G'day all,

Since the last blog we have visited 1770 (Agnes Water) and Airlie Beach/WhitSundays. In 1770 we did Scooteroo's, which is a tour around the town on your own little chopper motorbike. They have been designed to look like a mini "Harley" when in fact they are only 50cc engiines! We left about 4pm for that, and we had such a big group. All the bikes were in use - about 60-65 of us in total! We had to wear really cool safety helmets of course! I was a bit nervous at first as ive never even ridden a moped so I just knew I was going to fall off. I picked a bike with the American flag on it, and Lee had a silver one with flames on the side (because he's flamin' hot on the bike, haha!) It was actually really easy once you got your balance sorted! We saw some kangaroo's and then watched the sunset with some Wedges & sour cream/chilli sauce with Rod - the leader of the pack! Then headed back before it got to dark! Was such a fun experience, and a thank you to Marc & Becky who paid for that for us!! The next morning, Lee had some surf lessons down at the beach. $17 for 3 hours - was the cheapest we had seen it anywhere. The waves weren't that big, but for a beginner it was perfect. I sat on the beach and took photos of him, as surfing has never really appealed to me, id rather body board! He managed to stand up on his board about 7 times!


We caught the overnight bus from 1770 to Airlie Beach. That was a disaster. We had a driver who got on the wrong side of nearly every passenger. And was 99% determined to make sure he made the journey as miserable as possible. He then topped it all of by running over a massive kangaroo, when we were only about 20 minutes away from Airlie Beach. We arrived early morning in Airlie to rain, and dark clouds. The tide was so high, you could barley see the beach, the palm tree's were all blown out of shape! We had just caught the back of cyclone Olga, lucky it didn't hit when we were on the boat!

We checked onto our tour boat 'Powerplay' on Tuesday morning, met the rest of the group and the crew. We sped off out of the marina and off to the Whitsunday Islands, we sunbathed until we arrived at our first dive site, Blue Pearl bay. James Bond style entry into the water off of the tender. We were only under the water for about 30 seconds and when we saw a white tip reef shark, awesome! We also saw 2 Napoleon Maori Wrasse, the size of a bath and a green turtle, quite a successful first dive! That night we had an aussie bbq and watched the sunset over the islands.

On day 2 we were woken up by screeching noises, the skipper called us up to top deck where we were meet by a pod of 25 pilot whales. Wow, what a way the wake up. The whales followed and played with us for quite a while. The crew had never seen a pod this size ever in the Whitsunday's before, so we were extremely lucky to be in the right place! We headed towards our second dive site, Mackerel Bay a nice early dive at 7.30am. We were diving a drop wall of coral which is a different dive to what we have done before. We didn't see many fish, but it was a good experience. Our third and final dive of the trip was at a site called Pitt stop, this was a very colourful and active dive. We saw plenty of fish, but the main highlight was getting up close to 2 green turtles who were chilling on the bottom of the reef. Turtles get stoned on the jelly fish they eat, this is why they are so chilled out. Cool!

The afternoon of day 2 we headed towards Whitehaven beach, the main attraction of the Whitsunday's! The sand here is made up of 96.7% silicone and is the whitest sand you will find in the world! We spent a good few hours here taking photos, chilling out and playing in the water with our stinger suits on! After a bit more sunbathing, we headed up to the viewpoint of Whitehaven… The most spectacular view in the world! From up here you get the swirls of white sand meeting the crystal clear water, breathtaking!! Having such a hard afternoon we all got back onboard and enjoyed another quality meal made by our host Beau and played some games before retiring for bed. Day 3 was quite short, we got to enjoy a morning snorkel which again was very active and colourful. And then headed back to the marina. We couldn't have been any luckier with the weather, we got to dive the great barrier reef and overall the trip was awesome!!

The last couple of days we have been on Magnetic Island, we didn't get up to too much here as we were let down by a car hire company, this left us stranded at our hostel with not a lot to do! We were hoping to drive around the island and do some snorkelling in the far bay. Today we had a 6 hour coach journey up to Cairns, we have checked into our hostel and are going to explore later this evening. Will update before we jet off to Singapore. X