5am and we slowly dragged ourselves out of the van into the darkness as today was our first days work at the banana farm. We drove the forty five minutes to Tully from our camp at Mission Beach and then followed the mini bus full of workers to the farm. We did however lose the mini bus as it was driving too fast and poor old Sheila couldn't keep up. We just followed the road and when we drove through ...

Pinch, punch first of the month, Friday 1st August. We were still awaiting our Tax refund to come through and only had a few dollars left in our pockets. We had already broken the seal on the credit card so thought why not fill Shiela up on it and head off to Eungella National Park, a few hours south of Airlie Beach. Eungella apparently has the highest concentration of platypus in Australia and we had promised ourselves we would do our damndest to spot one in the...

Friday 18 July. After a free sleep in the van in the car park of Koala's Hostel we moseyed on in and grabbed ourselves a free shower and Vicki managed to get us two free cups of tea, pretending that she was in the group off to Fraser Island that morning. We fired Sheila up much to the protests of the starter motor that sounded like Pat Butcher after smoking 40 Marlboros. Little did we know but that would be the last time it would ever turn over again. We drove no...

Monday 14th July. After a hefty four hour drive from Noosa we arrived in plenty of time in Hervey Bay at the Koala's backpackers village for our pre-expedition talks. We were booked on a three day self drive 4x4 trip around Fraser Island with eight other backpackers that we hadn't met yet. We were praying for a good group, the last thing us oldies wanted was a bunch of lairy, gobs***e teenagers. We were pleasantly surprised when we were put into our group of ten,...