Day 108, 109 - Mission Beach - Wednesday 1st, Thursday 2nd February 2012

4am came and so we arrived in a very dark and quiet Mission beach; to add to this our hostel didn't open until 8am and it was pouring with rain! We made our way over to where our hostel was and found a restaurant that did buffet breakfasts and opened at 6.30am so we camped outside until the sun rose and the doors opened. After gorging ourselves with several helpings of cooked breakfasts, fruit and cereal we headed over to our hostel in time for 8am and sat in the movie room watching films until our room was ready at 11.30am. PS. the film Semi-pro with Will Ferrell is rubbish!

We checked in and went to bed for a couple of hours to catch up on some beauty sleep. Come 3.30pm we woke up, showered and made our way downstairs for the bus to spot the local and endangered cassowary's who call Mission beach their home. We spotted lots of little wallabies but no cassowaries - they were obviously having a down day.

We decided to do the hour walk back along the beach to our hostel and about 5 minutes into the walk the heavens opened and we had to take shelter under a palm tree! After 10 minutes the rain subsided so we continued our walk - all the while spotting washed up jellyfish along the way.

After popping into Woolworths supermarket to buy some essentials we headed back to the hostel and chilled on the veranda with dinner followed by tea and crumpets - All cooked by Ad!

The hostel is really nice and has a white theme running throughout - we've only been here about 10 hours and already we feel at home.

We woke up this morning after having 12 hours sleep, well I did, Soph couldn't seem to sleep! It's so hot here that if you are in a hostel without air-con it would be so hard to sleep. Lucky for us we had an air con room at no additional cost! The tropic of Capricorn runs directly through the middle of Australia and we have been told that it's best to be below it in summer and above it in winter. We have done it the other way round, so at the moment the humidity is unreal, it's like you have just walked out the shower all the time, and its 38 degrees too!! So taking that all into consideration, we decided to go on a 4 hour trek through the creek and over the beach, oh, and we did this in the middle of the day between 11am - 3pm! I think it's the hottest I have ever been; as for Soph, she was like a walking boiling kettle with steam actually coming off her head! At the moment its stinger season and the further you go up the eastern coast the more stingers you get so not much swimming in the sea is done. As we slowly walked across the empty beach we saw hundreds of 'beached' jellyfish, they were everywhere! On the way back from the walking trail we went to the supermarket, for two reasons, 1. To get food for tonight's dinner and 2. To make full use of their air-con!! Believe it or not the biggest supermarket chain out here is either a place called Coles or the good old fashioned British sounding Woolworths!! Anyway we had a box of Australia's finest red wine (2 litres - $12) back at the hostel so we got some steaks, prawns and salad to create the classic 'surf and turf'!

Back in the hostel kitchen Soph was attracting a fair bit of attention - whilst the rest of the hostel were cooking up $1 noodles, Soph was creating her surf and turf masterpiece. Flashpackers in the true sense of the word!!

After our steak and prawns with red wine we settled down to watch the Adjustment Bureau in the TV - not a bad film, and then headed to bed to the sound of heavy rain.