Magnetic Island and Townsville were great places to visit from a tourist's point of view, because we were actually meeting real life Australian people! Frankly, it's starting to annoy me that everyone I seem to be meeting is usually German (sorry but they're everywhere except their own country right now) or English or Irish or Scandinavian. Why so many Germans? I sit in these hostels, or on a beach, or a bus or even just walking round town, and I could just as well be in Europe, I don't understand a word of the languages being spoken around me! Sometimes I feel a bit of an outsider, in an English speaking country!! But yeah, when we went to a Full Moon Party on Magnetic Island my ears pricked up as I finally heard some Australian accents, woop! Except the bad habit of saying "aye" at the end of every sentence grates somewhat but I will let them off because at least they don't speak German! The Full Moon Party was good fun, wasn't the actual full moon that night but I guess they had to have the event at the weekend! The real full moon was a few nights before when Annika and I were in Townsville. It was enormous and had a bright orange glow to it. So much so, that our first thoughts were that it couldn't possibly be the real moon, it must be some kind of light display from a nightclub or something....but no, twas the moon indeed. Interesting stuff eh!

Airlie Beach was our next port of call after Magnetic Island. We stayed two nights in a freezing air conditioned room before setting off on our sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands. We boarded a nice boat with three staff and 25 guests (of which I was the only English, the rest were, yes, GERMAN!) and set off for 2 nights/2 days. Unfortunately, the weather was not on our side for the first half of the trip. So Wednesday night saw me and Annika dancing up on deck (alone!), kitted out in waterproofs looking very Regatta chic, beer in one hand and doing some kind of rave sundance to impress the Gods and to make them stop the rain. Don't think they could make sense of our knee flexing/chicken wings/spinning pizzas, so the rain continued! Bugger. So we got through our alcohol supply instead and talked all kind of profound ramblings about stars and "being a tiny megapixal in the gigantic poster of life". Yeah man.

Next morning the skipper kindly woke us up at 6.30am by bringing up the anchor and chugging the boat along to White Haven Beach. I sat up in my cabin bed (shaped like a coffin and shared with Annika, romantic hey) and immediately felt sick from the waves and smell of oil below deck. So I managed to get up top for some air, but couldn't face any breakfast from the rocking of the boat, not good first thing in the morning!

We arrived at White Haven Beach later that morning, zipped up in stinger suits and dropped off on the white sandy shores. In the rain. Under the clouds. Oh paradise blue sky photos, where are you? We got in the water, laughing our heads off for our one opportunity of being on the Whitsundays, in terrible weather! Oh, did we get the giggles! Eventually the boat crew picked us up again (lucky buggers keeping dry on the boat!) and just as we left to sail on, did the blinkin sun decide to shine! So for the final half of our trip we had some sunshine and a lovely sunset in the evening! Wahey! We did some snorkelling and lots of sunbathing, and all was well again.

Quite happy to get back to solid ground again, though the trip was good fun. We travelled on by overnight bus that night to Agnes Water and stayed at a brilliant hostel called Cool Bananas. The overnight bus meant that the next day was a bit of a wipe-out to recover from interupted sleep, but still, who wants to waste 11 hours in the day by being on a coach? We chilled out for a couple of days in the lovely hostel, sleeping in hammocks and watching lots of good films, and now we are in Rainbow Beach, preparing to do a Fraser Island self guided safari trip for the next two nights. I am the designated driver for tomorrow, as I am the only one in the group who drives on the left in their home country (guess what nationality the rest of my group are!) so I'm gonna be responsible for the safety of 10 others in a 4x4 tomorrow, HAHAHAHAHAA!!!!! We'll see how that goes! Temperatures are meant to reach 45 degrees tomorrow, hello Australia! We've had our safety talks about dingoes and driving on sand, so lets hope for the best and hopefully we won't get bogged down in sand too often! At least I won't have to push!

Hope your thoughts are with the passengers!