Sending you a Postcard: East Coast Trip

About a half of our trip, or a 1/3 more likely, around the East Coast has passed now – time flies! As mentioned earlier, we started our trip from Cairns and we will travel down to Melbourne before starting studying. Here are first steps of our trip:

Magnetic Island

Magnetic Island is an island with population of 2000 people and you can get there by the ferry from Townsville. Guess the island is mostly known for its animals and nature – it holds several bays for snorkeling, it is a home to rock wallabies, you can live in a bungalow next to a koala sanctuary as we did and you can rent a tiny “Barbie” car to drive around the island or go hiking on diverse tracks. All in all it was a cute, small place. In addition to koala cuddling by the bungalow resort we found wild rock wallabies and a “wild” sleepy koala, opossums that stole our food and we climbed up the “Forts trail” to admire the sunset and sceneries (and on the way back in the dark an angry roadrunner scared us to death…) As said, it was kind of a cute and relaxing place but nothing grandiose. Maybe few more days in Cairns to see Cape Tribulation and Port Douglas or Mission Beach (1-2 hours from Cairns to South) could have been more interesting.

Airlie Beach and Whitsunday Islands

Whitsunday Island National Park Sailing Tour is a must! Life on the boat is super relaxed not to mention the amazing places you see by island hopping. You can start your cruise from Airlie Beach – a neat, quite luxurious looking town by the bay (we stayed in a cute, relaxed hostel called Backpackers by the bay who organized a ride from Greyhound bus stop to their hostel). Our boat was a small race boat called Ragamuffin II for a crew of 13 persons skippered by a young, true Aussie sailor who seemed to find “heaps of fun” in everything, dived down to 5-10 meters without any gear and who had a pet eagle (I mean who are these people???). The first mate was an 18-year-old Dutch boy, another backpacker who had done his sailing courses here in Australia at Whitsunday and now worked in sailing tours. He was our “mom and dad” for three days cooking us 3-5 meals a day – without doubt the best food I’ve eaten in Australia so far (on Magnetic Island we cooked mainly pasta, tuna and beans ugh…)

Our Skipper

Mums!

Days in the Whitsunday passed by sailing, snorkeling, relaxing and gossiping with the crew. The top spot is the Whitehaven Beach with cool white fine sand all around and changing crystal-clear turquoise waters as far as you can see. Also other islands and beaches are great for there is no-one around and you can snorkel endlessly between the boat and the beach and spot amazing sea creatures.

We saw dolphins from the ship, and while snorkeling we saw many gentle giant green sea turtles that we could pet, one smaller super turtle, most likely a hawksbill turtle, that rushed up to the shore and then turned around and flashed back to the ocean all in one second. Also we spotted a stingray, a sleeping shovel shark, humphead maori wrass, huge angel fishes and other huge black fishes, which we encountered attacking towards us after our skipper had pushed us down from the boat saying there were sharks in the water and started to throw fishfood at us… (the big fishes weren’t truly sharks tho’ which we discovered later.) However my favorite (after the turtles) was a manta ray. With a French girl from the crew we saw it – a huge black shadow with horns gliding just 5 meters in front of us with a parade of other big dark fishes. I swear it was the size of a human with wings. Spooky. Especially when it was so close to the shore and everywhere else there were just happily colored corals and fishes and turtles. Unfortunately we didn’t get a picture (where is Ville with his GoPro when needed?!)

After three days of sailing we returned to Airlie Beach and walked through the city to catch our bus. We happened to cross by the local lagoon with showers and like true backpackers stayed there to wash ourselves and cool down in the water before catching our nightbus to Rainbow beach. Good day.