Hey everyone

Today we travelled to Rainbow Beach!

We were up early to catch the bus, and Alex wanted a bit of time in the shops before leaving. We took our bags to the bus stop then Alex ran off to do some more shopping. 20 minutes later he returned, just in time for the Greyhound coach.

However, as we were getting ticked off the list of passengers, the driver said that Christina was booked to change half way, at a service station, and get on another bus a few hours later. We were not happy. It appeared that when we booked the journey on the phone, Alex got the second last seat, then someone booked the last seat online (from the service station to Rainbow Beach), so Christina was booked onto a different coach for the second half of the journey. We couldn't stay another night in Noosa as the YHA was full, the coach was packed so she 'had' to get off at the service station, and there was no space on the bus leaving later in the day. A few slightly raised voices later, we got the driver to call his manager, and eventually (having delayed the coach from leaving) we arranged to both get off the coach at the service station, wait 4 hours for the next coach, and take that to Rainbow Beach. Sigh...

Noosa to Rainbow Beach: 2 hours 30 minutes
Noosa to Rainbow Beach with huge wait at service station: 6 hours 30 minutes

Fortunately, the service station was in quite a nice location and we spent most of the time looking out over a big lake with hills in the distance. After a few hours, when Greyhound coaches pulled up, Alex asked the driver if they were going to Rainbow Beach but was barked "no!" at in response. Finally one said yes, though when we said we were joining the coach, the driver appeared pretty clueless (but let us on anyway, despite never showing our tickets).

From now on, we would check and double check we are both on the same coach when booking over the phone. Up to this point Greyhound had been great, but from now on we would always worry a little that our names wouldn't be on the passenger list.

We finally turned up at the very small town of Rainbow Beach, and checked into our hostel, Pippie's Beachhouse. Upon settling into our room, two germans told us how we were in the worst room - right next to the kitchen - and that it had been really noisy the last few nights. They also told us the kitchen wasn't just tiny, but two of the four hobs were broken. Great. Things cheered up though when a little friendly cat visited us in our room, and we had fun feeding it milk and trying to get it out from under the bed. Christina decided that she now needs a kitten as well as a puppy...

A trip to the local foodstore later, we had dinner and prepared ourselves for a bad nights sleep. However just before bed, we saw that the computers had been left logged on, so took the chance to back up a few hundred of our photos (we needed to as we were running out of memory cards). Back to bed we went, and unsurprisingly a group of British lads drinking in the lounge kept us up for an hour or so (and we only finished backing up photos at 1am!). We then heard their descent on the kitchen, and it sounded messy. Very messy. Tune in tomorrow to find out what happened in the morning... Xxx