Magnetic Island: Koalas & Sea Kayaking

July 13, 2012:

We had to wake up at 330am to catch the ferry to Townesville. Upon arrival, we checked into the Koala Sanctuary hostel and did a hike we dubbed the "Stairmaster" to Radical Bay. I almost didn't make it.

 

Recognizing the beauty of the bay, Brittney asked me if it had turned out to be worth it. I still hadn't shed my bad attitude and initially said "No", but quickly realized my error. We changed into our bathing suits in the centre of a small circle of mangrove trees and had a blast swimming. I realized what I had initially overlooked.

 

Somehow, the hike back did not seem as bad.

July 14, 2012:
We started the morning with a scheduled walk around the sanctuary. I got to hold a saltie croc! I was shocked by how soft they are to the touch, considering how tough their skin looks.

Her name was Barbie. I also held a Koala named Noah, and Amanda the boa constrictor snake.

And our seriously cool morning was bound to get better - we had sea-kayaking planned at sunset! We went out with an instructor and another couple. Caitlin and I managed, but the woman in the other kayak was a competitive kayaker, so we didn't feel that confident. Regardless, we saw sea turtles coming up for air (maybe? do turtles need air?) while eating the sea grass in the sea grass bed we were kayaking over.

 

Because of the sunset, we only saw the silhouettes of the turtles which looked like miniature dinosaurs. Champagne in our kayaks watching the sunset concluded our trip, and we finished the day by warding off some possums while we ate our spaghetti.

It was our last night in Jucy! She was the site of great memories, but we were ready to give her away.

The Whitsundays & The Great Barrier Reef

July 10, 2013:
The thing you have to remember about Gravol is that it knocks you right out. I took one before we boarded the ship for our Whitsundays cruise, and the waves were really choppy, but I struggled more against the need to pass right out than seasickness. It didn't even occur to me that it was the Gravol. I couldn't keep my head up.

We were spending the day at the Great Barrier Reef and the girls decided to try out scuba diving , which I find terrifying and thrilling as a concept, but I wasn't able to participate because of my chronic sinusitis. When I saw the doctor, the only thing he said to me was that I wasn't able to scuba dive. I was okay with doing my own thing, so we all got dressed in our suits and pulled out our underwater cameras. I snorkelled the end of the Knuckle Reef which is 10 km long and 3 km deep. Each reef has "bommies" which was the Aboriginal term for underwater sea mountain.

The first time we all went out together, it was disappointing. I couldn't really see anything. We went back in so that the girls could get ready. I went back out on my own, and I followed the buoys out to one point and as I was attempting to get to another point, I found myself above the reef. It was incredible.

I saw a Nemo fish in an anemone! It was so calming to float with the waves back toward the ship.

We had lunch when we all got back and I watched the windows of the semi-submarine and learned about coral. The ride back was a nightmare of choppy waves and feeling ill, but we made it, checked into our OWN ROOM with FOUR BEDS in the pouring rain, went for dinner and talked until bedtime.

July 11, 2012:
Our overnight stay was at Long Island. We started the morning at the beach which I was perfectly happy with - tanning (or burning, in my case), relaxing, enjoying the views. We had a reprieve from the rain of the last few days, and we were on an island. Bliss.

But apparently there were things to do... including an 8.8 km hike to "Sandy Bay" which was a misnomer, we would come to find. Because we were doing a three-day trip out the Whitsundays, I had left my hiking books in the van so that I wouldn't have to carry them around with me. I completed this four-hour in Birkenstocks. It was excruciating. To be fair, the hike might have been shorter for everyone else if I hadn't tagged along. I was miserable. The "Bay" ended up being the ugliest thing I think I've ever seen (maybe my mood influenced my memories of it??). Just picture the ugliest little wet chunk of sand with a view obscured by the ugliest mangrove trees you've ever seen, all broken off and awful. The only thing we liked about this cove was a tiny crab who hid between a few rocks. If only they'd left me behind!

NEVER GO HERE

When we got back, we self-medicated with Tim Tams and 10 minutes of Internet access ($12/hour!!!). We went to "Dave's Trivia" under the pseudonym "The Wilhelms (from Canada)" (pronounced Vilhelms) and came in fourth place (Canadian bronze!). Pretty impressive considering we guessed Germany as an answer to any question we couldn't hear (we got it right once)!

July 12, 2012:
We woke up to pouring rain once again. All of the tour guides assured us that this is very unusual for this time of year - this is more rain than the East Coast of Australia has seen in July for 70 years! Very comforting.

We scrounged up some ponchos in the hotel reception while we waited to be taken by glorified golf carts to the ship.

Just our luck that in this awful weather, we were taking an enormous sail boat. By the time we had moved from one harbour to another and ridden a dinghy out to the sail boat, all the seats inside the central area of the boat were taken. I was not happy. I'm not proud of my attitude, but it was one thing after another. We were onboard with a large group of extra-obnoxious Americans. The only salvation was the food. My travel companions made the best of a bad situation and decided to sit in the trampolines outside in the rain.

I was feeling seasick already and hadn't worn my bathing suit, so I stayed inside where I met Orlaith (pronounced Orla) from Ireland who I talked to for most of the day.

The attraction of the day was Whitehaven Beach. I was hesitant to get off of the ship - it was still raining really hard, but at the last minute I changed into my bathing suit and wetsuit and felt a million times better. Since I was late, one of the crew gave me my own personal ride to the Beach. He looked like Viggo Mortensen in Lord of the Rings (which I was really okay with). The sand on the beach was so fine, it could be used to polish jewelry. We gave ourselves some spa treatment. I'm glad I changed my mind. And the day kept getting marginally better. Lunch was delicious. We went snorkelling in Hook Passage, but it was no comparison to the Great Barrier Reef.

I was still so relieved to make it back to Airlie Beach and the "comfort" of the Jucy van. Looking back from the privileged position where I now I find myself (dry, in my dining room, almost two full years later), I can say that I am glad I went and that those experiences taught me things about myself in a bad situation. I generally think of myself as flexible and adaptable, and I like to think that I maintain a positive outlook even when things don't go my way, but it turns out that I have limits and I have the power to keep myself in a negative attitude that affects others. I hope that I've grown since then, and that my flexibility has improved, but we'll see if that's true beginning July 10, 2014 when I leave for Kunshan, China for four weeks.

Airlie Beach Drinking Games

July 8, 2012:

Airlie Beach is a very pretty harbour town near the Whitsundays.

We were staying the night at Nomads, a much nicer hostel than the one we stayed at in Noosa, and showered. Sweet relief!

It seemed like the right time for a night of carousing, since we would have a real opportunity to "sleep in" the next morning. Inside our Jucy van, we pulled out the table and sat around getting to know each other better and having a good time. Our van was one in a long row of camper vans, so we tried to be discrete, but it turned into one of the funniest nights of the trip.

We were trying to think of good drinking games (which I do not condone, in general, but there wasn't much to do in our van) and we couldn't agree on one game that we all liked... so we took the best parts of all the games we liked and developed our own called "Rules".

Basically, the deck sits between everyone and each person takes turns drawing a card. Every time someone draws a new number, they invent a rule for it. Examples of rules included "Find a hat.", "Say something Aussie.", "Do a pirate face.", "Say three swear words.", "Lick something.", "Pretend to drink your drink.", "Make a funny face.", "Shout supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.", "Act like a chicken.", and "Do nothing." This doesn't even begin to scratch - every round resulted in 13 rules. As soon as the rule was stated, the last person to do it had to drink. Obviously we were inspired by Kings and the Thumbmaster rule. Every time that number was re-drawn, you had to remember the action or the rule, and the last person had to drink. We added other rules, such as "If you take too long to think of a rule, you drink." and "Rules can't be repeated if the game is played more than once in a row."

By the end, we were in hysterics. Our "discrete" van party turned into a shouting match - I'm sure the people in neighbouring vans were concerned for our mental health and our safety. The longer the game went on, the more difficult it became to keep the rules straight, and it became a game of not being the last one to catch on to whoever remembered the rule first. Often with drinking games, the "lightweights" can't play for long and the "heavyweights" can't catch up - somehow this game evened the playing field.

We decided to check out the hostel bar, but there was no dance floor. A guy named Bart approached us and asking if we could please come with him for a minute. We were all skeptical, but he led us to his friend, Ty, who looked like a 12-year-old member of One Direction, to write on a tank top he was wearing over his shirt. We each wrote on it, and he struck up a conversation, telling us he was also Canadian, from Toronto, but he pronounced the second T, and had an Australian accent that he blamed on having spent several months/years in Australia. It was all a bit too suspicious. No self-respecting Canadian pronounces the second T in Toronto. Eventually they copped to "hoaxing" us and said they were just trying to pick us up. K.

Jay and I attempted to escape, but they wanted to have intellectual conversations with us. As a group of University educated women studying zoology, biomedical sciences, arts & film, and French literature, we felt like rocket scientists in comparison to the 23-year-olds that drove 45 minutes into Noose every weekend to prey on tourists. We decided playing our drinking game was more entertaining, so after a quick trip to Macca's (McDonald's), we returned to the van to play two more rounds before we crashed for the night (probably in fits of giggles).

Party with the Platypus

Or is it platypuses? platypi?

July 8, 2012:
We drove straight through the night. Britt took the first shift, I drove for two hours, and Jay took over at midnight for three and a half hours. It was really difficult to focus on the road, but we had to stay on constant alert for kangaroo - collisions are extremely common. Kangaroo are the equivalent of deer in Canada. We also had to ensure that we were never above the speed limit; our insurance would have been rendered invalid if we'd been pulled over for speeding, or if we'd had a collision while speeding. It was slow-going, dark, and there were barely any other vehicles on the road to help us stay alert. We strategized: our co-pilot would be responsible for keeping us entertained.

We survived, probably due to the excessive number of road signs warning us about the dangers of driver fatigue. We did end up playing trivia with really bad made-up questions when we ran out of things to do. So thank you, Australian government.

We pulled over early in the morning at a truck rest stop next to a super creepy sugar-cane field, skittishly walked to the truck stop washroom to brush our teeth, and set up our beds. I slept like a baby.

By the time we woke up, all the trucks had left and the sun was high in the sky.

But not for long. We were in for the first of the rainy weather we would encounter this trip. It was a short drive to Eungella National Park in Mackay to see some platypus. It poured.

But the hike was beautiful, and we did manage to see some platypus.

 They are the weirdest little creatures. And they are TINY.

Apparently the park had several species of plant and animal that are unique to that park, which is crazy to think about.

We walked into a clearing between rocks on the river and I could have stayed there forever. It was so peaceful with the water calmly, but confidently, pushing its way through the rocks.

When we returned to the van, I had my first avocado sandwich of the trip - lucky thing I liked it, because I was in for many more. Living in a van was turning out to consist of doing a lot of things in parking lots: getting changed, eating breakfast and lunch, sleeping.

It was only a short adventure, but it was well worth the stop, and we packed up once again and drove to Airlie Beach.

Surfing in Noosa

July 7, 2012:
Despite having stayed up as late as possible after a few really early mornings, we only managed to sleep in until 7:30am. Making the most of it, we spent some time exploring the shops in Noosa before our surfing lesson in the afternoon. Noosa is famous for its surfing.

The surfing lesson lasted about 2 and a half hours and I managed to stand up on the board a few times. I wasn't a pro like Brittney or Jay who were talented enough to actually ride full waves in every now and then, but I did my best. It was cool, but so physically exhausting to stay above the waves, some of which were overwhelming (but not the enormous kind that you see in surf movies, of course), and to maintain control of the surfboard. I got smacked in the head a few times by the big ones.

Essentially, surfing seems to consist of performing yoga in a rhythm that allows you to keep your balance while riding a wave - cobra position to downward-facing dog to warrior two pose all in a split second while fighting the urge to fall over. It was a workout.

The instructor was really patient and the guys we surfed with were nice. They were staying at the same hostel as we were and were planning to take roughly the same route down the coast as we were. They came from Scotland and Ireland - the one was from Northern Ireland and I felt like a horrible person but I could honestly not understand anything he said. Asking to repeat himself would have been futile. I don't know if it was just his accent (which is notoriously difficult anyway) or because he was mumbling, but Brittney managed to interpret what he was saying so I just nodded along.

After living in a van for 3 days, all shame was abandoned and I changed clothes in broad daylight in the parking lot (no, honestly, I was doing my best to maintain some dignity - it's just really difficult to change in a parking lot). An unsuspecting couple in the car next to us may have suffered the effects of a full moon. I didn't realize they were there. Oops!

Spending a few extra minutes stretched out was worth it, as we were headed for a 10-hour stretch in the car for the drive to Mackay, and our muscles would be very sore the next day.

Next time, I'll try this first:

Mood music: