Good Friday I went down to the local bus station... The bus was 3 hours late, and Australia closes down on Good Friday, so there was nothing to do but sit around and wait. So then there was a long bus ride featuring a bad movie, and when we got into Airlie Beach it was fairly late. I awkwardly followed around an American girl and a group of Germans who were all from the Uni and there for the same reason.
We had all assumed that being in a beach town on Easter would be kind of a crazy party, but there was almost nothing open at all. We barely found a pizza place to eat dinner, and they charged extra as a "holiday service tax". I'm seriously unimpressed with Australia's ability to make things convenient. It reminds me of my hometown, the least tourist-friendly tourist destination on earth. At least Marietta has the excuse of not being a beach town.
That aside, we got up the next day and tried to find a place for breakfast. There was a little open-air market set up near the beach, so Sarah (The American) and I went down and checked it out. We both got a cheap sarong for the trip, which turned out to be quite handy indeed.
Around noon we all trekked out to harbor and got on our sailboat. It was... a bit smaller than we'd pictured. Turns out that about 2/3rds of us were expected to share bunks... fortunately I was the awkward girl who had gone on her own, so they gave me my own bunk. The crew consisted of three guys who were all pretty cool.
It rained pretty hard Saturday. I tried on one of the raincoats provided by the management... it did not keep me dry at all...
There wasn't much room on the boat, so we all had to sit along the side while we were moving, which was pretty cool. We had the sail up for a lot of the time, and the boat tilted so we were practically in the water. It was exciting. At least, I thought so.
We got through the storm and stopped at a bay to do some snorkling... it was box jelly season, so we all had to wear wet suits, but it was also pretty cold, so it was for the best.
Sadly, I do not have a water-proof camera, so I don't have any pictures of the corals/fish we saw, but they were AMAZING.
Coral is not as technicolored as tourist places would have you believe, but it's still pretty. The fish ARE as technicolor as they would have you believe, though. There were tons of them, bright blue and pink and silver and every other color, and they weren't particularly shy, either, so they would swim around me while I was kicking around.
The parrot fish were particularly cool- they have sharp little beaks and eat coral (for calcium, I think), and you could hear them chewing under the water.
Here are some fish that came up for some bread one of the crew threw at them:
But we were kinda cold, what with the rain and everything, so we got back on the boat, had dinner (chicken, if I recall), and just sort of... hung out. We all went to bed pretty early, anyway.
Sunday was cloudy, but not nearly as rainy, which was nice. Did some more snorkeling... we met up with a dive boat that takes newbies on short dives. (You need to take dive-certification classes for most dive trips... I am not dive-certified, which is probably a failing on my part). So I got to do some diving.
I have to admit that I'm a wimp... My friend Beth once told me all the horrible things that can happen to you while scuba diving, like your lungs slowly bursting. My ears hurt a lot on the dive, so I was a little preoccupied deciding if they were going to explode or not. Another girl was having the same problem, though, so I didn't feel too bad about it. We just settled for swimming a little higher up than the rest of the group.
I have to admit that going deeper into the coral instead of just looking down at it is a very different experience, but I got to see plenty just snorkeling.
After the dive we went to Whitehaven Beach, which is on an island whose name escapes me at the moment. They dropped us off on a very rocky, coral-y beach opposite Whitehaven, then we took a little nature hike to a lookout, then went down to the beach and played around for a while.
Me in my I'm Poisonous scarf, on the beach they dropped us off on:
View from the lookout:
Whitehaven beach is a big tourist destination. It doesn't look like a real place. Seriously. The sand is super-fine and bright white, and it sticks out from the rest of the island. Nothing grows on it (there are some cool trees right before it starts to jut out into the ocean, though) and it's surrounded by bright blue water. It's beautiful in a really otherworldly, bizarre way.
I didn't take too many pictures on the beach itself, but fortunately Sarah did, so you get pictures of me, for once:
None of us really wanted to get back on the boat, but we did... Then dinner (spaghetti and meat sauce), and more-or-less went to bed. Sailing around is so tiring.
Monday was the beautiful day that we had all be hoping the whole weekend would be. Naturally. A lot of sunbathing.
I have to say, I really enjoyed just sitting on the edge of the boat and watching the islands go by... I may have been alone in this, but that's ok.
We got back to the harbor around 11. The students I'd been hanging out with were staying until Tuesday, but I had a class Tuesday morning. I left my stuff in their hostel room while we wandered around the town. Bought a couple of postcards for some people, did some window shopping, that sort of thing. Then I got my stuff and grabbed the Greyhound back to Townsville, sketchily asked a random group of girls for a ride home, and spent the rest of the night writing a paper.
It takes way too much time to post all of my pictures to the blog, and Facebook won't let me just link a single album to the general public, so I'll have to find another way to post pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment