Whitsundays!
Trip Start
Nov 26, 2009
1
16
29
Trip End
May 05, 2010
Airlie Beach, Queensland, Australia
Monday, January 18, 2010
Airlie Beach is pretty cool, although there's not that much there. The weather was boiling so we headed down to the lagoon. You can't swim in the sea here because of the jellyfish so they made a massive swimming lagoon with a beach on it in town. The water was really nice and warm so we just sat in there all afternoon!
After going to the supermarket and loading up on food, we discovered that the hostel didn't have a proper kitchen - only a microwave and a toaster - so we had to try and find cheap places to eat out instead. Had an early night as we were still pretty tired, and had to be up early for our sailing trip the next day.
We wanted to do an overnight sailing trip round the Whitsundays but they were quite expensive so we decided to just do a day trip instead. Our boat was called the Camira (means 'strong winds' in aboriginal) and was a massive purple sailing catameran. We got free drinks all day (including alcohol!) which we rather enjoyed. I stuck to coke most of the day and had some wine on the way back but Jamie was cracking open the beer at 11am!
The weather started off ok, but soon black clouds were looming on the horizon and the skipper told us there was a bit of 'tropical moisture' that we would try and skirt round. Of course by tropical moisture he meant monsoon, and by skirt around he meant sail straight through, so we had a couple of torrential downpours where everyone was huddled in the tiny indoor section! Luckily it had cleared up a bit by the time we got to Whitehaven Beach, and only rained when we were getting on the speedboat to leave the beach. The tide on Whitehaven was pretty high which was a shame as the whole reason to go there is the sand - it's silica and is really dazzling white. But even at high tide with grey clouds overhead it still looked amazing! We spent most of the time in the sea, wearing our stylish stinger suits to protect us from the jellyfish.
After we left the beach we had an amazing BBQ lunch on the boat - sausages, steak, fish and chicken. Tasty times. Our second stop for the day was a snorkelling spot by one of the islands. The snorkelling was good but nowhere near as good as Lady Musgrave island. There weren't as many fish, and there was a really strong current so we spent half the time fighting to get back to the good coral!
On the sail home the wind really picked up which was great for the sailing - we were speeding along so fast, it was great! Couple of giant waves soaked us as we were sitting on the trampoline bit at the front,which was nice and refreshing.
That night we met up with a bunch of people from the boat and had a night out in Airlie. Went to the bar at Beaches hostel which had a guy singing live, but that closed at 12 (2 minutes after they served me so the bouncer made me down a full glass of wine - I wasn't pleased) so we went on to a club called Evolution. The music there was pretty rubbish, loads of techno electro stuff, but was fun anyway. Haven't had many nights out since we've been in Oz so was nice to let our hair down (not that Jamie has much)!
Love Laura and Jamie xxx
