Our last couple of days in Australia seemed to fly by. We went to the Queensland Art Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art as they were both free and a short walk from the hostel we stayed at in Brisbane. They were surprisingly good and small enough that Jak's attention was held almost all the way round each one. There was a piece of 'art' by Tracy Emin on the wall of the modern art museum: neon pink lettering spelling out 'I have never stopped loving you'. No mes...

We had the best time on our 3 day camping safari to see Ayers Rock, or Uluru as it is now more commonly known. We thought that seeing the gigantic sandstone monolith would be the highlight of the trip and that everything else we saw on the way (Kings Canyon, Mount Connor, the Kata Tjuta formation) would be cool, but not amazing. We were wrong - it was all awesome. This was lucky as it was a 1,500km round trip to Uluru and it would have felt ridiculously long with...

We were up bright and early on the day of our trip to the outer great barrier reef; there was no way that ship was sailing without us! Most of the crew were taking part in Movember and had outrageous moustachios so Jak felt right at home as soon as he stepped on board :-) It took 90 bumpy minutes for us to reach the Norman Reef. During this time we were both kitted out for our introductory scuba dive and given a talk on how to use the equipment and generally avo...

After Townsville we headed north again, this time to tropical Mission Beach where the looong beaches are lined with palm trees, heaps of dense rainforest has just been left lying around left right and centre - and the insects are HUGE. The hostel we stayed at had a good pool so we spent most of our time in town (just two nights) hanging by it so that we could dowse ourselves whenever we felt we were in danger of combusting, which was quite frequently. We went fo...

The sailing trip after-party was awesome, mainly because if you spent $5 before 8pm you got half a large dominos pizza for free! Food is definitely the way to a backpackers heart. They're clever though as they make you wait an hour and a half for the pizza which means that of course you've drunk more than it's worth by the time it arrives! Still a good deal though. The next day we logged onto our internet banking to find out that somehow someone, somewhere, had ...