So we’ve long left behind Australian city life and gone off on our east coast tour. This is a 23day affair and as such this will be just about the longest thing I’ve found time to write since my dissertation. If you aren’t fully invested in knowing my minute by minute movements then save yourself a failure and stop reading now… Seriously, its long-ting.

Cairns – Magnetic Island – Airlie/Whitsundays – Rainbow/Fraser Island – Brisbane – Surfers Paradise – Byron Bay – Sydney

We flew from chilly Melbourne all the way north to sunny Cairns. With only three weeks to hit all the top spots on our way back to Sydney, we’re looking at plenty of two or three day max stays in each place… Probably not a great idea to have turned one of our valuable days in cairns into a sleep fest because of our hideous/awesome Melbourne night out/flight experience? But actually a concise description of Cairns would probably include references to Malia, Magaluf, Benidorm etc. and since we’re both over the idea of constant partying, we only had interest in one thing during our Cairns stay – The Great Barrier Reef. (Well… and the lagoon, directly in front of our dorm, but it was shut for three weeks for maintenance, booo)

Greeted by one those typical, unbelievably happy and chirpy outdoor pursuit instructors, we knew our reef tour would be a mad day. We had opted for snorkelling rather than diving which was absolutely perfect – I’m not sure how much more the divers would really have seen as they could only dive the same spots as we snorkelled but couldn’t go off on their own from the guide like we could – so if you’re not an experienced diver and are unsure what to choose, then considering the price difference, snorkelling definitely won’t disappoint – and its cheap enough for you to justify buying photos of you with Wally …. Wally is a giant fish who plays with you as if he we were a puppy and likes to have his lips rubbed and he LOVES the underwater photographer like a proper dog and owner. So cuteee.

The reef has, understandably, become more and more protected, mostly because it was being badly damaged by tourism. We still saw tonnes of amazing fish and sea life and a few bits of cool coral – I think its all the really amazing coral that you’re banned from as its super fragile, but whether you’re moving or just hovering over something pretty, then random new and beautiful fish just pop out of a cave and you’re like wohhhh thats amazing, OMG look over there etc. which spoken through a snorkel sounds ridiculous. We saw Clown Fish (primarily referred to as Nemo’s – Jade spotted a Dory too) sea cucumbers (stay away from these) and then I pretty much don’t know the actual names of any thing else but there were rainbowey ones, long pointy yellow speckled ones, big flat ones, many variations of neon ones, etc, etc. We both enjoyed it much more than we thought we would, despite the VERY choppy water and many lame vommers on board – our sea legs were excellent 😉

I’ll say a few nice things about Cairns itself – its a very clean party town and has a decent array of surf shops and a brilliant aboriginal art shop/gallery plus its own tiny but interesting art gallery and many restaurants that are decent for affordable backpacker meals if you’re ceebs for cooking. Further more the bars every 19 year old british gap yarrer gets trashed in before crashing in whoever’s nearest bed are actually quite nice. We had the pleasure of sharing a dorm with some girls who had been living there for some time and despite never engaging in a conversation with them I can tell you every detail of their lives from their time here, including who is mad at who for sleeping with who days after who slept with who “OMG you guyyyys we have to get out of Cairrrns” was their fave phrase, “Please do” was the the response we politely refrained from saying out loud.
Overall its a nice place to be, and perhaps if the lagoon was open it would have impressed more but it just isn’t as ‘Australian’ as other places, if that’s acceptable to say? We could have been in any general holiday destination when we weren’t out on the reef itself, but still lovely, especially if you were actually on holiday, I suppose?

Next stop, Magnetic Island. A tiny island which is a sort of haven to escape to, minimal tourists and locals, not overly developed but still a TONNE of stuff to do and see. We stayed in Base, which was right on the beach at Picnic Bay, had cool beach dorms, a pool and an awesome open air bar. Also they run a sunset walk with free goon… This was beautiful even though our staff guide got us lost, extending the walk a little and a group of Americans fully freaked out about my phone (its a Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom, compact digital camera/phone combination and LITERALLY everyone who sees it needs a half an hour lecture before they understand this, even though camera phones have existed for a long time now) but I mean fully lost their minds, everyone else was English or French and just sat their like, seriously guys, its just a camera/phone, chill your beans.
The population of Magnetic tends to hover around 70% female 30% male… This is quickly understood when you further discover that the vehicle population is 70% awesome barbie jeeps and 30% 4x4s. We rented ourselves a sweet ride and cruised around the Island visiting a few other bays and dropping in on Zoe Whiting for a little Devonian catch up! We also attempted a walk out to Arthur bay – strayed off the path a little and got stuck in what seemed to be a maze of snake nests… Not an ideal situation in Australia so we gave up and went to see the Rock Wallabies.
These are a pack of mini wallabies who live on a rock. Makes sense. You aren’t encouraged to feed them but you can give them certain foods, we didn’t take anything with us but magically timed our visit at the same time as “Wallaby Man” (not sure its his official title but we chose it for him anyway) He feeds them a few days of the week, seemed to know them individually and said they know his car when it approaches, so they must be pretty close! He gave us some tomatoes to feed to them, some of you may have seen many snapchats of “tomato time”, AKA wallaby chops. They were adorable (once you got past the fact that when they move they look like giant rats) and some had little Joeys in their pouches :). We chilled with the crew for a while then went to watch another spectacular sunset over at Horseshoe Bay, sooooo many sunsets.
Our final morning on Magnetic was spent at a Champagne Koala Breakfast. All you can eat food heaven, nommin’ ‘ell. We held a couple of dragons and a weird pine-cone-lizard hybrid and a huge boa constricta… And a Koalaaaaaaaaaa. Sooo soft and fuzzy and teddy bear like, people say they smell but we didn’t notice this at all, it was too cute and cuddly 🙂 I want one.

Next up was the Whitsundays. I wept on the coach a little when we left here. I want to go back and buy a boat and live out on the sea and watch whales all day and go diving with turtles forever. For our two night sailing trip we were onboard New Horizon… Book it and never look back. The boat itself is pretty awesome, large cosy sleeping cabin, a galley/seating area perfect for drinking games/eating the lush food, and some cool extras like a dive board, inflatable slide and paddle boards. More importantly the boats crew were awwwwwwesome. Although they can’t actually drink, they join in with every aspect of the trip and make sure everyone is loving life – not that thats a huge task considering your first afternoon is spent paddle boarding/swimming in a beautiful bay in the islands while the sun sets, followed by a perfect night drinking and horse racing (the card version, not the equine variation) then up early the next day to spend hours on the unbelievably beautiful Whitehaven beach, swimming in the glacier mint clear ocean or exfoliating your ENTIRE body in the 80% silica sand (pure) – they used Whitehaven sand to make the Hubble lens – and then, if you want the opportunity to try a scuba-dive! They offer an introductory dive at a very good rate, so despite what I said r.e. Cairns about not necessarily choosing diving where good snorkelling is also available, I ate my own words and went for it.

It was just twenty minutes and was seriously weird to begin with, breathing underwater isn’t exactly the most natural feeling, but by the end of it I would quite happily have lived underwater!! I opted to do a second, longer dive the next morning, which was even more amazing. We got in the water at 7.30am, in high winds and a strong current i.e. bloody freezing. This time we didn’t start on the beach but did the classic roll backwards off of a dingy… Scuba kit is HEAVY, you hit the water and immediately begin to sink and because I didn’t hold my mask in place properly I had a bit of a cafuffle, struggled to catch my breath through the creepy Darth Vader breather and nearly bailed on the whole thing. Luckily the instructor calmed me down, turned up my air flow and deflated my suit, no option there then, but this ws the RIGHT MOVE, we watched all the amazing fish, a huge variety of them too, wake up and swim in and out of the coral like it was rush hour. The coral we were around was more incredible than the previous day, some of it towered way above us as we dived deeper down and avoiding collisions was slightly impossible, at one point I had to use my hand to stop my self and have no idea what on earth what I ended up touching! Just as we were about to give up on our turtle hunt and head to the surface, one appeared just ahead and happily sat and let us admire him. It was a fairly large hawkshead turtle and he was magnificent! The koala was cute and probably comes in at my number four animal encounter, the turtle a verrrry high level third, the elephants in Thailand get a solid second and obviously Bailey gets number 1 forever. I’m going to do a PADI course as soon as I get home!

Our second night on board was more of a party atmosphere, the crew put a few interesting team games on – for the sake of certain relatives who may be reading I won’t go into great detail but there may have been some mild nudity and a lot of blowing involved in gaining points – teamwork is important after all. Throughout the days sailing we saw humpback whales breaching, a few turtles swimming on the surface, and lotsssss of amazing tropical islands sprinkled in the crazy blue water. The Whitsunday’s are too amazing. After a rough, wet, thrilling sailing home and after party, it was time to say goodbye. I just about managed to catch up with Charlotte Bower, who is lucky enough to have been living here for nine months, so that totals three Torbay residents in three weeks on the total opposite side of the planet!! I also slyly bought some birthday supplies for my fellow lung while she had a nap by the lagoon… We were due to board an overnight bus on the eve of her birthday so obviously banners, fairy lights, “champagne”, cake and some of Primarks finest happy birthday sun glasses were necessary items for a 6am (terrifying) wake up, on said coach. I’m sure she’s scarred for life, theres video evidence on Facebook and I believe a staged re-enactment also did a round on snapchat.

Lets talk about Fraser Island now. We are being sooooooo spoilt with great experiences on this trip so far and this is another amazing, can’t miss adventure. This time we were on a tag along 4x4driving/camping tour which goes a little like this; heres eight jeeps, split into two groups of four vehicles, eight people in each one, four crates of food/alcohol for each one, follow the lead car, take turns to drive in varying degrees of sand difficulty, camp here on the aboriginal land, don’t feed Dingos, don’t get fed to Dingos, don’t walk alone because DINGOS, drink all you like, play music as loud as you like, basically do anything you like and as lead driver Brent would say, “enjoy the s**t out of it”.

Fraser is the largest sand island in the world and is home to many, many Dingos, an aboriginal camp, a super tiny township, a couple of casual resorts and a pretty large shipwreck. Its basically one enormous beach separated on either side of the Island by woodland, or as they call it here, bush, and dessert like sand dunes stretching mile after mile. Hidden among the inland bush and dunes are a few incredible lakes, including lake Mckenzie, which looks like a paradise beach not a lake, with glassy clear waters and soft white sand. In contrast we also saw lake Wabby, which sits at the bottom of a steeeeeeeep sand dune and is your more classic greeny water, backing onto thick forest. Sorry, thick bush. The sand dunes act like sun traps at the lake so the water feels extra fresh on your mozzy bites.

An old Tasman cruise liner, The Maheno, is wrecked here. Its wrecking wasn’t hugely interesting – it was already being towed to be retired but a storm tore it from its tug and it wrecked on Fraser island. It’s history as a cruise liner and later a war time hospital ship was more impressive but one of the lead driver guides had a much more exciting tale in which the Maheno was wrecked by a Japanese crew who were trying to smuggle kangaroos out of Australia. I believe he rotates this story with several other works of fiction and the tourists eat every word. At the northern tip of the island is Indian Head, we trekked up here one day to whale spot, saw plenty of them breaching and slapping in the distance but nothing too close and the rain was starting to set in. People had just started to turn away when an almighty slap drew gasps, as a mother and calve appeared just below us. So we stuck out the pouring rain a little longer to watch.
Although the guides here were much more hands off “you do your own thing I’m mainly here to supervise the drive” they had their moments of hilarity. Both Brent and the camp staff were peaceful hippy types and genuinely use phrases like “be at one with nature” and “far out dude” with no hint of irony. So when a game of “cards against humanity” broke out around the camp fire, Harley, the camp manager, could not comprehend the idea that you choose the most offensive, deep-darkly-funny answer, rather than a real answer. Fair play duuuude, he is the human version of the turtle in Finding Nemo… And also Canadian…from Canadia…Yep.
Fraser was awesome. Do a tag along tour. Spend a week re-living the memories through sand lodged in any crevice you own 😉

Brisbane. Literally the shortest stop, I can not tell you anything much about the city itself except that we lost our “Hungry Jacks” virginity and bought cheap neon trainers… This isn’t because we slept for 36 hours straight, its because we went to Australia Zoo!! For anyone who didn’t have a childhood this is a world famous (although surprisingly small) zoo founded by the one and only Steve “crikey” Irwin (well his parents founded it but you know..). If that still means nothing to you then type Crocodile Hunter into youtube and sit and wish you could rewind time to before he was tragically killed by a stingray :,( I have a flashbulb memory of when I first heard of this loss – I was working a morning shift at Beverly Park when a colleague strolled in and broke the news to everyone and we fought back the tears by stealing hot chocolates from our slave labour inflicting bosses. The zoo obviously had many dedications to the great man all around the zoo and his team still carry out the same awesome shows with the stars of the zoo, the crocs. They also have a place called Kangaroo Heaven where the Roos roam free and you can pet them and take selfies to your hearts content :). One keeper was carrying a baby croc around the zoo for people to hold, another had a large wombat on a leash (funny sight) and the unlucky third got stuck with the Echidna, freakishly long skinny tongue and spines, I would far rather cuddle a koala, which they also have plenty of. Personally, Paignton zoo will always be my fave but Australia zoo ticked an item off my younger selfs bucket list – plus my brother and dad will be crazy jealous so win, win, win, cheers Steve.

Surfers Paradise – Weirdest place. I knew nothing about it before arriving and assumed it would some tiny little surf town full of, well, surfers. Its actually like the Beverly Hills/Miami of Aus. Loads of skyscrapers, but they’re all apartments and swankster hotels. A river runs around them, along the banks of which are dozens of magnificent houses, mansion after mansion with at least one super yacht parked outside each. I don’t know who you have to be to live or own property here but actually after the pretty beach and few nice coastal walks it all gets a bit Blackpool meets Orlando, with an array of theme parks and seafront attractions. You can go whale watching from here and in this season especially your chances of spotting at least one are excellent. We’ve seen plenty though so we aren’t investing our selves too much into the excitement of Surfers Paradise, just chilling and enjoying being stood still for a day or so. The beach is very pretty and like much of the Australia we’ve seen they look after their tourists and locals alike so you feel very welcomed by everyone from retail staff to the seagull that politely stares at your fish and chips, rather than just snatching it straight out of your lap. Worthy of mention is our current hostel, Sleeping Inn Surfers. Its very reminiscent of a student flat – communal living area/kitchen, one solitary bathroom and three small rooms crammed with six bunks each… The cliental are also much the same as your first set of uni housemates, which is amusing right down to the suspicious noises occurring a few feet from your head while you try to sleep… Classy. Surfers didn’t really do it for me, however…

Byron Bay! Our final stop before returning to Sydney to do lots of laundry before New Zealand 😉 … Byron Bay is just about the most typically Aussie surf town you will ever find and its beautifullllllll. It’s easily stealing second place from Fraser Island leaving my top Aussie rankings as 1. Whitsunday Islands 2. Byron Bay 3. Fraser Island 4. Melbourne 5. Sydney. Sure everything else was amazing too but these 5 are the absolute stand outs. Byron is just the sweetest little town, its tiny but theres actually loads here in terms of retailers, restaurants, activities etc. If you’re a backpacker with dwindling funds then the beach is sooooo gorgeous you can just sit all day watching the surfers and attempt to learn all the professional modes on your ultra smart camera phone, fail and use Instagram instead ;). There is also a lush walk up to the lighthouse and I mean UP. Steps, many steps. Its the most easterly point of mainland Australia with amazing views back over Cape Byron and we had the most incredibly clear sunny day for it (And ice-cream). I couldn’t see the screen on the camera as I took a bajillion photos as it was so bright, so the fact the photos came out in such amazing colours was a pleasant surprise. As per usual we did some whale spotting! Our final stop along the coast it puts surfers paradise to shame and we wish we had come straight here instead so we could have had longer and become surfer girls with perfect beachy hair and an epic tan, you live and learn eh?

Thats just about it on the East Coast of dreams. We have the most amazing time, been incredibly lucky on the weather front the entire journey and I will be much sadder to leave Australia than I ever thought I would. I have several versions of hopefully not pipe dreams of returning to this wonderful country in the not too distant future, but for now its bye, bye Byron, hello 16hr coach to Sydney to catch a flight to… NEW ZEALAND. I know, I know you all hate us and I’m sorry for, in the words of my brother, being a jammy bastard 😉

Much loveeee, Rose x