Noosa!

Hey everybody, I know it's been a while so this one's gonna be a doozy.

Let's see, since Alice Springs, I've been to the Great Barrier Reef in two different areas, ridden a mechanical bull, learned how to crack a whip and lasso (spelling?), and gone 4x4ing on the world's largest sand island. Oh yeah.

So, to start, I flew from Alice Springs to Cairns where I took a day cruise out to a sand spit and snorkled with the fish and coral and a sea turtle. I had only been snorkling once before so it was still a new experience checking out all the cool wildlife, which was amazingly colorful. The fish were very used to people, so they swam around with me as I looked at them. My favorites were the parrot fish, which were multicolored and ate at the coral the entire time. I could hear them scraping at the coral as they chewed. For whatever reason, that blew my mind. The return trip to land was a sobering experience though, as the sea became rough and I did all I could to keep the buffet lunch down. Many other people were not as lucky.

The enxt day I started my Oz Experience bus trip, which is essentially a Greyhound service with smaller busses and some help with finding accomodation. I've met a lot of cool people on the busses and have had a lot of them on more than one leg of the journey. I just departed from the last of them, a couple of Irish guys that have been hanging out with me for the past week or so. It took me a few days to be able to understand what they were saying and even on our last day together I missed some of what they were saying.

The first day on the bus took me to Magnetic Island, which was the location of the first hostel on my way down the coast. It was OK but not as great as all of the ads I saw for it made it out to be.

Next, I made it to Airlie Beach, the port for the Whitsundays cruise I signed up for. For the next three days, I was on a boat traveling through the Whitsunday Islands. We snorkled in the reefs, stargazed on the boat, and visited Whitsunday Island and Whitehaven Beach, which has to be the setting for every "visit this tropical paradise" commercial ever made. A few times when we were snorkling, one of the ship's crew would throw bread chunks into the water and the fish would just SWARM around us eating it. Once, one of the fish got overzealous and tried to take my ear instead of the bread. That suprised me more than a little bit, but didn't hurt.

After Airlie, we drove to Cattle Station for an overnight stop and I did America proud. I lasted the longest on the mechanical bull ride (41 seconds thank you very much), learned how to crack a whip, lassoed a goat, rode a horse to help muster some sheep, and hit 3 of 5 clay pigeons with a shotgun. It was a pretty fun day.

Next, we made it to Hervey Bay, which is where 4X4 trips to Frasier Island leave. I did a 3 day 2 night trip during which it rained about half of the time, but not in a normal way. It would rain cats and dogs for 5 minutes, then sprinkle for 2, be sunny for 25, and then be absolutely dumping. If it wasn't for the two Irish guys, I would have gone nuts a few times because of other members of our group. I'm glad I went on the trip, though, because the island was scenic, I got to drive the 4X4 a few times through the forest, and we visited Lake McKenzie. Lake McKenzie was easily my favorite part. It is a freshwater lake in the middle of the island that has white sand surrounding it. One of the Irish guys (Patrick O'Gara, how Irish can you get?) and I swam across a good portion of the warm water, which was great. Even saw a few dingos; none of them ate any babies that I saw, but one made off with a guy's sweatshirt.

Now, I'm in Noosa and going on a 3 day kayaking trip that starts in two days before continuing on south. I'm realizing how long I've been gone more and more now and looking forward to seeing everyone when I get back and finding out what you all have been up to. Less than two weeks left. Sounds crazy that I've been gone for two full months already.

Hope everybody's doing well and I'll see you soon.

Andy