Rest Of Australia

After Tim left us, we ditched the camper van and had to improvise for the remaining 1000 miles of our journey to Cairns. We stuck around in Brisbane for a week and met up with some friends we had made on our previous travels.

We spent Christmas in Thailand with an Australian couple called Sam & Shawn and it was great to see them again. They cooked us up an unreal meal of some sort of Kangaroo and Shawn even cracked out some wine made by his Dad. We also bumped into Dan & Laura, an English couple we had met on a boat in Vietnam, crazy!

Also while in Brisbane, we visited Hillsong (pretty much the most famous church on the planet) which was brilliant and also I got to go to Australia Zoo, which was home to this absolute legend.

Steve Irwin is probably one of my top five guys of all time, just such a hero. He started Australia Zoo years ago with all the crocs he rescued and it is where they filmed the Crocodile Hunter TV series. His wife Terri still runs the zoo today and when I got on the bus early in the morning, the driver put on an old episode of the show which almost brought me to tears!

When we got the zoo, I was able to to feed the kangaroos, play with some koalas and even got taught how to survive a crocodile attack, which should come in useful when I get back home!

Further on up the coast, we spent a memorable few days on Fraser Island, which the world's largest island made of sand. Although instead of paying a couple of hundred dollars for a tour, we decided to do things DIY, which didn't turn out so well. We ended up having to walk 60 km (through sand) carrying every single thing we owned, chalking up a $500 fine for lighting fires in the process AND almost got eaten by dingoes. But now I can look back and laugh, and don't worry, we never paid the fine!

Back on the mainland, our transport issues were solved by two Dutch legends we found on Gumtree. Remco Brands and Erik van Houtum were travellers like ourselves, heading to Cairns in a beat-up old station wagon. They welcomed us aboard and we spent our last week driving north, cooking up awesome food, narrowly missing extreme floods, swapping travel stories, eating pies, talking about life and stopping at every single McDonalds we passed for ice-cream. Some hilarious times thinking back, thank you guys, you are heroes!

By the time we got to Cairns it was time to leave Australia, so we didn't get to do any scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. I was able to go snorkelling one day though, and got to swim around with some turtles which was awesome.

That whole day was brilliant actually, most of it was spent at one of the nicest beaches in the world, Whitehaven Beach. I made friends with some random travellers, one of which was an Inuit! Literally the most interesting person I met on my whole trip. She told me about how they just eat raw (or frozen) meat, how their bodies work completely different from ours to cope with the cold and how they don't actually live in Igloos any more! Crazy! We all played some cricket on the beach and then just chilled in the sun for hours.

Australia, although you are ridiculously expensive, you will be missed!