Dear Warren and Claudia

Thank you very much for buying us the Castaway tour for our wedding present. This was a trip where we got flown out to a desert island and we were left to fend for ourselves for three days. It sounded amazing and beautiful but…

We decided not to do it, I am afraid.

Why?

Well, I think this might need a little story to tell the whole picture.

THE ADVENTURES OF THE INTREPID HONEYMOONERS AND THEIR FAITHFUL SIDEKICK CHLOE

Once upon a time, there were a couple of honeymooners and their faithful sidekick Chloe who went on an adventure in Australia. They travelled far and wide down the East Coast, doing all the cool and wonderful things down the east coast for which the east coast is famous for. One of those cool and wonderful things was meant to be the Castaway tour. This sounded exciting but on closer inspection was possibly a little bit too exciting. For example, they would have been flown out on a very scary small plane to the island with a pilot who everyone we spoke to described as 'a little bit crazy'. Secondly, you spend all of your time on a desert island with nothing to do. This would be fine if there was other intrepid travelers to interact with but when they found out that it would only be the three of them, it became less exciting. Of course, being the best of friends being stuck by themselves would just mean that they got to spend some quality time together but because they could do this anywhere, it didn't really make sense to go to a desert island to achieve that.

In addition, we had heard the tents were crap, all of the equipment was old and decaying and generally it all sounded a little bit like hard work.

Like crap yoga retreats before, our intrepid honeymooners (and their faithful sidekick chloe) made a bold decision:

'Bugga that' they said

'I really don't fancy it' they said some more

'Wouldn't it be more fun to stay at the hostel' they said even more.

That was the extent of the conversation. So they cancelled the whole experience and booked a couple more nights in Town of 1770 instead.

Thoroughly pleased with their decision, they made the most of it by:

-sleeping in comfortable beds

-drinking more beer

-laughing when it started raining really really hard and being really really pleased that they were not stuck in a tent on a desert island because that would have been really really rubbish

-Bonding with their fellow hostel guests and realising that they are by far the coolest backpackers around and a lot less annoying than most of them (FACT)

-Interacting with some Irish people and managing to not be racist by mentioning potato famines or the IRA

-Eating some more barbeques and some more TimTams

-Getting a bit of constipation by surviving on a diet consisting only of barbequed sausages, bread and TimTams

-Weeing in the pool a bit more

-Watching a movie when it was raining and enjoying it

It wasn't just about sitting around at the hostel though. Oh no! Our intrepid honeymooners (and their faithful sidekick Chloe) also went to visit a Joey Sanctuary at the second attempt. The first attempt ended in failure when they turned up too late for the pickup and it wasn't even Donna's fault. Well, not exclusively her fault anyway. At the Joey Sanctuary, there were lots of baby kangaroos who were very cute and friendly, who would come up and cuddle you. They would also eat lots of sweet potato out of your hand or, when you had run out of sweet potato, nibble your face. (I am not sure that this was strictly hygienic). The adult kangaroos were not quite as cute but still nice apart from the one who tried to start a fight with first Donna and then Jim by grabbing hold of their arm, balancing on its tail and then trying to kick them. Given this was an animal sanctuary, it was considered bad sport to kick the kangaroo back.

Previously i have always really enjoyed a kangaroo steak or sausage or two but after this tour i now feel a little bit guilty about it.

They had one joey who was very young but had these weird boil growth all over its hands and we were like thinking 'Ok, it is meant to be young and cute but those hands look really weird and contagious and yeh i know that it is a baby kangaroo with a nasty disease and everything but yeh i really don't want to touch those freaky feet'. Is that a bad thing to think? It is the animal equivalent of a homeless person trying to give you a hug.

Not only did they do that but they also went on the Scooteroo tour. Yes ,our intrepid travellers really have been busy bees. This is like a motorbike tour where you drive around on Harley Davidsons but the

bikes are really small (it is a bit like looking at a normal Harley Davidson the wrong way through binoculars) and not very powerful. It was very safe and you had to prove that you were a competent driver by driving round and round and round and round in a circle until you got dizzy while the people in charge shouted at you a lot if you did anything wrong. The people in charge liked to shout a lot to be fair so it wasn't personal at all (except for one girl on the tour called Lisa. For her, it was personal because they didn't like her). We then drove our bikes around a lot seeing kangaroos, the town, some scenery, the sea and other stuff. Donna and Jim rode their own bike but Chloe decided she was not very good at that sort of thing so decided to become a koala instead. This meant that she got to sat on the back of a really powerful bike with a slightly odd bloke called Brendan. He was the least shouty of the shouty people in charge. He drove Chloe around very fast and she looked really cool and we were all slightly jealous of her.

THE END

So thanks again for buying us the Castaway tour. We are very sorry that we didn't do it but we really enjoyed doing the things we spent the money on instead.

After all that excitement we have since got a ten hour coach trip down to Noosa; the posh beach town of Australia, not that Australia can really do posh. There are far too many old many walking about the street in their speedos for that. The coach journey was memorable because the driver informed us half way through that the toilet was out of orders except for emergencies. I then spent the rest of the journey trying to work out whether me needing the toilet very very badly constituted an emergency. After all, I have very strong bladder control so am unlikely to piss myself any time soon so therefore i would say it wasn't an emergency but at the same time i really really need to go and it was infringing on being able to concentrate on the book i am reading so maybe it is an emergency. My God, why can't the driver just give us more detailed instructions?

All our love

Jim, Donna and Chloe