We arrived at Rockhampton at 6.30am to discover our travel agent had booked us on the wrong day for our farm stay. After a traumatic time where we thought we may have to spend the day in hilly-billy-rockhampton-ville we were picked up. We arrived at Myella, a working cattle farm near the town of Banana (actually its name!), for 9am and made ourselves toast and tea over the fire. We then went out for a horse ride – Mel on Whiskey (the horse) and Stu on B...

Having left Townsville we headed for Airlie beach – a very touristy place which appears to centre around foam parties and wet t-shirt contests. We quickly avoided this and dived on the boat going out the next day. We checked our luggage into storage and then Mel’s shell flipflops snapped and so she ended up walking to and from the marina (4km) in bare feet and so had blisters on her feet from the heat! We sailed on Condor with Prosail – a m...

So we got an early bus from Cairns to Townsville and hopped straight on the ferry to Magnetic Island ($26). The short sunny ferry trip landed us in the port where Mel took around 4 seconds to hire a pink barbie car with pink heart seat covers and pink steering wheel cover, pink mirrors and pink cover! The island is only 12km across but a pink car was absolutely (un)essential. We drove around the island appreciating its beauty and the fact that we could see kanga...

So we went to reef teach which was done by an eccentric Irish Man called Paddy - he taught us lots of cool things about the reef - like a sea cucumber breathes through its bottom and spits its lungs at you when it feels under attack, the parrotfish sleeps in a snot sleeping bag and then eats it for breakfast and that most fish grow into males but clown fish grow into females! Paddy was really good - seriously all of my lecturers could learn from this guy. Best $1...

We spent the first day in Cairns sunning by the lagoon reading a rainforest of leaflets on tours and trips around the east coast. We finally managed to choose everything we wanted to do, get buses between them, and be with companies that looked good - I wont spoil all the surpsise by saying all our plans now but it is an action packed fortnight! The second day we went out on a snorkel trip to the outer Great Barrier reef and through our agent managed to get scub...