1770/Agnes water

After the excitement of Fraser Island and the excitement in anticipation for the Whitsunday Islands we visited 1770 and Agnes Water to try and control the excitiement before it became overwhelming! Unfortunately we failed because Agnes water was great and we got to experience surfing for the first time for the first decent price that we had seen for a lesson so we did get extremely excited.

1. Southern Cross backpackers - This was our hostel which we stayed in. It was really big, had a pool (which looked cleaner than Hervey Bay Nomads....not hard to beat that cespool though), a table tennis table, a decent bar, barbecue area, camp fire and all the rooms were named after countries. We were appropriately put into England and we shared with a girl that Han and Rich thought was deaf because of the way she spoke but in fact she was Norweigan! For the record I thought she spoke pretty good English. Rich and Tommy got some good use of the table tennis table, playing for hours even when it was dark and noone could see the ball! Han recorded a rare victory over me and I think she may have beat Rich when his vision was impaired! Some evenings we joined in with the Sausage sizzle which was where you got a free hotdog with every drink you bought from the bar, the perfect combo meat and beer! We also got to see Tommy and Rosies skydiving DVD which inspired us to start looking into doing one ourselves because it looked really cool.

2. Surfing - One of the highlights of Agnes Water was the remarkably reasonable price of a 3 hour surf lesson setting us back only $17 each (compare that to $60 in Byron Bay). We all were rather nervous about doing it since there had been shark attacks in the news up the East Coast so to put it crudely we were s***ting ourselves. To start with we learned how to paddle, when to paddle and how to stand up on the board which we did on the beach. There were 26 people doing the lesson so some of us had to share boards which wasnt as bad as it sounds because it is bloody knackering and we were all grateful for a rest from time to time. Others must have felt the same way because there were more people sitting out most of the time so there were always loads of boards lined up on the beach not being used. Tommy and Rich were the best and stood up almost straight away whereas it took the uncoordinated couple of me and Han about 2 hours before we stood up for the first time. In the end we all loved it but were hurting big time from all the paddling...bloody waves! While we were doing the lesson Rosie sat on the beach with our stuff to keep an eye on it, which was lucky because thieves were about and stole a girls passport from her bag while she was in the water! Why she took the passport to the beach god knows!!

3. The day we did different things - We were all our own people on our last day in Agnes. Han fancied a chilled day with some sunbathing and reading on the beach with Rosie, Rich was up for another crack at surfing with Tommy and I fancied the scooteroo tour. By the end of the day Rich and Tommy were becoming a bit good at surfing, Han had smashed through her book and was looking half African with her tan and I had seen 1770 (where captain cook first discovered Queensland) on a motorbike. I got to wear a bad ass flaming leather jacket with matching flaming helmet, learned how to ride a motorbike, broke a motorbike, then broke another motorbike, then saw someone brake themselves as they crashed into another cyclist, had some potato wedges and saw a nice sunset at the place where Captain Cooks ship first docked.

Overall it was nice to chill out here for 3 days and come back to Earth again after the madness of Fraser.