After leaving Noosa we went to visit my friend Alana in Moolooluba. I hadn't seen her for 4 ½ years since Camp Scatico so was lovely to finally have the catch up we had been planning for so long. We hung out at the beach, ate great lunch and just reminisced about the good old times before heading onwards to Rainbow Beach, Gympie and Hervey Bay - the starting point for our Fraser Island 4x4 self drive trip. Fraser Island was just absolutely brilliant, we had a fantastic group of people from Australia, England, Canada and Germany who all got along really well and had such a laugh together. It is the worlds largest sand island and we spent 3 days on a self drive tour, swimming in creeks, visiting the Maheno Shipwreck, chilling in the champagne pools and at Lake Mackenzie - a beautiful clear lake that looks like something out of the Caribbean the sand is so white. The most exciting part of the trip was getting bogged in the sand 75% of the time and it was a real group effort pushing the 4x4 to save us! If you didn't change the gears down in time then you just got bogged. During one of our bogging moments a guy from another 4x4 that was helping us had a bit of a scare as he got bitten by a spider that fell from the trees onto his hand. The guys in our group were so quick, catching the spider and putting it in a tube so that it could be identified as poisonous or not. They even shoved him in a passing car to get him to a hospital quickly but thankfully it wasn't poisonous and he was ok.

One of the evenings we spent around the campfire we had a show put on for us by the Aboriginals guys that ran the campsite. Travis and Smiley did some tribal dancing and singing, getting some of the crowd involved which was fun to watch. It was a really interesting night as I really like hearing about the Aboriginal culture and went to the toilet at 2am to find them sitting with my friend Rainee around the fire chatting. So I sat down with them and chatted about their way of life, the way of the world, family and even got them to so some Aboriginal stances like the dude in the film Australia (much to my enjoyment to tell Jess about…maaaannnnngooo!!). The final morning we packed all our stuff up and headed back to Hervey Bay for a night of partying as a group before going our separate ways. Thoroughly enjoyed Fraser Island, up there with Noosa for sure.

A couple of days later, after camping at Mount Larcom, we arrived into Airlie Beach which is the starting point for trips on the Whitsundays. We went on the fastest catamaran in the Whitsundays, Powerplay, for 2 nights 3 days to see the beautiful Whitehaven beach and scuba dived to check out the Great Barrier Reef. It was really cool seeing some pretty huge scary fish (especially if you know how much I hate the sea) and saw some weird colorful clams that opened if you went close to them while we were snorkeling. The coral reef was beautiful and luckily we managed to go to some untouched places where the coral hasn't been broken or cut away. The crew on the boat was great fun and we were treated like princesses with a constant supply of food throughout mmmmm!!! I think it was the first lot of food for us in a while that wasn't noodles or pasta! The Whitsundays was such a relaxing trip away from the mainland, until we were heading back to shore and hit some really really rough waves…bless poor Nicki was sick and I had to be upfront on the boat getting soaking wet just to find fresh air incase I threw up! But the blessing in that was that I got to see some turtles swimming around in the wild J After arriving back to Airlie Beach we went out for drinks with the rest of the group and said our goodbyes. We rocked up to another bar and saw Christian and Johannes which was nice and shared the stories of our past week with them. As they were heading up towards Cairns quicker than us sadly that was the last time we saw them. Onwards and upwards towards Magnetic Island though….