Whitsunday Bloody Whitsunday...

So after leaving the Sand Island we took and overnight bus to Airlie Beach to catch a boat to sail around the Whitsunday Islands. A network of 74 islands, the largest being the same size as Barbados. For some reason I was expected a small cruise ship with sails, this was not a small cruise ship with sails.

Somehow 25 backpackers and 5 crew were supposed to sleep on this for 3 days, it was proper crammo’d!

After a short safety demo of what to do on the boat etc and which cranny you have been allocated to attempt to sleep in we headed off for the high seas.

The plan was to snorkel a bit the first day and get to know each other. Then the second day go and see a postcard beach and snorkel more before a night on the razz and then returning the next morning.

The first bit of snorkelling was shit, I’m not even going to pretend I enjoyed it. Might have seen one fish, even that fish though that area was shit, and he lives there. The coral was basically brown cack. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I am a terrible swimmer and couldn’t master the breathing and not dying aspects needed to relish in the sea life. Once I had been given a floaty noddle usually reserved for spastics and children it was a little better.

Straight after the snorkeling fiasco I got straight on the goon, I didn’t want to run out like of Fraser so I bought 6.4L, in hindsight this is definitely too much.

 That night the crew cooked up some chicken, they called it baby emu to be funny – I didn’t laugh. But the food was good and the scenery nice before one of the crew tried to organise some sort of “get to know each other” game which 100% of the boat wasn’t keen on. Also this guy must have been 12, and looked like a lesbian. Ryan form Northern Island actually thought he was a girl.

One of the questions he was asking everyone was to tell a funny or interesting story. It was the turn of Chris, a slightly unassuming bald Geordie with glasses, like Moby. He reminded me a lot of a former boss of mine. Here he is without his glasses.

He told the story of how he had pulled a bird and needed some condoms so went to the toilets of the place he was at and went to the vending machine. He was faced with a few options – dotted, ribbed, a few others and “Travel Pack”. The travel pack option was only £2 so he thought “bargain”.

He took her home only to open the travel pack and examine the contents. A comb, miniature tooth brush and a pair of scissors!

I still can’t get over many elements of this story including how you would ever think that travel pack was selection of condoms. Anyhow his name going forward was “Travel Pack”.

The next morning it was wake up time at 7am! Completely unnecessary as we would finish the day at about 3.30! We went over the Whitsunday Island and Whitehaven Beach. We were walked to a lookout point to see the views, very nice.

However I was distracted from admiring the delightful views by some weird goings on. There was a girl, she didn’t look weird or nothing, but she was talking to a hand puppet.

I looked around for ages to see if there was a camera crew or anything to indicate that she wasn’t a complete mental. I found no evidence.

The beach was amazing, seriously like a film or something. Only issue was I hadn’t heeded Skipper Ned’s advice of “don’t go to heavy on the first night, it will spoil it”. I was hanging hard, like a 9.5! Very concerned I would sick up on the white beach, I held it in though. I the water we also saw bare Stingwrays (correct spelling) and crabs. I’ll put a little video and the end with them on.

Next was snorkeling, in a good place. Saw loads of fish and this giant one called Elvis.

I had bought an underwater disposable for the trip and expected some good pictures. I handed the camera to Graham, the fun filled Irish lad, who had offered to take a picture for me after I had got one of him. Here is my picture of him:

Here is his picture of me (cheers mate):

After the snorkeling it was back on the boat for the party to begin. Due to no signal on my phone, I had switched it off so the concept of time was completely lost. I later found out that we started drinking at 3.30! Chaos ensued as drinking games began (mostly targeted at Travel Pack) and odd dancing involving a make-believe lawn mower, also ring-led by Travel Pack.

We returned the next day, nobody was keen on snorkeling again except a select few do-gooders.

Anyway it was another awesome trip, can’t knock it. Whitsundays = Ace.

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Sun, Sand and Vaginese...

Afternoon, its been a while and we have done so much since the last post that I’m going to have to whizz through a lot of the less interesting stuff to keep it short and not boring; so here goes.

(please note that this is a bit TLDR then there is a summary video at the bottom)

So after Byron Bay we headed to Surfer’s Paradise, didn’t see a single person surfing. Need to rename it I reckon. Surfer’s is like an aging European holiday town – Benidormesque; it was super busy though due to some 7’s tourney that was on so all the hostels and hotels were booked, and we hadn’t. We found a hotel for one night at an extortionate rate. We were tired and fancied making our own food for once so we went to the supermarket and returned with plastic cutlery, delicious precooked roast chicken and noodles to boil in mugs.  We ate it and fell asleep at 9pm watching Castaway like a right couple of LADS.

After that we headed to Noosa, same sort of story; key highlight was walking into the rainforest on mushrooms acquired in Nimbin. Lovely scenery and colourful, however after the sunsets it’s the most terrifying situation I have ever been in, I have never ran so fast away from a frog. Here’s a couple pictures of times when I got spooked by the forest:

Next came Rainbow Beach, nothing much there but the stop off before we headed to Fraser Island, the world’s largest sand island – apparently. At Rainbow we had a lengthy safety demo on how not to die as somehow the trip to Fraser Island involves allowing, essentially kids, to drive 4x4s unsupervised (in a convoy) around the beach and through the rainforest.

The next morning we headed off in our Toyota Land Cruisers, I opted to go first as I had expected to be hungover the next day and could therefore say “I’ve driven already, so…”. I was the first to get the car stuck, but it wasn’t my fault, it fell out of gear and dug in, not my fault as I said, ok, not my fault.

We had 4 cars heading off to the island and we had 8 in our car, Jack and I, 3 loud welsh girls who enjoyed singing and playing lots of Ja Rule songs on the iPod dock (ONLY FOR THE ROOLE BABY), a barrister, and a German couple. The German man was head to toe Crocodile Dundee; he had the hat, a knife, green and khaki gear and a digital camera belt clip. His name was Kevin… Kevin Koostner! He didn’t seem to find that funny, or even interesting in any way. One of the Welshies said that that sounded like it should be an actor’s name, her friends pointed out that it already was!

After getting on the island and eating some shit beef sandwiches we swapped drivers, saw a Dingo and headed into the jungle for 2 hours to visit Lake McKenzie.

After that it was time to head to our camp for 2 nights, N’gari or something, can’t remember. It is an ancient Aborigine site I was told, my question was if it’s so ancient they have had loads of time to make it not a shit hole but I guess it would do.

The camp had 2 very strict rules laid out by the natives, and this isn’t a joke:

1. No spitting in fires.

Why? That is just stupid. Prior to hearing that I hadn’t even thought about spitting in a fire but afterwards it was all I wanted to do.

2. No Whistling.

Why? At least it meant that I could a have couple days without anyone mocking me for not being able to whistle, result.

We made dinner as a group which was mash, soggiest salad and steaks, I still can’t identify what cut they were, but probably the gooch, and I under cooked them. All the groups got together after around a campfire, played drinking games and headed over to a makeshift dance floor for general outrageousness.

The next morning was horrendous, woken up at 7am, shit scrambled eggs and the grimiest shower, like prehistoric, apparently the toilets were worse but upon hearing that I made a pact with myself that I just wouldn’t shit for the whole trip. I had decided it was just best to rough it going on, so I didn’t wear footwear again.

So we headed off again, this time to Eli Creek, a spring stream that you can float down and was actually proper refreshing.

We heard there was a 4 month dead whale up the beach so we checked that out, mega disgusting!

Further down the beach was the 70 year wreck of the Maheno, rusty ruined ships are better than lakes imo but that’s just me.

At this stage the German girl took over driving, got it stuck as she tried to drive up a sandy hill in 3^rd like a spazlord and we had to get out and push, unacceptable. When we were getting back in the car she decided to reverse and try to run my foot over. Who starts driving when half the people aren’t in the car and doors are open and someone’s hanging out of it? Germans, that’s who!

And on to the Champagne Pools, this is a rock pool where when water splashes over the rocks in looks like champagne… if you’re Stevie Wonder! Still nice though. Here a girl asked me if she picked up a crab, would it bite her, I said it was unlikely… but be careful of the pincers. Some people.

Finally we drove over to Indian Head, a lookout spot for sea life.

Everybody was on the edge of their rocks, were we going to see them? Were we going the view that one thing everyone wanted to see?

The answer is yes we did!

That is a whale by the way. We also saw turtles, jellyfish and Stingwrays (correct spelling).

Back to camp for more of the same as the night before, only difference was I had drunk all my Vodka on the first night, as in all of it (nearly a liter) so in the day I had to buy Goon. Goon is what poor backpackers drink as booze in Oz is rinse as. It’s a box of wine, taken out of the box so it’s a silvery bag with a tap. It’s basically syrup and equates to £1.50 a bottle in UK. So I though 4 liters would do.

The drinking games began and people started getting nicknames. Jack’s was Jasper because someone thought his name was Jasper. I got a mix of Ben Affleck (just because I have a beard) and Briefcase from Inbetweeners meets Snape from Harry Potter (just because I pronounce my T’s I think).

We also played Chinese Whispers. One round had started with “Playing Chinese Whispers with strangers”; someone must have included the word vagina in there somewhere because the end result was “something something Vaginese” The game is now known as Vaginese.

The next morning was hell. We had a 40 minute hike through the rainforest on sand to get to a lush lake whilst on a Goon hangover, we saw a massive lizard called a Goanna; this is essentially a cucumber dragon. At the lake there was a vast sand mass with steep slope to the water.

The instructions before we left were “do not jump in the water, its shallower than you think”.

As I was running to the water to jump in I encouraged the Canadian girl to do it also. After she fucked her ankle, I and few of the other lads tried our best to avoid helping whilst at the lake. This included looking the other way and allowing the wind to blow our floating bodies further and further away from the action. When it was time to leave and piggyback the girl out of through the rainforest; Jack and I walked ahead at quite a pace, abnormally fast for the weather and terrain until an Irish girl shouted that we were trying to avoid helping at which stage we turned around and said “let us know when you want us to take over, we immediately took over. This took an age and although we kept taking turns; with the sweat she kept sliding off, just awful. (NB. this is not an innuendo)

Anyway I’ve dragged on a bit, we left the island and the last thing I saw was a dolphin jump out of the water and do a flip

A truly awesome trip, great sights, people and jokes along the way. Amazing stuff

Here's the vid.

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The Life of Byron...

This is Byron Bay

Its good.

Byron Bay was our first foray into SHARED ACCOMMODATION!, sleeping in bunk beds, general BO, general clothes everywhere and general noise everywhere, I was not looking forward to it. Plus one night in an 8 person room cost the same the 4* place in Cancun ($25).

I actually liked it. Our room was full of Germans, I called in DeutscheBunk.

Jack later had to move rooms as we had booked and in his room there some proper LADS who tried to climb into birds beds while they were sleeping etc, fairly funny behavior

The hostel put on a thing every night which meant there was always a busy bar to go to. The first night in the bar you got a raffle ticket for a free skydive with every drink. This meant that the drunkest person had the best chance of winning an extremely dangerous prize. Although I wasn’t keen on the skydive, I did want to win; and J Bird didn’t want to win so I had his tickets and we got on it. I was sure this one was in the bag. It came time for the DJ to announce the winner; I was planning an acceptance speech in my head. Then surprise surprise, some girl in a group of girls hanging around the DJ booth won. I left in a huff.

At this stage I would like to show you J Bird’s hair, it’s ridiculous. He looks like Niffty who was a dinner lady come 6^th form canteen lady at school. Nice woman but she looked like a massive lesbian.

You can take a minibus to a town called Nimbin, we were told it’s like Amsterdam. The person who told us this has clearly never been to Amsterdam or even seen a picture of Amsterdam or even heard anything about Amsterdam because Nimbin is nothing like Amsterdam. It’s basically 1 street with drug dealers walking around and drug paraphernalia shops.

About 45 minutes into the way there the emergency exit roof hatching thing of the minibus flew off. As in flew away into some field. It was raining so the cabin just completely filled in with water and passengers moved seats to avoid the flooding. I was sat at the back of the bus like a LAD so I just saw the whole thing unfold. When we arrived at Nimbin the bus driver turns around and says:

Driver: “oh, have we had a leak from somewhere” He looks up “oh Christ, where’s the roof?

Passenger 1: “it flew away”

Driver: “it flew away?”

Passenger 2: “yeah, it flew away”

Driver: “why didn’t anyone tell me”

The whole bus shrugs their shoulders

In hindsight that is a pertinent question, I still don’t know why anyone didn’t tell him. Someone should have told him really. Not me, but someone.

We went out again, no stories but got some funny videos and texts.

So next up is Surfer's Paradise (that's actually the name of the town) according to one of the LADS in Jack's room, in Surfer's; "even the dirty birds are fit... probably an average weight of 8-9 stone". What a ridiculous thing to say to a stranger

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Oh and don’t get me wrong, Byron aint all drinking and shouting, it’s got bloody lush scenery too

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