Beep…beep…beep. Yep, it’s 3:00a already and time to get up. I’m glad we decided to take showers last night. One less thing to do this morning. David got up and made us some tea while I tried to pull myself out of bed. We got all our stuff together and made it out to the waiting car at 3:50a. It was lightly sprinkling. Hopefully, we’ll have better weather in Hervey Bay. He drove us to the airport in Cairns and we hopped on our first plane at 5:10a this morning. As we climbed up the stairs to the plane, it started to rain again. Luckily, we got inside before it really started to come down. We saw Susan also boarding our flight and tried not to make eye contact. Luckily, she didn’t recognize us. She was probably half asleep as well. Our first plane took us to Brisbane and then we boarded a smaller plane to Hervey Bay after quite a long layover (we boarded at 10:15a).
We flew on another little plane: Quantas Link: it’s a prop plane holding around 50 people. We were served a light breakfast or breaky and shortly landed in Hervey Bay. The airport there is quite small. I still find it odd how people can meet their friends/family at the airport gate on arrival. I wish we could still do that in the states. We took a taxi to our hotel and checked in. Our room wasn’t ready yet since it was only 11:30a, but they held our bags for us. We have a whale watching tour at 1:00p and they guaranteed that our room would be ready by 2p. We left the hotel to look around the marina. It’s pretty small and not too much to do. Also, there are very few restaurants. We wanted a light snack since we would be fed lunch on the boat, so we found a snack shop and I got some garlic chicken balls. They were pretty good!! Imagine a chicken tender shaped in a ball with butter and garlic in the middle. Very tasty!
Shortly, we boarded the boat for the Whale Song whale watching cruise. We found out that it’s international pirate day today and our crew on the tour were all dressed as pirates and talking in pirate: Gar! We opted to sit in the pilot’s deck, away from most of the people. We headed out to sea and were served a cold meat and salad lunch. The boat was so rocky that a crew member carried our plates upstairs to where we were sitting. I was so happy about that; I was certain I would have lost my plate over the side. :) Upon finishing our lunch, we were in whale territory and saw several whales.
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It was so cool to watch them jump out of the water. We even saw some calves! We were out on the boat from 1p to about 5p. Halfway through our tour, we were given cheese and crackers. On the way back, we saw a rare whale that even the tour guides don’t see that often: a southern grey. We even saw a calf and it was jumping out of the water too.
We’re pretty tired from being out on the boat and all the flying we did today. We grabbed dinner nearby and now we’re heading to bed. Tomorrow, we have an all day safari tour on Fraser Island. Not really sure what to expect, but it should be fun. Night!
20 September 2009, Sunday
Fraser Island Safari today! The green tour bus picked us up from our hotel and drove about a minute to the marina. We would have walked if we knew that it was gonna be that close! Oh well. Then, we boarded a ferry over to Fraser Island. The ferry took all of about 30 minutes to cross the way. We sat out on the front of the boat and spotted some sea turtles along the way. They were swimming in the waves. Pretty neat! Upon docking at the pier, we followed our tour guide off the boat and onto our 4x4 green bus. This was gonna be interesting. Our tour guide had a German-Aussie accent which was pretty difficult to understand at times, but I managed and shot some video of him too.
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Our group loaded onto the bus and put our seatbelts on. The guide assured us that we would be “kissing the ceiling” if we didn’t wear our belts. And, boy was he right! The island is mainly made out of sand, hence the need for a 4x4 vehicle. We listened to his jokes as he toured us around the island. The roads on the island were pretty small so when we would happen upon another vehicle, the other vehicle would find a place to pull over so we could pass them. That’s the advantage of having a larger vehicle. We got lost (he missed a turn) and had to back track a bit to find the turn we missed so we saw more of the island than we thought we would. :) Our first stop was ____________ to top up the fuel on the bus. We could see the beach and the ocean.
From here, we drove onto the beach. The speed limit is 100km/hr. It was surprising to see the amount of cars on the beach. It was literally a highway with at least 2 lanes going each way. People were out fishing on the beach or camped up on the rocks above the beach. We continued north on the beach to our first stop the Cathedrals.
Our second stop was an old wreck of a ship left by Captain Cook.
Then we stopped
For the rest of the day, here are notes: Lunch, cathedral, wreck, swim stop, back to the place we ate at for lunch, picked up chef to take off island, drove to lake, drove to virgin rain forest, dropped us off and we walked behind bus, had a tea stop, drove to beach to be picked up by ferry; put bus on ferry, rode ferry back, watched sunset; back at hotel, had a quick dinner and went to bed.
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