SO WHERE THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU? STILL STUCK IN F**KING TOWNSVILLE… From Airlie Beach we pressed on for two days, hoping to get some more miles under our belts to gain more time around Cairns and the tropical north of Queensland - or at least that was the idea. We spent an uneventful night in Bowen, and continued north through incessant heavy rain, through Townsville and on to Taylors Beach, outside Ingham. The conditions were terrible so we decided against g...

WHITSUNDAY ISLANDS We spent the next couple of days driving up the East Coast in our van which we had belatedly christened Ailsa but with whom we continued our love/hate relationship. We stopped off at Yeppoon near Rockhampton and Blacks Beach near Mackay en route to Airlie Beach for the start of the next leg of our big adventure - a three day sailing cruise around the Whitsunday Islands, one of the most beautiful spots in Australia. Unfortunately it was raining...

PADI POWER AND TURTLE POWER We had read in the Lonely Planet that one of the cheapest places to get your PADI open water diving qualification was in the town of Bundaberg. We had never heard of the place but decided to give it a go as a way of helping to ease our budget deficit. We bombed up the highway early on Monday morning on the off chance that a course would be starting first thing. We were in luck, signed up at the dive school (which was run by the most l...

FRASER ISLAND Things were definitely looking up as we tucked into our steaks which we'd cooked on one of the free bbqs on the sea front at Hervey Bay after spending the day driving from Dicky Beach. Next day, we gladly left the campervan behind at the campsite and boarded a large 4WD coach with enormous wheels that took us across on the ferry to Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world. Better drivers than us (i.e. most people) would have opted for th...

ON THE ROAD AGAIN…JUST ABOUT We weren't expecting much from Brisbane and weren't proved wrong, as we wandered around a city that seemed to lack any major landmarks or interesting sights. As usual, we had left things to the very last minute and frantically managed to book a campervan at five minutes to six just before the Apollo hire office was closing. It was a bit pricey but we were pleased to have been able to book a van for us to pick up the next morning. T...