Whitsunday Islands

Fresh off our Fraser Island safari and epic 13 hour bus ride into Airlie Beach we set sail for the Whitsunday Islands. In hindsight I wish that we set aside a little more time for this part of our trip. Its not that spending 8 days in Byron Bay was not great (supposedly it has a tendancy to suck people in there) but we now have so much to do in such a little time, that its becoming a blur. So, while Fraser islands was pretty much a big party with some nice scenery thrown in, the Whitsundays were more of the opposite and I don't think that we had enough time to switch modes.

We sailed on the mighty Reality Is... A old 50 foot catamaran sail boat that we found out was the self proclaimed party ship of the whitsunday islands. We also found out that there were about 30 people on the boat so we both expected it to be a booze cruise. It turned out to be a lot more chilled then we both expected and even more so than Fraser Island. With the exception of the Irish on board, most people were happy to just relax and enjoy the ride. We got really lucky again with the weather, which can change in minutes here. We had 3 rain free days and mostly sunny skies and we would just hang out on deck between our destinations. At night they would serve dinner on the boat and everyone would drink after until they dropped us off at the hostel and everyone would continue drinking and being social. I even partook in the social scene until I found someone's playstation with old nintendo and super nintendo games, which as sad as it was, was like looking into an old album of my life...and much more fun than trying to make new friends.

It has been a long time since I last sailed properly, and even though I didn't get to control our boat it still felt great when the captain turned off the engines and we actually sailed. While I don't think that the Whitsunday Islands are actually included in the great barrier reef when we snorkeled there were still some incredible reefs and fish to see. Unfortunatly as beautiful as the waters are up here they are equally deadly. Everytime we stepped into the water we would have to wear full body licra suits (very sexy), even to just wade through the waters, because of the jellyfish that if they don't kill you, you need to be airlifted to a hospital for morphine for the pain...terrifying. Our package even included a scuba dive, which was really just a 10 minute swim around rocks at a depth of 10 feet. Mike even managed to swim headfirst into a coral reef, it was pretty funny but he cut his head up and had to get it cleaned...but still who swims into a wall anyway?

Other than the snorkelling, scuba diving and swimming, our other day activity was to visit Whitehaven Beach. If you have ever seen a picture of the islands, this would have been the beach in that picture. The sand is bleached white, the water is like a swimming pool and forests run straight into the sand. It is definatly the most beautiful beach that I have ever seen. We spent about 2 hours there and because of the low tides we could walk pretty far out into the ocean and could see sting rays and reef sharks swimming right by the beach edge. Definatly the highlight of the whitsundays trip.

In the end the whitsundays sailing trip was great and very different to Fraser Islands. We didn't form as many bonds as we did on Fraser, even though there were more people, or that could be the reason. But I think that it was better that it was a relaxing sail trip because otherwise it would have been hard to take all of it in.

We just got back into Airlie Beach a couple of hours ago and managed to find what must have been the last couple of beds in the town because its easter weekend. I blame mike for not warning me about easter, he should have known better. Tommorow we were going to head up to Magnetic Islands to meet a friend from Sydney who has been telling us about this incredible full moon beach party, which we thought would be tommorow night seeing that it is the full moon, but as it turns out is next week....go figure. So we were going to head straight up to cairns but we just ran into our truck group from Fraser Islands so maybe we may stick around here for a couple of more days.

Also here is the blog of one of the english guys from fraser island. He has a bunch of great pictures and writes so much more than I do. Should give you a better idea of what we did.

http://www.travelblog.org/Australasia/Australia/Queensland/Fraser-Island/blog-52040.html