4-5/1/09 We set off on our long journey towards Brisbane. We spent the first night at Mission Beach; this was beautiful, but it was raining when we arrived and continued on and off all evening, night and morning, before we continued our journey - and even if it had been dry, we'd been put off swimming in the stinger enclosure in the sea because the owner of the campsite told me a crocodile had been seen swimming around in it the day before! We arrived at Airlie Beach the next evening, having survived a scare on the way. We had been driving along the main road when suddenly we heard a loud squeal, and then the car started bumping a lot more than it should do. We pulled up and found out straightaway what was wrong - our front right tyre had burst! We got the tyre off, and had just started putting the spare one on, when a car drew up and a woman and her son got out and asked if we were alright. When we said what was wrong (when the centre looked like it was in right, the tread went round the wrong way, so we were wondering whether just to leave it or take it off and turn it round), she said that the way the tread turned didn't matter, it was whether the centre was the right way around that mattered, and screwed it all in for us! We bought a spare tyre at Ayr, the next small town on our way. The weather had improved a bit since Mission Beach, though it was still as changeable as in England in the spring. I was surprised at it, because it is summertime here and I hadn't expected it to rain at all once we'd got out of the tropical north.

6/1/09 This day was spent walking around Airlie Beach and deciding what sort of deal we wanted for visiting the Whitsunday Islands the next day. The deal we ended up getting seemed a good one for our budget - plenty of snorkelling and swimming, with lunch thrown in.

7/1/09 The Whitsundays certainly live up to their exalted reputation! We passed through a couple of rain squalls on the way out, but after that, although there were a couple of brief showers, the weather generally behaved itself and the sun came out quite a bit. We snorkelled off Haslewood Island first, wearing stinger suits in case we met any unsavoury jellyfish; because the sea was so shallow, the coral was even closer to the surface than at the Great Barrier Reef, so a lot of the fish did swim up at the surface in front of our faces and just below us! We stayed there for a couple of hours, without any sightings of jellyfish to our relief; then we went to Whitsunday Island, to the famous Whitehaven Beach. The sand here is absolutely unique (99% silicon), created by a volcanic fault line which lies off it in the sea. It's so incredibly fine that in America they used it to create the glass for the Hubble Space Telescope, apparently. I know it's a cliche to talk about how white the sand is on idyllic beaches, but I've never seen anything like it until we got here. It really is incredibly white, so much that in the sun it hurts your eyes if you look at the same spot for too long; you could probably get 'snow blindness' if you did it for an extended period of time. The sea was very clear and warm, too. We had a buffet luch under the edge of the forest next to the beach, which was lovely, and then carried on with swimming/sunbathing/whatever else we wanted to do. To begin with the beach was a bit crowded, but then after a while it emptied quite a lot, leaving our group pretty much to itself in our part of the beach. We stayed for quite a long time. The last thing we did before turning back to Airlie Beach was sail up to the top of the beach and around it, and then walk about 600m though the forest to a famous lookout over Whitehaven beach and some of the other Whitsunday islands. Apparently it's one of the top five most photographed places/objects in Australia, along with Uluru, the Bungle Bungles, and Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. It deserves to be that famous, too - it's just so mind-bogglingly beautiful, especially when the sun comes out, that our time there passed all too quickly before we had to go back to the boat.

The sun disappeared as we approached the shore, and the rain began again. After stopping for a while, it started up once more in the evening and didn't stop until we left Airlie Beach the next morning. We were woken up in the middle of the night by rain dripping though our tent, and by 4.30 am I knew I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep because of it, so I fled to the dryness of inside the car and just read until the morning.