We stopped two nights at Mission Beach on the Cassowary Coast in between Townsville and Cairns break up the Greyhound coach journey. It is the name given to an area of 14km of multiple villages along the beach front and though small in size it is the place to do extreme activities in Oz, such as sky diving on the beach, whitewater rafting, kitesurfing etc, but as we plan to do all this in New Zealand we just wanted to chill out.

The hostel we stayed in was a really good standard, very modern, clean and crisp, we were in a ten bed dorm and luckily on the second night we were the only people in it. Luckily because on the first night, four Irish lads managed to piss me off so much, I now hate their entire nation! They made Ulrika Johnson and the Berlin Bum Boys from Dingo's in Rainbow Beach seem like the perfect room mates! But anyway!

As I said we didn't really do too much in Mission Beach we just wanted to chill out, the weather wasn't the best though should have been expected asit is still the wet season in tropical north Queensland and it has an average rainfall of 6 metres a year! In comparision to London which has 0.6m average rainfall per year! So ten times as much and bare in mind that for six months of the year it hardly rains at all!

The golden gum boot photo which will go on the wesbite shows the record rainfall in Australia at 7.9m in a year, which was here, some serious rain!

The only thing we did do in Mission Beach is walk a lot! I reckon about 20km in a day, hard work in 30 degree heat and 80% humidity! We saw our first wild kangaroo, I have to say it was dead at the side of the road, but still we can tick it off! We were on the lookout for the endangered and elusive Cassowary bird which is the largest bird in the world. (I always thought it was the Ostrich). The cassowary stands up to 2m tall and weighs up to 80kg, there's only about 1500 left and they all live in the rainforest in northern Queensland, this being the best place to see them, so we were on the lookout walking through thick rainforest getting eaten alive by mosquitos when I suddenely got the fear, these birds which to me look insanely like Dinosaurs and not at all like birds are quite aggressuve and I couldn't get that scene from Jurassic Park out of my head, the one where they are all trying to get to the generator to switch the power back on and they are being hunted by velocaraptor. The guy in the scene who incidentially gets eaten had a shotgun, me not having a shotgun here grabs the next best thing which was a stick. I don't care how endangered they are if one runs out of the forest and tries to peck out my eyes or slice me open with their dinosaur claws he's getting a stick to the neck, good job we didn't see any then! Next stop and last Greyhound bus journey to Carins!!!