Andy & Gillie's Big Adventure!: Hippy shit

It’s Australia Day! When all non-indigenous Australians show their gratitude to the English (for…- complete as required).

Needless to say, the sun’s out. But it hasn’t always been the case. Since our last post we have endured electrical storms and rainforest conditions. Oh and lots of sun.

Chronologically, we had four great nights in Airlie Beach where there was some bucket list activity, as some of you will have seen on Facebook. We had a brilliant trip to the Whitsunday Islands on a catamaran, where we indulged in lots of snorkelling on the reefs around Hayman Island. The sea was very calm and clear with excellent visibility, so we were able to see loads and spent at least two hours face down in the water – Gillie too!

The next day we took a fast boat out to the Great Barrier Reef, where I took my first-ever scuba dive. If you’re going to pop your scuba cherry, The Great Barrier Reef is a pretty good place to do it. The coral, fish and whole experience were quite amazing. What a lovely (early) birthday present.

The next day we drove 500+ km to get to the charmingly-named Kinka Beach at Yeppoon. I think Australia takes the biscuit for place-names, as you will see from the photos in this post! At Yeppoon we were treated to a spectacular electrical storm inland while listening to Pink Floyd – ‘Comfortably Numb’ - which we were becoming thanks to the wine…

From Yeppoon we had a couple of pleasant beachside camps at Agnes Water and Rainbow Beach, where I started to perfect my boogie board technique – alas still need practice. Ho hum.

Got to a very nice site in south suburbs of Brisbane and on Tuesday enjoyed the rare sight of England winning an ODI comfortably. Won’t happen very often. We were also chuffed to discover that our niece had managed to snap us on Sky Sports News in a general crowd shot. Chances of that..?

From Brisbane - where we were fortunate enough to meet a Dutch family who, as they were flying to Sydney the next day, bestowed upon us a number of useful items they could no longer use, such as a decent frying pan, cleaning items and more importantly lots of beer and wine! – we set off early for Byron Bay.

Byron Bay was always going to be a destination at some point on our trip and we arrived in glorious sunshine. Lonely Planet says ‘you stay one day, then you book a couple more and before you know it, you’re there forever…’ this is entirely possible, as we have added days onto our original plan and will be blasting down to Sydney in two days – not a killer, but we don’t like to rush things.

Some of you may have seen a rather obscure status update when we went to Nimbin. In case you didn’t know, it’s the ‘Marijuana Capital of Australia’, where bush and cookies and mushrooms and practically every other type of herbal yummy is readily available. The driver initially thought we were on the wrong bus, till we put him right. Anyway, we went there on Friday and had a lovely time…

We’ve seen quite a lot of rain in Byron Bay, but it’s been very warm and when the sun is out it’s fierce. Saturday night we had lovely Middle Eastern scoff at a BYO called ‘Orgasmic’, then it was back to the beach on Sunday.

As we said at the start, it’s Australia Day today, so we’re off to see how the laidback surfer dudes and hippies celebrate. Our next post will probably be when we’re in our second house-sit in Chipping Norton, near Liverpool (see earlier reference to names).

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PS Gillie, again. Hope you all are well, thanks for the comments and emails, it’s really great to hear from you. Now about lemons… I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about the price of lemons in Australia!!

In England I go to Morrisons or where ever and buy a lovely juicy lemon for about 30p. I’ve just been to Woolworths (?) (one of the big supermarket chains here in Oz) and purchased a lemon for $1.67, which is not far off £1!!!!!! They grow them outside on the trees all around for God’s sake! In the UK we have to import them... What’s going on?

I asked the lady at the fish counter why they were so expensive and of course she didn’t know. A lady shopper approached me as I wandered down the aisles and said, “I totally agree with you about the price of lemons, I’m from New Zealand and they are much cheaper there!! So now you know, if you come out here for any reason, bring your own lemons!! I’m now on a one (sorry 2) women crusade to stop this robbery!!

I feel better now I’ve got that off my chest and it’s still a great country. Byron Bay is just wonderful, we have so enjoyed our stay here, we’ve met some great people and will be sorry to leave tomorrow. However we’re looking forward to seeing the girls for three more weeks before we shoot off on the next stage of our adventure. Take care all of you. xxxx