Sorry I haven't updated a while, there's either been nothing to write about or too much going on for me to do it, but now I have the chance to round up the last crazy 7 weeks with the last week just being absolutely surreal.

We finally up and left Sydney on the 2nd April. After much tears and see you soons we jumped on the Greyhound bus for a 12 hour trek up to a place called Byron Bay. We arrived there early morning and checked into our hostel. We didn't really do much, had a wander round the place, watched some TV and had an early night. The place is very strange, it gets a massive amount of hype in Oz, it does have a gorgeous beach but it rained both days we were there so we didn't enjoy it so much as we were just sat in our hostel as torrential rain surrounded us.

Our next place is Surfers Paradise which ended up being 1 of our favourite places on the coast. It's miles and miles and miles of stretching gold sand with a city right next to the beach. Its very weird to be sunbathing with skyscrapers a stones throw a way. We got picked up from the bus stop in a limo and found out the hostel was awesome. It's set up more like apartments so we had our own room, lounge, kitchen and bathroom which was a very nice change. Everyone in the hostel was really friendly as well, we sat chatting to some English and Belgian for most of out 1st night there.

Second day hit and we thought we'd check out some of the theme parks in the area. Warner Bros Movie World was 1st and it was pretty decent to say it's an Australian theme park. They had an out of this world car stunt show and 1 of the best roller coasters I've been on, shame about the lack of staff and coaster cars because it took forever to get on, even when the line was tiny. After riding the ScoobyDoo roller coaster like 5 times we were pretty tired and headed back to the hostel for another early night.

Third day its time for Sea World, which I didn't think would be all that great but how wrong I was. The dolphin show was awesome, and the seal show was hilarious. There were a couple of very good roller coasters so we rode those a few times and Victoria got annoyed at me because of how addictive I found stroking manta rays.

The next day we had a shortish trip up to Brisbane. We had a walk into town and round the shops. We headed back to our hostel Bunk and had a beer in the bar and out of nowehere a hostel quiz started up which was lots of fun. We got chatting to the rest of the people on our table and we became a team. We lost out on 5 free nights of campervan hire from a 10 point question which only guys would have known, we lost by 3 points :(

Had a bit of a stressful morning as we only just caught the Greyhound Bus due to our hostel shuttle bus being very unreliable. We got to our hostel in Noosa, everyone again really friendly, got chatting to a load of people outside our apartment about what everyone has been getting up to up the East Coast. We checked out the local beach which was unbelievable, so much better than "Main Beach". We headed to Australia Zoo the following day which was wicked, loads to do, but not too much that you couldn't do it all in 1 day. We hand fed Asian elephants, saw an amazing show in the Crocoseum, stroked koalas, saw massive crocodiles, awesome birds of prey and stroked a 6 week old piglet until it fell asleep (so cute). Awesome Day.

The next day we decided we do the Noosa Everglades Canoe trip. ERROR. We got to the boat ramp early morning, got thrown onto a big boat to take us to the everglades, and when we got there given camping equipement and a canoe and map and told to get on with it. 6kms of paddling later we were at our "camp site" which was just a clearing in some trees with a block of toilets. We had nothing to do all day, just sat there and chatted, saw some goannas which are like 6ft lizards, a snake, some bush turkeys, frogs and many a bug and decided camping wasn't for us. We had to be in bed by 6pm because the sun had gone down, we had no light and there was deadly snakes and spiders out at night, hmmm.

Obviously we woke up stupidly early the next day because we'd gone to bed so early and today was the "awesome day". We set of canoeing at 9:30am, and arrived at Camp Site 3 at around 11, which was another 6km of paddling. We then had a 12km round trip walk up to this sand patch thing which we set off on. Victoria gave up about an hour in and I can't blame her, it must have been at least 35 degrees, walking up hill, with no shade. Me and another girl on the trip finally got to the sand patch, which is like massive sand dunes in the middle of the forest and collapsed for half an hour. Took some photo's and headed on the trek back knowing we have another 4 hours of exercise ahead, oh the joy. Found Victoria and did the 6kms of canoeing to get back to the camp site, it was like torture. We had tea and went back to bed again really early. We played some cards and I read Twilight whilst doing the voices for the characters through shadow puppets, Victoria thought it was hilarious.

Woke up at 6am the next day, packed up and got out of there. We were so happy to see the boat come for us, and tried to warn the next group not to do it, but they weren't having any of it. Got back to the hostel and had the best shower I'd ever had in my life. Chilled out on the beach a bit and got ready to go to Rainbow Beach and Fraser Island.

We arrived at Rainbow Beach, which turned out to be quite boring. The hostel was boring and there was nothing to do in the town but the promise of Fraser Island made it worth it. Fraser Island is the worlds biggest sand island. It was no dirt of any form on it at all, and only a small bit of rock at the north end, the rest, even what looks like rock is just compressed sand. It also has some of the purest water in the world, as rain water falls onto the island, sinks through it, gets filtered and pushed back out again, which can take up to 80 years.

Unfortunately we had more rain when we got to Fraser but that didn't put us off. We had 3 other English girls on our trip and we had a great time with them, they were pretty awesome. We saw some turtles, 3 of the purest lakes with gold, yellow, orange white sand. Swam in a creek, walked through the rainforest, went to Indian Head which has unbelievable views, champagne pools which are fresh water rock pools and when the tide is high enough and salt water goes in it reacts with the fresh water and bubbles, hence the name. Awesome few days.

It was funny as well because we got back to Rainbow Beach and the hostel we were staying at do their own Fraser Tour and we were quite jealous because we figured you'd make some great friends and blah blah, turned out they'd had a terrible time and wanted their money back. The tour guide had taken them to 3 places and most of the time they were sat around in their cars on the beach waiting for something or other.

5.5 hour bus trip the next day to 1770. We checked into Cool Bananas expecting great things as everyone raves about this hostel and we weren't dissapointed. The owner is crazy, but in a good way, and just wants everyone to enjoy themselves, and is 1 of the few hostels we've been to that seems to put the people 1st rather than purely making money. It was made even better by the fact there were 3 hostel dogs which we named Hostel Dog 1, 2 and 3.

Spent some time on the beach, and had a free tour around the place and saw some amazing views and learnt some not very amazing things but it was definitely worth doing. We spent 3 days here not doing much but sitting on the beach and watching films but we had an absolute ball.

Our last day in 1770 was a complete day as our Greyhound Bus was at 9pm and was another 12 hour trip up to Airlie Beach, which is a bit of a party place as its the closest place to the Whitsundays, so when everyone gets back from sailing there are big parties to go to. Unfortunately after getting next to no sleep we were just too tired and were in bed by 10. We had a wander around and its another gorgeous place with amazing views out to the Whitsundays and really nice beaches, which you couldn't swim in due to Box Jellyfish.

Day after this we were headed to Bowen which isn't known amongst backpackers apart from for its fruit picking. 10 of our friends were working there so we though after 3 weeks of travelling it will be nice to settle down for a while, see our friends and earn some cash. We were shocked when we get there to hear the stupid cost of accomodation, but we were lucky as we got work the next day in a tomato factory. The less said about it the better but basically we were sat in a giant fridge sorting tomatoes out into certain weights.... anyway...

We got into a bit of a routine and worked Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all at The Tomato Factory. It wasn't too bad, we had to wake up at 4:45am as the bus took us to work at 5:30 to start at 6 but it meant we finished and were back at the hostel for 2 so we had most of the day free which was nice. Everyone around the hostel thinks we're mental because we mess about a lot, we thrown 1 of our Swedish friends Lisa in the pool a lot and try to drown her which is always fun, and I got thrown in just as I got back from work whilst I was fully clothed, quite funny, though it wasn't at the time.

We only find out if we have work the next day at like 7pm the night before which is a bit annoying as you can't plan to do anything. But on the Wednesday as we finished work the manager said "see you tomorrow" to us all, but we went to double check we were working the next day just incase and found out we weren't. It was a bit of an Oh moment but not the end of the world, so we had another day by the pool. The same thing happened the next day and we were like Hmmm this isn't good. We woke up the next day wondering what to do with ourselves and found out we'd only been paid around half of what we should have been so we were a bit bummed out. I was on the internet and something so random happened it deserves it's own blog entry...