Hi guys, I have been surfing today which makes me totally cool. Dude.

Mission Beach, North Queensland

Leaving Cairns we decided to stop in a really small place to take advantage of it's great beach (hence the name). Well yeah it was a great beach but I now realise that's not enough for me particularly if the weather isn't too great. We didn't really do much to be honest but I did come to accept that the trip is going to be a little bit culturally dead till we get to the cities in the south of Australia. In Mission Beach I don't think I met a single Australian. The hostel staff were all backpackers but even all the people working in the (very few) shops and bars were English/Irish etc.

It didn't help that on the one full day we had the weather was pretty crappy, not as crappy as British weather but overcast and not very warm. In a small beach town this poses something of a setback. However, that night Tuely and I went out stargazing which was wonderful. Before I have never really been into stars that much (probably because it is so cloudy in Britain) but the night sky here was a revelation. The cloud of the day had gone and looking up was like looking up in a planetarium. They're are so many more stars in the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere. It was really great lying on the beach and just watching all the stars. I set up my CD player with it's speaker (and listened to the appropriately titled Explosions in the Sky). It was truly peaceful. We also saw a shooting star, something which I had never seen before. I recommend you all go out and look at the night sky tonight.

Airlie Beach, Central Queensland

The main focus of this place is to sell tours to the near by Whitsunday Islands. A tour which we dutifully bought. We went Jetskiing on the first day. The only instruction we were given was to not turn the Jetski if we were going fast. It was pretty fun but I had to take my glasses off to do it so I couldn't really see where the markers were for the area we were allowed to be in, I didn't let this bother me too much though. I was a little bit discouraged that the owner's word of warning was 'The Jetski has no right of way on the water. Get out of the way of everything. If you get hit it's your fault'. A sympathetic guy then. He was pretty funny though he demonstrated just how informal Australians are. I was asking him if he'd ever been stung by the (sometimes deadly) box jellyfish which swim off the coast of Queensland. 'Oh yeah a couple of times'.
'Really?' I replied quite surprised.
'Yeah when I was a younger it happened a few times'.
'Did someone put vinegar on the sting? (At some Queensland beaches there are stands with vinegar in as the first measure to apply before being taken to Hospital).
'Ah no, a couple of beers and you'll be right. It stings a bit and you feel sick later but it's nothing that a couple of coldies won't cure'.
Fair enough I thought.

The sailing around the Whitsundays itself was absolutely beautiful. Whitehaven Beach is certainly the most stunning beach I have ever seen. The sand is literally white. It's 97% silica and squeaks when you walk on it. It was also the finest sand I have ever seen. I'm not really a beach person but that beach was something else. The water was the deepest aqua-marine I had ever seen. Yet there only about a hundred people on this beach. In Spain a beach a tenth as nice as that would be filled with people but this was fairly empty. I think it's good the Australian Government keeps the area as National Park to allow people on any budget to visit. In other countries the area would be used as a resort and only the very richest would be able to enjoy this amazing environment.

Richard, 29th September, Byron Bay, Radical!!!!

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