Day after the reservoir walk, I was off to the much talked about Arts Factory hostel, in Byron Bay. The OzBus picked me up and we were headed for the morning's activity...Zorbing! It sounds ominous, and involves hopping inside a large translucent rubber ball and rolling down a hill! It was great fun, if a little short-lived.

The Arts Factory was a small hippy hostel founded in the 70s, and since then has expanded to become one of Australia's greatest backpackers! It has everything you could want...hot tub, sauna, swimming pool, large, clean room, friendly staff, a good kitchen, cheap cafe, cinema (!!!), bike hire (for $7 a day...more later!), hammocks, board games, reading room, the list goes on, and on, and on and on!

I met up with Jack, Dean and Laura who I'd planned to meet there a few days before, and we spent the rest of the day chilling in the hot tub and drinking goon! The next day, I went to the one and only Nimbin. It's a small town 70km west of Byron Bay, and is a seriously weird place!

A brief history; Nimbin was originally a small dairy farming community when in 1973 aq group of students chose Nimbin as the site for their new alternative hippy festival, named the "Aquarius Festival". Many of these hippies (as you can expect) were using marijuana, and after the festivals they would simply stay put in Nimbin, and form their own little communities. As Nimbin is now, Marijuana is as near as you can get to being legal, but is still illegal in the state of New South Wales.

Marijuana can be bought from sellers down the street, cookies, cakes and chocolate too. All this goes on, with some kind of exemption from the Police. There is actually a Police station in the village, how mad is that!?!? This place was unique, to say the least.

The tour took me to Nimbin, and Jim (the tour guide) told us many fascinating stories and took us on some rollercoaster driving trails! It was absolutely mad, but a good laugh none the less.

The next day, Jimmy (a friend we met there), Laura, Dean, Jack and I hired some bicycles! It was one of the best days of my trip! I was lucky enough to be dealt the cool card, and had a Harley Davidson type bicycle arrangement. It was amazing...dude! We cycled up to the lighthouse, which is the most Easterly point in Australia. From the point there, we saw stingrays and turtles in the sea below! Unfortunately, the bike had only one gear, so the ascent was pretty tough going.

That night, we made full use of the cinema and also cooked ourselves a fantasmic curry (the curry worked out at 1quid per person, the lady gave us too much change...quids in!). In addition to this stroke of luck, we also got a free cinema ticket as the lady serving us was just silly.

The next, we said our goodbyes to Jimmy and Laura, and Jack, Dean and I headed for Surf Camp. This is a special stop off for OzExperience customers where you learn to surf in a secret beach (ie. no real surfers there to make us look bad). I managed to stand up a few times long enough to scream "I'm Surfing Baby, yeah!".

This was this morning, and after a whopping drive we finally arrived in Sydney. I'm back here after 80days and it all feels very odd. Time has gone by so fast, I can hardly believe it's time to go home!

It wasn't one specific thing that you did, It wasn't one specific thing that you said

I've just got in from my bike ride down the river. The weather was fantastic, hot and sunny and a lovely cool breeze was blowing down the river. I biked for 3 hours or so and then, after grabbing a chicken kebab for lunch (it had too much chilli sauce on, and I had to pay for garlic yoghurt!), caught the 'Citycat' boat back down the river and dropped off my bike.On my way down the river, I made a friend.

Somehow it escaped the mind of the bike hire store owner to record the start time I hired the bike, so after having the bike for just over 4 hours, I only paid for 3. "Sweet", I thought.

On my return to the hostel I stopped off in a barbers for a long overdue hair cut, and basically asked him to make it less mop-like. I could have sworn this guy was drunk, but anyway, he cut my hair, and rather amusingly cut my hair completely, except for a mullet type arrangement at the back! For a split second I witnessed how ridiculous I would look with this hair style, it looked pretty stupid, and to think some boys actually think this looks cool over here in Australia ?

Weirdos.

That evening I went bowling with some guys from my room and their mates. It was cheapskate Tuesday, so how could I resist, cheaper bowling and free popcorn! I won, which was nice. It got me some more popcorn anyway.

The next day I planned to get the bus to Brisbane Forest Park to go on a walk and enjoy the scenery. Again, it was a lovely day, and unfortunately I drastically underestimated the time it would take to get to the bus station, so I had to sprint the length of Queen Street Mall, and, upon arriving at the bus station stood there in a confused, hot and sticky state trying to figure out which side of the road to be on. Fortunately, I changed sides and the bus arrived just on time.

I did a 5km or so walk, and it took about 3.5 hours! I was dordling, to say the least. One reason for this delay was the fact that shortly into my walk, I spotted a tree snake climbing up the foliage of some nearby branches. I took my eyes off it for a split second to get closer, and subsequently spent the next hour looking for it again. I eventually found it, but it was too far to photograph, and I couldn't be sure it wasn't a vine, even through the binoculars. It was great to see it anyway because snakes are usually very hard to see. I definitely heard some other snakes rustling along the dry leaves, but couldn't see them, unfortunately.


The walk was around this reservoir, and was a haven for birdlife. I saw lots of birds, which I photographed and will identify now I've bought myself a more in depth, yet concise, bird guide to A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A!

Ella, eh, eh, eh, under my umbarella!

My attempted walk was a dismal failure beyond all previous dismal failures. I awoke early, packed and ready to go. Off I skipped, heartily excited about the ventures I had planned for the day. I hopped onto the right bus, which, was arrived early. I was to get the bus to Cooroy, and then a train from Cooroy to Cooran. From Cooran I was to walk a bit and then get the train back, and the bus back after that.

Unfortunately, there were no trains on saturdays. Supergay! So I went back to Noosa for 10am. Great.

Making the best of the wonderful day, I decided to walk up to Laguna Lookout, which was more of a look-at-hideously-overgrown-vegetation-from-a-lookout-type-platform. The views were impressive though, be they obscured by masses of foliage.
I spent the next 6 hours walking along the beach, sunbaking (grrrr...), reading, eating and generally what people seem to call "relaxing". It was the only day of sunshine I had at Noosa.

The next morning I left for Brisbane/Brisvegas. Personally, I was excited by this as it is the third largest city in Aus (population 1.3million), but most people I'd met along the way had advised me to skip Brisbane and head straight for Surfers Paradise. After inspecting the lonely planet, I easily made an itinery for 4 full days in Brisbane, so, ironically, I extended my stay in Brisbane and decided to skip Surfers Paradise.

I'm glad I did. Today was my first full day in Brisbane, and I had a great day! I roughly followed the Lonely Planet "Walking Tour" of Brisbane, and also enquired about bicycle hire (for tomorrow) and a few other bits and pieces.
I attempted to trade in two books I had read in return for some cash. Unfortunately the evil book stall man exclaimed he was not interested in my books, and that he would not pay cash for them. I said the same back to him, and then went and burnt down his house.

Planned for the rest of the week is a bike ride down the river, walking in Brisbane Forest Park, climbing Mt. Coot Tha and visiting the Dreamworld Theme Park. Exciting!

Play that funky music, white boy!

Bourne Ultimatum was a great film! Some bits didn't make sense because I hadn't seen the first two films in the trilogy, but it was fun nevertheless.

Yesterday I went to Australia Zoo and it was pretty cool. I saw otters (they were unbelievably cute), more crocodiles, alligators, koalas, tigers (!!!), kangaroos, laughing cockatoos etc.etc. This was great, but most of them I'd already seen in the wild. Even though it rained heavily all day, it was a good day out.

Today, I decided to head up to Noosa National Park and take a look at the bushwalks around there. Every walk I seem to go on, they massively overestimate the time it will take to complete the walk. I walked 10km, and they claimed it would take 5 hours! I'm guessing this had something to do with the fact that they suggested it was a strenuous walk, which it really wasn't.

The walk was cool, I didn't see any koalas, but the second half of the walk was coastal, and I sat eating lunch watching the surfers down below negotiate the ginormous swells. I've never seen waves as big, they were about 6 ft high!

After my walk, I went into town and grabbed a Subway (as in a sandwich, not an underground railway) and as I sat eating it, something odd happened. A cleaner came up to me, and, after kindly taking my rubbish, he asked me what I was doing around here, where I was from etc. and as he left, he pointed out that I had a bruise on my arm. He said it in the same manner as you would if you had, I don't know, a bit of dirt on your face, and that I was supposed to somehow remove this bruise because it was there by accident. Furthermore, he was surprised when I told him that the cause of the bruise was a horny goat. After this, I'm sure his mind jumped out on all sorts of tangents, but I explained that I had been wrestling goats and tieing there legs up. His surprised look didn't fade, I then lowered the weirdness tone by asking where the bus station was, I was getting a lfit back to the hostel by their courtesy bus.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to do a 26km (just over 16 miles) walk, I've heard the weather will cheer up a bit.

G'day G'day, and how ya goin? Whadda ya know, you'l strike a light.

Hey hey folks! My blogs are like London buses, you get none for ages and then two come at once!

I'm here in an awesome place called Noosa Heads, or just Noosa for short. I came here from Rainbow Beach this morning and it has been raining solidly since then. In addition to the obvious annoyance of the rain itself, an additional irritation comes from the fact that I have a lot to do here in relatively little time.

As I arrived here, I had no accommodation booked in for the evening, so I spoke to my guide and he suggested this place called Koalas, which is a chain of hostels all over Australia which I've stayed in before and have been bearable. It turns out three others (two Londoners called Jack and Dean and Jenny who I'd met from a previous trip) were also staying there so we rang up the hostel and they sent out a courtesy bus, which arrived unbelievably quickly.

We were picked up in a Ute (pick up truck) and our things were taken from us and placed in the back of the truck. They were covered up to protect them from the rain. We spoke to the friendly driver about the weather, the city, what there is to do etc. and I quickly began to adore the place.

Just north (as in walking distance) of Noosa is Australia's most visited National Park, ("AWESOME!!!" I thought), and there are oober loads of fantastic walking tracks. In addition to this, the driver (who's job it is to drive customers around) said he would drive me up there to save me the walk, ("AWESOME!!!" I thought).

Australia Zoo is owned by the widow, Terri, of the late Steve Irwin, or "The Crocodile Hunter". There's a free shuttle bus from the hostel to there ("AWESOME!!!" I thought). I'm off there tomorrow, very excited indeed. It's very wet, so four of us are going to cheer ourselves up and go to the cinema to see "Bourne Ultimatum", it looks fantastic although I haven't seen the first two.

Two weeks today.

The more you try the Fraser

Ah yes, you last heard from me a while ago when I was off to Kroombit Cattle Station, yeeee haaaaaa! Kroombit was brilliant! There were 7 of us on the bus, and 3 hilariously funny guides, which is a pretty good ratio! At Kroombit, we spent the night and the next morning went off for a horseride to muster the goats.

That was great fun, except for when the guide's horse stood on a goat! The goat made an heart-wrenchingly painful-sounding scream and then proceeded to limp onward on three legs, it's fourth leg bent double and cringeingly taking some of the poor animal's weight. The guide, unbelievably optimistically, assured is that the poor goat would be fine and make a full recovery. It was one of thousands of similar goats, and I would bet my life on it now being dead.

I have to choose my photos to put on the blog carefully due to poor upload speeds, and my picture of the backside of my horse does, disappointingly, not qualify.

Next, we were to do a goat rodeo. We were, in simple terms, instructed to pin a goat down by kneeling on it's ribcage, and then tie three of its legs together and then poke it on the rump with a brander. This was all very well, but our goat was very frisky and very horny, that is, it had big horns, which it succeeded in ramming into my, now bruised, upper arm.

The next activity was clay pigeon shooting, with a 12-gauge shotgun. The guide told us that if any of us beat him, he would buy us two beers or something of equivalently enormous value, so I was concentrating hard on this activity, a little shaken from my two earlier goat related incidents.

I missed the first shot, and immediately hated myself. Fortunately, the next four shots were successful, so suicide was removed from the equation. Frat also shot 4, so we were equal. Without my two beers, suicide was, once again, put back into the equation. Only kidding :-) .

Below is a picture of me shooting up, note cowboy looking figure in the foreground, who is actually a proper cockney lad who works there. Damn, deleted the picture. Sorry.

After Kroombit was a long, long, drive to Rainbow Beach. Mind you, a 10 hour drive is a quick trip to the shops by Australia standards.

In the morning I was booked into a 3 day self drive 4x4 trip around Fraser Island. Fraser Island is the largest sand island in the world. I was told that if all of the sand that makes up Fraser Island was picked up and dropped onto Sydney, that is, all of Sydney, the sand would be 80m deep. This island is 130km long, and covers an area of 1630 sq m., in short, it is gigantic. The whole island has no sealed roads, and so access is by 4x4 only.

I met my group in the morning and they had been shopping already the night before. We loaded everything onto the roof and off we went, none of the drivers had driven a 4x4 before, and, ironically, I had yet I couldn't drive as I wasn't old enough (21yrs) to hire a car.

As most of the good driving is on the beach, the tide times and heights strongly determined our itinerary for the trip as there were certain periods when you couldn't drive on the beach. a few hours in, we got a flat tyre. Fortunately, I was there to save the day and take some cracking photos of other people doing the work (below). One bloke, dyeing to put his new toy to good use, attached a tube to our exhaust, the other end of which attached to an industrial strength balloon and proceeded to lift our car up from beneath. I was impressed, if not a little anxious that the balloon may burst and kill our little leprechaun hobbit-like Irish helpers.

Anyway, an hour or so later we thanked them greatly and made our way across the island to Lake McKenzie, which is a huge freshwater lake. It was stunningly beautiful, with gorgeous white sands and crystal clear water, picture-perfect, ready for a postcard. It was cloudy though, picture below.Following this, we set up camp at central station and, after a good feed, I proceeded to have second worst nights sleep of my life, the first worst was to await me the next evening.
The next day, we had to go to Eurong (pronounced "you're wrong", much to the amusement of German fellow on board) to pick up another spare tyre, leaving us with a total of six tyres on board.

We then proceeded to Wabby Lake, which is the deepest freshwater lake on the island. We had a nice swim and a sunbake (why do Australians call it that? What am I? A cake?!) and the rest headed back to the van for some lunch. I wanted to walk up to the lookout, which was well worth it. Photo below.

There are many fantastic bushwalking tracks on the island which, unfortunately I was not able to explore.

After lake Wabby and lunch, we drove to the famous wreck of the S.S. Maheno. This is a ship which, in 1935, was being towed to Melbourne for scrap metal when it was caught in a cyclone and washed up a few days later on the beach of Fraser Island. It was used as bombing practise for the RAAF in WWII, and is now very rusty.

We then went back to camp, and had a great meal (Martina, a woman on my trip, is a cook :->), after which we had an early night and I lay there for 10 hours, insomniac.

We rose early this morning to see the sunrise from Indian Head. Indian Head is in the north of the Island, and was named by Captain James Cook, after seeing many Aboriginal people gathered at the peak of the headland on his sail by.After this, we drove back along the beach to wait to board the ferry and return our vehicle. We saw our third dingo of the trip, on the beach as we left.

Happy Mondays, Whitsundays!

Well hello family and friends! I've spent the last two days having the experience of a life time!

I'm in Airlie Beach on the East coast of Australia about an 18hr drive south from Cairns. The town centre is a street made up of little more than pubs, clubs and travel agencies, which is a little samey, but quite fun nevertheless! The town is really just a gateway to the archipelago called the Whitsundays, which is a large group of 74 islands, mostly National Park and therefore protected land.

The Whitsundays islands were named by Cook (again), and he simply named them after the day he sailed through them! However, due to the time zone difference, it was actually a Monday!

It's one of few places where normal, smelly, scummy backpackers can spend a few days on million pound maxi racing yachts, all at backpacker prices too! So it was definitely not to be missed. I was on the Boomerang!There were about 20 or so of us, and it was a real laugh. The food was great and we visited many famous sites. We set off from Airlie Beach, and the 30m high mast was overwhelmingly impressive! At one point, we were sailing and the boat was about 45degrees to the water, one side of the boat was almost submerged! I was sure we were going to capsize, but the crew said that as long as they're smiling, all is ok!

Here's the bed I was sleeping in, suitably trashed!
We visited Tongue Bay on Whitesunday Island, and the famous Whitehaven beach, which is apparently the third most photographed place in Australia. I found this a little hard to believe, but it was certainly a beatuful postcard-worthy photo!

We sailed around a few Islands, including Border Island, Hayman Island and Hock Island, and also stopped off for some brilliant coral snorkling.
So I'm here in Airlie for a few days now, until I head off to Kroombit, which is a cattle station inland! I hear many interesting things go on there...

nb. pictures can all be enlarged by clicking on them.