The 74 Whitsunday Islands were named by Captain Cook in 1770, and are the tips of underwater mountains. The islands are surrounded by fringing coral reef.As with the rest of the East Coast, we found ourselves herded onto a trip for two days and two nights aboard the Dreamcatcher, skippered by Captain Ron, first mate Scotty and trainee first mate Jo.We picked up our boat from Airlie Beach on the mainland, where we'd spent the day before, and set sail into grey...

Fraser Island is the world's largest sand island, and it's said that all the sand on the East Coast of Australia ends up there. Measuring 120km's by 15km's it's entirely made of sand, but has dense tropical rainforest, diverse bird and wildlife, and nearly two hundred freshwater lakes. Once the settlers realised the value of the rot-free timber and sand on the island, logging and sand-mining were big business until the early 1990's and 197...

Leaving Brisbane we headed to Noosa, a cool little surf town further up the East Coast, and also a good place to travel to Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo. Crikey! Things started badly when our hostel lost our reservation so had no double room, but luckily we were given a seven bed dormitory just for us for two nights and for free. On top of which we even got a free dinner and drink. Think she felt bad about putting us in a dorm after I gave her the whole sexual...

After Byron Bay we caught the Greyhound bus to Brisbane.Unfortunately we had another bad experience as the clutched blew so we broke down. Luckily we weren't far from the bus terminal so we able to walk the rest of the way. Ozbekistan strikes again! Brisbane is Australia's third largest city,with only Melbourne and Sydney being larger. We only had a couple of days in Brisbane so as this was going to be our last big city for a while we made the most of it...

After Sydney we started our East coast package and headed on the overnight bus to Byron Bay. This was our first experience of the Greyhound buses in Australia. They were ok, pretty basic nothing like the luxury we were used to in South America where we got a meal, fully reclining seats, a few films and even champagne on one of the journeys. The bus was going well until we got pulled over in the middle of the night by the police as apparently the bus had no tail...