Hi guys,

Hope you are well. I'm very well, and amazed at how fast my time in Australia is going. Last time I posted I was in Byron Bay, which was a hippy town but was a really cool and chilled out place. It was at that point that the flooding started to occur further north and cause chaos everywhere for a lot of people.

I booked my tours of Fraser Island and the Whitsundays in Byron Bay, and that night went to a bar and ended up winning a tour of Fraser Island. Excellent I won something good I thought...... I couldn't give the trip I won to anyone or sell it, and I couldn't cancel the one I had paid for, so basically I had won something really good for the first time, but it was something I had already got! I was told by the travel agent that I should just be happy I won. I may as well have lost as I didn't exactly get a prize!!

After Byron Bay I travelled up to Surfers Paradise, which was the complete opposite of Byron Bay. It felt like it was trying to be a Las Vegas, but not quite getting it right. I wasn't a big fan of the place, it was quite expensive and the hostel we stayed in was really weird too. The rooms were great but it had 2 receptions, one for the backpackers and one for everyone else. The backpacker one was on the lower ground floor, and to get to the room you had to walk through an arcade that probably hasn't been played in since the 80's as all the games were really, really old. Then you had to walk through a car park before walking up the stairs to where the rooms were. It was a weird set up.

By this time the floods had reached their peak and buses had stopped running, and I was starting to wonder if I wouldn't be able to make my tours. I decided to go to Brisbane in the hope it would all clear up in a few days. I got to Brisbane fine, and you could see the river was still really high and running really fast, and also the debris by the bridges where boats had smashed into them. I saw small areas that were still flooded but where I stayed the streets were fine. The place was really quiet though, and not many cars around. A lot of the shops were closed, including McDonalds, which was the first time I had seen one closed, as nothing ever stops them from opening!!

We found a bar that has a load of screens and you can play games on PS3, Wii and Xbox, so we spent an afternoon there as there wasn't much else to do. After a couple of nights I got a bus to Noosa as I was going on a canoe trip. The roads had started to open up so it wasn't a problem getting there. It was the last time myself, Ross and Mike were together, so the goodbye at Brisbane was emotional, I'm sure they were crying when I left!

Noosa was really, really hot. I spent the night there before leaving early to go to the canoe camp. That was a real experience! We slept in dorms in the bush, but the beds were made from trees and there was a bit of material that drooped in the middle that you slept on. The guy who ran the place was adamant that it was the most comfortable thing ever, and I have to say my back has never hurt so much. I think the floor would have been better. There were loads of huge spiders everywhere, and frogs, but I got used to them in the end. It was seeing the girls running around screaming everytime there was a spider, which was like every 5 mins.

The family that run it were really weird too. There was a guy who had the luife of Forrest Gump when he told us his life story. He had done it all apparently, from making a world class marinade when he was 5, to managing a large department of a supermarket, to being a referee in a million different sports, while also still being in the army. Then he had a fiancee who he had met and then proposed to 2 months later. They looked so much a like. She had 4 kids, 3 from one father and 1 from another. 1 lived with them, and the other 3 lived with their father, which wasn't a good sign as a woman rarely loses custody of her kids. The 3 kids had come to visit, but for some reason they weren't allowed to visit the camp so they had lied to their dad and said they were going somewhere else. It was like a real life episode of Jerry Springer! Needless to say we didn't do much canooing, i was bored after 10 mins to be honest.

After that I came up to Hervey Bay, and went to Fraser Island, which was amazing. I got to drive a 4x4 over the beach and some crazy inland tracks. There were loads of fresh water lakes that were really beautiful, my favourite being Lake McKenzie which was like a beach with a huge lake in th emiddle of the island. I saw a load of dingos, and we managed to fit in a game of football on the beach too. The group we had was really good, and much better than the group that came the next day, as a couple from their group decided to have a massive domestic and keep everyone awake!

I'm now back in Hervey Bay and I'm off to Airlie Beach tonight, and then to the Whitsundays on Thursday which should be amazing.

I've got a backlog of photos, but I'm trying to put up some when I can, it may just take a while!!

Until next time, take care.