Well I’m finally back from my first-ever vacation that I’ve taken on a spring break, up to the Whitsunday Islands and Cairns, and it was an awesome trip! This post’s gonna be a bit long, it’s pretty much inevitable.
I got up to Airlie Beach early Sunday afternoon, and then just bummed around until Richard arrived around 11:30pm on a bus from Cairns. After dropping his stuff off in the hostel we went to one of the bars at midnight so that I could have a couple drinks to celebrate my 21st birthday, wheee! Airlie Beach is pretty much a resort town, and is really geared towards backpackers, which was cool. Pretty much everything in the town was on just one street, which meant it was really hard to get lost. The beach itself at Airlie Beach wasn’t anything too special, and was actually an ugly muddy bay at low tide. But the town built a very nice artificial lagoon that’s suitable for swimming pretty much at the shore, it’s pretty cool.
Monday morning Rich & I did the first part of our Whitsundays Experience package, which was parasailing a couple hundred feet over the bay. I’d never been parasailing before, but I loved it! It was so fun soaring in the air like that, and even after they dunked us in the water before sending us back in the air again it was still really warm (after most of the ride they slowed way down so that we’d slowly dip down into the ocean, at which point they’d speed up again, which would take us right back in the air, it was sweet). The view was magnificent too, neither of us wanted to come down. We had the rest of the day free, so we just bummed around town again, and relaxed in some shade near the beach.
Tuesday was part two of the Whitsundays Experience, an Ocean Rafting trip. They boat we were in was basically an unsinkable yellow raft that could hold 20-30 people, and we’d cruise through the ocean at speeds of up to 30 knots or so, it was fun. After a bit of a cruise they took us to Whitsunday Island (the largest island in the group), to climb up to a lookout to view world-famous Whitehaven Beach from above. It was amazing! Then we had a picnic lunch (included in the tour) on Whitehaven, it was so cool. The sand at the beach is incredibly white, and so reflects so much sunlight that it stays cool even on a hot day. It is made of 99% pure silica, and it’s so pure that it makes an otherworldly squeak when you walk on it, it can take scratches off of jewelry or watch faces by rubbing it on them (if you’re patient enough), and the silica sand from Whitehaven was also used by NASA to make the lens for the Hubble Space Telescope! 
After lunch it was time to head to a bay by Hook Island to go snorkelling at some of the fringing reefs there. The reef and fish were really beautiful, although not as colourful as they would be further out (60 km from the mainland) at the Great Barrier Reef, or if you would scuba dive instead of just snorkel. When we were snorkelling the tide was getting pretty low, so the reef was well lit bit the sun, making for some cool pictures on the one-time-use underwater film camera that I bought. But on the way out to Whitehaven we saw a couple of huge green turtles mating on top of the water, and on the way back we saw a few types of dolphins, including a rare one that one of the guides said he had only seen three times before in his life (and not in the last couple of years at least).
On Wednesday we booked another day tour called Sundaze, which took us out to Whitehaven Beach again, and also for another couple of snorkels. This time we were on a bigger, more sturdy boat that left from Shute Harbour and went a more southerly route to Whitehaven, via Hamilton Island. We got to spend a lot more time at the beach this time as well, which was fabulous. I swam a bit, but not as much as the previous day, and I spent most of the time sunbathing, trying to get rid of my pasty white northerner complexion. But that combined with two snorkelling sessions and a hole in my sunscreen coverage left me with half my back burnt to a crisp, it was definitely lobster red. I’m hoping it’ll mellow into a nice tan eventually. 😉 In between the two snorkels we had a marvellous BBQ kebab lunch, and the prawn kebabs were definitely the best shrimp I’ve ever had in my entire life. 
The first snorkel of the day by Border Island wasn’t as cool since the tide was high (and therefore 2-3 meters over most of the reefs, making them less brilliant/visible), but the second one over by Hook Island was much cooler, as the tide was going down. After we got back to Airlie Beach Wednesday evening we caught a Greyhound bus up to Cairns overnight. We had been planning on renting a car and driving up, but it was going to be prohibitively expensive; the rental agencies were going to force us into a minimum three-day rental, plus an additional $300 relocation fee if we left the car in Cairns. What a ripoff.
So anyways, the bus arrived in Cairns 10 hours later at about 6:30am Thursday morning. Rich & I tried to get ourselves booked into Gilligan’s hostel (where a bunch of his friends from UWEC were staying), but they were full so we went a couple blocks over to the YHA (we were also at the YHA in Airlie Beach, so the memberships we bought really came in handy and saved us some money). But since it was really hard to get any sleep on the bus, we just decided to take it easy and bum around Cairns. We met up with Rich’s friends Lee & Uriah, and the four of us went to a cinema in the mall across the street from the YHA to see “Dodgeball,” which was a pretty funny movie. Not great by any stretch, but still worth some good laughs.
On Friday we got up early and rented a car from Thrifty for about a hundred bucks (split between the four of us it wasn’t bad), and drove around the Atherton Tablelands, a beautiful countryside region just southwest of Cairns across the Great Dividing Range. It was so fun getting the chance to drive again, I discovered that I’d really been missing doing that while I’ve been down here. And it only took me a minute or so to adjust to driving on the other side of the road, it wasn’t bad at all. We stopped to see a couple of ginormous fig trees (Cathedral Fig Tree and Curtain Fig Tree) and Crater Lakes National Park (Lee & I swam for awhile in Lake Eacham, it was so nice finally swimming in freshwater again). After stopping for lunch in Atherton (we were all ravenous for some Mackers (McDonald’s)), we did the beautiful waterfall circuit by Millaa Millaa (Millaa Millaa Falls, Zillie Falls and Ellinjaa Falls), drove through the Misty Mountains (which weren’t too misty, it was a bright clear day out) and then on the way back up to Cairns, north of Innisfail we went up to see Josephine Falls and The Boulders. 
We started driving around 8:30am and got back to Cairns about 7:30pm, so it was a good full day of driving. But it was very relaxing, since we were going about at our own pace and not be hurried about by a tour guide on a tight schedule. It was also significantly cheaper than if were to have booked a tour doing that same loop. And I only had one little mishap of driving on the wrong side of the road. It was late in the afternoon after we had seen The Boulders, and we were driving along this country road when we saw a peacock in someone’s yard. So I pulled into a driveway down the road to turn around, and when I was pulling out a doberman started chasing us, so I was paying attention to that (I didn’t wanna run him over) and not which side I was on. I think the oncoming van got a pretty good idea that we were Americans, hehe. But at least I got that mistake out of the way there when it was basically harmless and not at some busy intersection in a city, right?
And then this morning we woke up a bit before 4am so that we could drop the rental car off and get to the airport by 4:45 or so. Rich, Lee, Uriah and the other UW-Eau Claire people (who are all studying abroad this semester at Southern Cross Uni in Lismore) had to catch a 6am flight down to Brisbane, but my flight to Sydney wasn’t until 7am. At the Sydney airport I very nearly lost my camera. It was only about 10 minutes before we were supposed to board the flight to Melbourne when I realised I didn’t have my camera anymore. So I ran down to lost & found to see if they had it, and then I realised that I also didn’t have my mobile phone either (or my keys), which made me remember that I’d forgotten to pick them up at security after putting them through the x-ray machine. So I ran all the way back there to pick them up, and then went back down the stairs towards the gates, when I noticed that I didn’t have my boarding pass anymore. So I ran back up to security, and found where I’d set it down when I had picked up my camera and phone. I’m sure the security lady thought I had premature Alzheimer’s, always forgetting everything. But I made it back in time to board the plane, and at that point I was more than ready to get back to Melbourne. The plane was delayed a bit, and so it was around 3:30 before I finally got back to my room at Monash. My ears are still popping from the descents into Sydney and Melbourne today (they were also painful for both descents into Sydney and Proserpine on Sunday), so my hearing is currently only at about half of what it normally is. But it’ll get better over the next day or two as my ears pop fairly frequently. This afternoon when I got back I also picked up the birthday package that Mike & Kevin had sent me in the mail from UW-Green Bay (thanks for the card & gift guys, they’re awesome!). And thanks to all the rest of you that also wished me a happy 21st during the week!
Well, that’s about all for me. I’ve gotta get crackin on a 2000-word research essay for my Climate Change class that’s due Monday (I also have a lab report for that class that’s due Monday too). I think I’ve done most of the research that I need to do, but I probably have to take some notes on a couple more sources to get up to the minimum number Dr Beringer wants. I so don’t feel like doing work, but I’ll have to force myself to do so. Maybe I’ll just go to bed early tonight (since I’m sorta worn out from travelling) and then wake up bright and early tomorrow. Hmm, the thought is alluring, especially since it involves a bit more procrastination. 😉 I’ll most likely have to resist the urge to even upload my Whitsundays/Atherton photos from my camera to my computer until at least Monday, probably until Wednesday after I’m done with my Fluid Dynamics test (posting the albums to the web won’t come until next weekend at the very earliest). These last three weeks of class (you read that right, only three weeks left) are gonna be busy-busy-busy for me. Spring Break’s over and now the stretch run is here.