According to alot of people Byron Bay is Surfers Paradise's ugly sister, a similar kind of place but a lot more chilled out with a laid back surfer (almost hippy vibe) and without the cheese. You can see what people mean when they say this about Byron Bay, it is a medium sized town smack bang on the beach, but there is not a high rise in sight, instead these are replaced with small independant shops, boutiques and cafe's. It's a little less busy. When we fir...

The next stop on our journey was one which we 'umm'd and are'd' about alot before finally deciding to visit, Surfers Paradise. We were unsure on whether to stop off here or not as we had heard that it was very tacky and somewhere you just went to go and get drunk until the early hours of the morning. After our 2 near enough sleepless nights in Brisbane this was something neither of us fancied. However, with plenty of time left in Australia we decided we would g...

Walking up the stairs in our hostel on the way to our room we ran into a couple of familiar faces on the stairs, Canadian James and Andy. Out of all the hostels in Brisbane we were all staying in the same one, lovely. The hostel itself was a converted old department store (I think) complete with an old lift (with manually opened door) and although it had some character, was fairly run down. The same could be said for the room we were in. We had arrived in B...

Before we met up with Koo on our travels she told us that she has a cousin (Sammy) who lives on the East Coast of Australia in a town called Mooloolaba. Koo wanted to go and visit Sammy on the way down the coast and Sammy had kindly said she would put us up for a few days. Such a nice offer was too good to turn down, so Mooloolaba was our next stop. Sammy, her husband Barry, Charlie (Sammy & Barry's two year old son) Mollie (the boardercollie) and Dillon...

After Fraser Island we had two nights back in Rainbow Beach before we moved on again. We really didnt do much in these two days, so this blog is only a short one. This was mainly because the weather was horrible (raining constantly) and because we needed to catch up on some sleep. When we got back we managed to have a couple of drinks in the evening before hitting the hay, well three of us did at least. Joe was ill and had tonsiles the size of tennis balls. ...