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Dear Simon, Karine and Hannah
Thank you for buying us the roadtrip to the Atherton Tablelands. We did this on our last day in Cairns and it was really good fun. We ended up doing it with Barefoot tours because it was the highest rated tour operator on Tripadvisor.
The tour consisted of being driven in a well loved, but slightly rough around the edges tour bus called Charkira to various beautiful waterfalls and a less than beautiful pub. The beautiful waterfalls included the famous one where Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl was filmed and also the famous Timotei advert from the 80s or 90s which everyone pretends they can remember. I doubt that anything has been filmed in the less than beautiful pub.
We were warned beforehand that the tour tended to contain some adult humour so we were prepared. However, this seemed to be restricted to being given big hugs by the hairy tour operator called Matty a lot and being asked whether we folded or crinkled the toilet paper when wiping. After two and a half months of using the bumgun, I couldn't really remember so just went with the general opinion that folding was preferable. Apart from that, we were mostly treated Matty's endless repetoire of knowledge on the sex lives of butterflies and kangeroos.
Matty ran the company. He doesn't normally run the tours, being more busy with the admin side of the business but because there were enough people wanting to do the tour for two groups to be out that day, he had been forced out of retirement. Being the boss of the company he had hand picked the group for his specifications. This meant that it consisted of us and ten young blonde girls. We only made it onto the tour because we had booked it under Donna's name rather than mine. I don't know what the other tour guides would have been like but Matty was brilliant; funny, charismatic and good looking (according to Chloe) so we were pleased that we had been mistaken for attractive young blonde girls.
Despite the fact that we were at least 10 years older than everyone else on the tour, we still managed to be the most drunk. The day started with Matty very kindly buying us a bottle of champagne to celebrate our honeymoon, swifltly moving onto a long visit to the pub for lunch and carried on with the takeaway bottles of 'Yellow'* which saw us through the afternoon. Yellow being a rather original name for a brand of sparkling wine, one step up from Lambrini, that they sell over here. We haven't tried the other variety 'Pink' yet.
We had originally planned to hire a car and visit the waterfalls ourselves but decided at the last minute to join a tour because we thought it would be more fun with a designated driver and other people and we definately made the right choice.
The name of the bus 'Charkira' is a word whose meaning describes those moments of absolute pleasure which send a tingle down your back. Matty described it as the moment when you have been drinking for several hours and finally break the seal and go for a wee. While this might be an accurate analagy, I prefer slightly more poetic termonolgy such as:
-the moment when you are sitting on an old bus about to fall apart, being bounced around as it careers round stunning scenary, trying to drink wine without spilling it all over ourselves which listening to Peter Andre blasting out over the airways,
-the moment when you treading water, trying not to drown under a beautiful waterfall surrounded by amazing rainforest
-the moment when you try to imitate the Timotea adverts with the perfect hairswish with ten other equally uncoordinated backpackers
-the moment when you risk your live sliding down a ten foot rockslide, being battered by a torrent of water only to emerge unscathed at the other end
-the moment when you take over a small backwater Bogan pub, try to order vegitarian food from the bemused barman with the meat only menu and play Meatloaf and Men at Work on the jukebox
Moments of charkira we will take away with us.
Lots of love
Jim, Donna and Chloe
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