Sunday 8th June - Thursday 12th June 2008

Ok so its now Sunday and we are driving from Hervey bay down to Australia Zoo which is around 20mins north of Brisbane. We set off at around 5.30am as it would take around 3 hours to get to the location of the zoo and we wanted to spend most of the day there. Once we got there we got ourselves through and wandered around the zoo. Its pretty impressive its enormous! They have regular shows on and have random animals wandering around the park that you can meet such as lizards and elephants!

We watched the show they do with the crocs whereby they jump up and grab food from the keeper and that sort of stuff which was arite to watch.But the highlight has to be the kangaroos. They have pens whereby you walk through and you can literally lay down and stroke the kangaroos and they dont care! I got some interesting pictures with them!!

That evening we drove down to the centre of Brisbane where I met Becky - a girl who has been out in Oz since November and I used to go to school with her. She didnt no I was arriving and she told me where she worked a few weeks ago so I randomly walked in to say hello!

On Monday we went back in to the city after sleeping in a suburb around 10mins from the centre. We had a wander around some shops then Adam went to do his thing and I logged online for abit to catch up with things. Brisbane is a pretty impressive city with some cool sky scappers built around the river.

That evening we drove down to the Gold Coast towards Surfers Paradise. We arrived late evening so pretty much parked up and went to sleep.

Tuesday dawned and the weather was appalling! It was overcast and chucking it down - welcome to paradise hey! But the weather cleared pretty quickly and we headed into the town to see what there was around. We bought tickets for Wet n Wild water park and went drove straight there! The weather by this point was really quite nice and warm and as we had little time left we thought sod it lets go. It turned out to be really good and I enjoyed the day the rides were awesome, it was like a waterpark you get on holiday but alot bigger! The park was dead aswel so we got on all the rides numerous times before the skin on your fingers went all dodgie!

Later that afternoon we drove back to surfers paradise and met up with Adams friend who he worked with in New Zealand. We orginally met him in Melbourne but he had now moved up here so we had a few beers with him and then went back to the van to crash out.

Wednesday morning and the sun was blazing from the start, it was going to be a hot one! We had our morning showers on the beach and then hit the sea! Later in the day Adam went off to do some washing whilst I just crashed out on the beach soaking up some raise with my ipod blarring away.

That evening there was a big rugby final on between New South Wales and Queensland. So we headed to the centre and watched the game on a massive outdoor screen which was situated slap bag in the middle of 2 huge sky scrappers. It was so surreal laying there looking up and this was the scene I loved it! That night we slept at Shayd's place - the guy that Adam knows. He had an apartment in one of the building 21 floors up. The view was immense from his balcony looking out over the city and the beach I just loved it!

On Thursday we drove away from Surfers down the east coast to Byron Bay. The drive didnt take too long so we were there by mid morning. We had a look around and a walk down the beach and chilled there for a few hours. By mid afternoon we decided to drive up to the lighthouse for sunset which was stunning. Whilst up there we got a glimsp at Whales migrating northwards for the mating season. It was stunning to see as one of them jumped out of the water and did one of those belly flops that you see them do on the tv! The sunset that evening was spectacular so got a few shots of that. After dark we hit a bar and then a club and got chatting to some people and had a little dance before heading back to the van.

That was pretty much the east coast done and dusted, the next stop was SYDNEY!!