Messing about in boats

After a terrible night's sleep in Rockhampton we set off early towards Mackay to try to avoid a little of the heat.

Goodbye and good riddance

Our car was air conditioned but even with this it was still pretty uncomfortable in the heat of the day. The journey was pretty uneventful, more empty roads for mile upon mile, looking exactly the same.....and on, and on and on.....

We're on a road to nowhere

Eventually we arrived in Mackay, officially the 11th largest city in Australia. You could have fooled me! It may be a city geographically, but yet again we came across another deserted urban area. To be fair, it was Sunday, but even so, there was barely anything open and nobody was around. Thankfully there was a little Italian cafe open where we were able to get some lunch, as by this point we were starving. We both had fettuccine carbonara and it was very good.

We had originally planned to spend a night in Mackay, but as it was only midday and there was nothing to do, we decided that we would be better off carrying on the extra two hours to Airlie Beach.
Back on the road again...

Airlie Beach is really only a single main street full of tour agents selling sailing trips around the Whitsunday Islands. As this was what we wanted to do we had obviously come to the right place. We made the unusual decision of starting to look for somewhere to stay fairly early in the day and managed to get ourselves into a very pleasant little cabin in a caravan park only 2kms outside Airlie. It didn't have it's own bathroom, but most importantly it did have air conditioning and after our experience in the Rockhampton Hovel this was very important. It also had a proper mattress not a horrible foam one!

We didn't even have to go into town to book our sailing trip, we spoke to the lady in reception at the caravan park, told her what we wanted and the next thing we were booked on a two day, two night trip aboard a 14 metre sloop called Prima, leaving the next day (14 metres is about 46ft and no, I don't know what a sloop is either).

The boat trips have a rather funny policy of not allowing anyone to bring bags that have zips onto their boats. Apparently the zips can harbour bed bugs and it is to stop them being spread around the boats. What everybody does instead is take their belongings onboard in canvas shopping bags. It's quite funny walking around Airlie, because everybody is carrying shopping bags full of clothes around looking like tramps!

We had chosen our boat on the basis that it takes only a small group, maximum twelve passengers and it's not a party boat. We were very lucky because the boat wasn't full and there were only eight passengers plus four crew. I think that there were only supposed to be two crew, but the deckhand had brought his brother along and the skipper had brought his girlfriend along too, claiming that they were 'volunteers', chancers would have been more accurate, but what can you say when you're already out at sea and don't have a 'driver's' licence. It wasn't really a problem, but I did think it was a bit cheeky.

We were very fortunate with the rest of our group on the boat, everybody got on well, there were a Dutch couple, two girls from Scotland and a couple from Dublin and we had some good fun together.

The boat had four double 'rooms' - three of which had their own bathroom and one of which had a bathroom that was shared by the crew. Can you guess which one we had? Thought so!

The bedroom was rather cramped, but there was more room than I had expected, because the boat was fairly wide. Having said this it was significantly smaller than our train compartment in Thailand, so there wasn't much room to move around.

The basic plan appeared to be to sail around a couple of the islands, do some snorkelling, visit Whitehaven beach and come back to Airlie. First stop was for some snorkelling just off Hook Island, where we all hopped in the water and had a look around. Around the Whitsundays you have to wear stinger suits at this time of year, to avoid being stung by Box Jellyfish and Irukandji, which are small but extremely venomous. The stinger suits make you look a bit daft, but not as daft as you'd look if you were laying in the sea dying!

No reason to feel nervous then

We pulled up at a deserted beach to watch the sunset, which was pretty special - then back on board for some dinner, where mayonnaise featured heavily. It was a theme that would carry on for the rest of the trip....

Next morning we set sail for Tongue Cove on Whitsunday Island, which is the drop off point for the famous Whitehaven beach, the one that you see in all the brochures and on the postcards. Unfortunately the sun wasn't out and the tide was quite high, so it wasn't really showing off to it's full potential, but still looked pretty good. From the lookout you could see stingrays in the shallows, and when we got down to the beach there were quite a few young sharks in the shallows too, only about two to three foot long, but perfectly formed ready to grow into something a little more scary! My main concern was that Mummy shark may be waiting around only a little bit further out, so we didn't venture too far. Note from SR: Since this event I have read about a shark attack in this very place where we were paddling!

Next stop was Manta Ray Bay, where we had the best snorkelling I have ever seen. The visibility was very good, the coral reef was alive with vibrant colours and the fish were amazing. We were surrounded by all sorts of fish, but the ones that stood out were the Maori Wrasses. One in particular was huge, over a metre long and probably two and a half feet high, it came right up to you as you snorkelled, it was amazing. Note from SR: This is a typical fish story as told by a man - the fish gets bigger every time the story is repeated - it started life as a pilchard.

That night we anchored in a bay off Hook Island, where we were sheltered by the wind - unfortunately during the night the wind direction changed and the wind strength picked up. At about 2.30a.m. the crew got up to move the boat as the anchor was slipping and we were heading for the reef. Thankfully when we moved the boat the anchor got a decent hold and we were able to stay where we were for the rest of the night. We had another snorkel the next morning, but after Manta Ray Bay it was a bit of a letdown. We were back in port for lunchtime and Sarah and I were both shattered, neither of us had slept very well on either night as our cabin was so cramped and hot. Two nights at sea was more than enough for both of us and we were quite glad to get back to our little cabin at the caravan park.

We were up quite early on Thursday to head north again towards Townsville, but as always our plans were 'subject to change without prior notification'.

Looks promising, doesn't it?

It was a long drive up to Townsville, we went through several towns that looked significant on the map, but turned out to be a single street with a pub and a bottle shop! The drive was again pretty monotonous and we were glad to get to Townsville, which is the second largest city in Queensland. We headed straight for the centre and shortly afterwards were ready to leave. It was very similar to Mackay and Rockhampton in the way that there is nothing much at all in the town centre, everything is in out of town complexes, so the towns themselves seem dead and totally unappealing. It is totally reliant on people driving out to places to shop for anything, so there are very few, if any, decent places to get a cup of coffee or some lunch.

After a great deal of searching we eventually found somewhere to get a drink (and lift my severly depressed blood sugar levels) before we headed off again to Cairns.

For a moment we thought we were on the M4 in Bridgend

We had actually chosen a good day to travel, because the weather was pretty poor, raining on and off all day, so we weren't wasting a nice day that we could have been doing something else.

Is it a mirage or have we finally arrived?

After travelling through a succession of forgettable towns, it was quite a relief to get to Cairns, which is quite a lively place. It's obviously very popular with backpackers, but there are also a lot of nice (expensive) places to stay and eat, because the city is very popular with Japanese tourists. Many of the shops have signs and label in Japanese, and there are quite a few places offering Japanese food.

We headed into Cairns city centre that evening to see if we could get ourselves booked onto a diving boat in the next couple of days, and had a boat called Aristocat recommended to us. It was actually departing from Port Douglas, an hour north of Cairns, on Saturday, giving us a day to spare.

We decided that we'd head up to Port Douglas the following afternoon and stay there on Friday night so that we wouldn't have to drive too far on Saturday morning. Unfortunately Port Douglas is a lot like Noosa and we soon realised that staying there was going to cost us a fortune, so we called the motel that we had stayed in the night before and booked ourselves in for the night, then got a bag of chips and an ice cream before heading back to Cairns.

We were up early the next morning to get to the boat and we were very pleasantly surprised when we got there, it was very new and flash and only about one third full, so there was plenty of room to move about. The sea was like a millpond, so we had a very nice crossing to the Agincourt Reef, where we were to do our dives.

The first dive was quite good, but visibility wasn't great, particularly for Sarah, as her mask kept filling up with water! I think that we really need to get our own masks, the ones that you hire can be a bit unreliable.

"I'm ok ... I'm ok ... I'm ok ..."

The second dive was much better, and we saw a small shark, it swam around a bit, but wasn't very interested in us, so it wasn't very scary.

Spot the real shark

Had I been bleeding I may have been a little more concerned. We had one more dive, but again the visibility was a bit poor, but overall it was worth doing the dives, although not as great as I had hoped the Barrier Reef would be.

We still had one more day in Cairns before flying back down to Brisbane, so we decided to go inland to the Atherton Tablelands. First stop was a place called Coffeeworks where we were given a tour and were able to sample up to 21 different coffees. I think I only managed about twelve, I was a bit concerned that if I had anymore I wouldn't sleep for weeks. We then did a circuit of the waterfalls in the area and decided that we would visit the tea house in Millaa Millaa, which is highly recommended in the Lonely Planet, for afternoon tea (very civilised). We were both really looking forward to this as it was Sunday afternoon and we had been thinking about what we might have been doing back home on a Sunday afternoon - (bread, cheese, jam, Bob the Builder cakes and a nice pot of tea perhaps). Unfortunately when we got there at three o'clock in the afternoon, in true Australian business tradition, it was closed!

So that was it for our trip up north, we left tropical Queensland on Monday afternoon, just as the heavens opened for another downpour and headed south back to Brisbane and then on to Coolangatta to stay with Di and Dai again until we fly out to New Zealand.