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G'day folks! Right first things first, i've just spent 45 minutes writing the longest blog entry ever and then the internet cut out and I lost everything so if this doesn't make sense in places or I make random jumps then that is why. Secondly sorry for the rubbishness in the lack of blog posts for a while. I wish I could say it's because I've been too busy doing exciting things but unfortunately it's because i've just been stuck in Brisbane with nothing interesting to write about. O.K so since I last wrote in you I moved to Brisbane and met a group of people; Vicky, Damo and Anouska amd had an awesome couple of days with them. Then I moved to a place on the coast called Moreton Bay which on the internet looks beautiful but in real life isn't that great. Plus the place I was staying in was disgusting, there were thousands of bed bugs and a resident rat called ratty. When I was there I was lucky enough that i didn't get bitten but after about 2 days I'd had enough and I moved back to the city and into the hostel with Vicky, Noush and Damo.
It was then that the bed bugs caught up with me and I woke up one morning with literally hundreds of bites all over my legs, back and arms. Not nice! They were so itchy and to make it worse I looked like I had some horrible disease. Eventually after washing and tumble drying everything we owned about a million times and moving rooms we managed to get rid of them and the bites are finally now beginning to clear up.
So, the original plan was that I was going to stay in Brisbane for about a week and then carry on up the coast to Cairns. But then the cyclones happend (stupid natural disasters not taking my travelling plans into account) so I've basically been stuck in Brisbane for the last 3 weeks because no traffic has been able to get up the coast. Despite that i've actually had a really good few weeks. Me, Vicky and Noush met an Irish guy called Fabian and the four of us decided that when the weather was better we'd go to Fraser Island together. So after 2 weeks of sitting around the hostel watching films when the weather was too hot or raining and spending days lounging by the lagoon (a man-made beach in the middle of the city) we booked our places on a self-drive 4WD safari around Fraser Island.
Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, we packed up our things and left our latest home and got on a greyhound up to Rainbow beach. That evening we met the other people in our group (there were 11 of us in total) and went food shopping in the pouring rain. The rain drops out here are huge, we were absolutly drenched after about 30 seconds and what made it worse was that we had to walk to the super market :-(. It was good fun though. Then we had a briefing about Fraser Island where they gave us some really 'useful' information about the island like.... don't pet the dingos (Well Duh!) and don't swim in the sea because you will get eaten by a shark or stung by a jelly fish and die! They then tried to scare us even more by showing us a picture that had been taken the week before by a group of a couple who had ignored the warnings not to swim in the sea and had decided to wade out, just to the top of their legs. Beside them (about 2 meters away from them) you an see a massive shaddow about twice the size of them which is a tiger shark. Fortnately for them it just circled them for 5 minutes before swimming away while they were completely oblivious to it.
So after making us all convinced that we were either going to be mauled by a Dingo, eaten by a shark, stung by a jelly fich or at least be injured horrifically in some way on the island we all went to bed, hoping that the weather would clear up, knowing that we had be up to check out at 5am :-(. The next morning we woke up to beautiful sunshine, the first we'd seen in about a week, we were so unbelievably lucky with the weather. We packed up the 4WD together, had a briefing with a mechanic (who convinced us that we were going to crash the car) and set off for Fraser Island where we spent 3 days and 2 nights camping and having an amazing time.
On the first day we drove up the beach to a small town called Eurong, the only place on the island which is inhabited at all. From there we went up to Lake Mckenzie which is without a doubt the most beautiful place I have ever seen. When you get there you are greeted with the whitest sand and greenest trees surrounding the clearest water you will ever see. It was amazing, so amazing that we decided to scrap the afternnons plans and stay there all day because none of us could bear to leave. Think of the beach in 'The Beach' (the film with Leo) and you've got some idea of how gorgeous this becah was. Eventually we managed to tear ourselves away from the lake and went back to Eurong to find somewhere to camp along the beach. What the people briefing us failed to mention was the flies. They are everywhere! They are nothing like our flies at home, they are bigger than hornets and when they sting you it feels like someone is stabbing you with a needle. When we were trying to put our tents up and cook dinner on the beach none of us could stop moving, we continually had to move, run, shake or dance in someway because if you didn't then hundreds of flies would land on you and sting you. So for two hours we must have looked absolutely ridiculous because there were 11 of us dancing around trying to avoid the thousands of flies (this is no exadgeration!).
Eventually when the sun went down the flies went away and we were able to sit on the beach, eating supper and talking. When you looked up it was amazing, i've never seen a sky like it before in my life.... we even saw the milky way. Soon after at about 9pm we all went to bed because we were all shattered and had the most uncomfortable nights sleep of our lives.... Then when we woke up in the morning at about 6am we lasted about 15 minutes before we'd had enough of jumping around trying to avoid the flies and we packed up our car and left. We went to a campsite nearby with no flies, cooked breakfast and had hot showers. After it was my turn to drive! (:-D) It was so much fun, there are no roads so it's on the beach or off or off road the entire way! We went to a place called Lake Wabby which is basially a massive sand dune with a tea tree lake at the bottom of it. It was gorgeous we had competitions to see who could roll down the sand dunes the quickest into the water.... Itw as so much fun. Then we had a massive drive up the coast to see the Maheno, a shipwreck that crashed in a cyclone in the 1930s, and found a campsite (no more beaches and flies for us) and set up camp. Cooked a bbq and once more was in bed by 9pm because we were all shatterd (to get to lake Wabby you ahd to walk for miles in the swealtering het up and over sand dunes). That night for the first time the rain started and all the tents got wet :-s so we had a restless nights sleep and all got up at 5am to drive up to the northen most point on the island. We climbed a bit of a hill and looked down at the water and saw a shark, which must have been about 1 1/2 meters long in the bay at the bottom. Then we drove back down the island, swam in a freezing cold creek and got on a barge to come home.... where we all collapsed, absolutely exhausted, thankful that we'd made it back alive without crashing our car.
It was amazing, we had the most amazing group, we all got on so well and Fraser Island is the most amazing place i've ever seen. So after sleeping off the effects of Fraser Vicky, Fabian, Anouska and myself got on a greyhound up to Bundaberg where we picked up our hire car and drove to our (AMAZING) motel in Bargara. Which in actual fact wasn't that amazing but when you've been living in disgusting hostels for 6 weeks it was heaven. That night we went to a place called Mon Repos on the beach which is a turtle sanctuary where turtles come into lay their eggs. We had to wait sround for about 3 hours but then we were taken down to the beach where we saw a hatchling (a nest of eggs) hatching up out of the ground and about 100 hhundred tiny turtles making there way down to the sea. It was amazing and to make it even better I saw my first shooting star.
Right, I think that has got you caught up. I'm now waiting with Anouska for a bus to take us up to 1770, which was the first place to be discovered in Australia. Vicky and Fabian went back down to Brisbane this morning but we've decided to make it up the coast to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. I will then head over to New Zealand in about 2 weeks.
Hope you are all well and wrapping up warm and I promise to write more regularly and photos will be up in the next couple of days. Remember to email me!
Love
Ruth xxxxx
p.s sorry about the spelling mistakes, i'm trying to write this really quickly.
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