Hello sunny Airlie Beach

Friday, November 14th

The 13 hour bus ride was ok.  I did wake up several times, but did enough napping to feel alright for the day.  It was nice that we each had a whole row to ourselves.  When I woke up at 2am or so talking to friends on gchat, I started to get hungry...which made sense because my last meal was 6pm the previous night.  I snacked on my ginger nut cookies to hold me till breakfast.

The weather at Airlie Beach was beautiful.  Clear blue skies.  It felt nice to have the sun lightly toasting my skin, a feeling we had forgotten with the cold days we've been experiencing.  We were staying at Koala beach resort at Airlie Beach.  It costs AUD16.50 ($11) for a six person female dorm.  We met two of our German dormmates.  They seemed really nice and are just doing leisure travel in Australia.  They were both working to support their finances for their trip - one working on a boat and the other fruit picking.  Although they were both German, they met each other on their Fraser island tour.  They weren't so happy about their self-guided group.  I get the sense we got a pretty good deal with the guided tour since we didn't run into any issues with the driving, stayed in cabins, and had our food taken care of.  All in all the extra we paid was worth it.

We started the shower train immediately since we didn't shower since two nights ago in dilli village.  It felt nice to be clean, but it was also a bit silly since we were just heading straight for the beach...or manmade lagoon.  But before that, we needed to eat lunch and check into our Prosail Whitsunday trip.  We just ate outside in a cafe facing the docks.  Bernice and I had grilled barramundi fish and Steph had caesar salad.  We were all really happy.  Bernice and I are pretty much done with sandwiches and fries at this point.  I might just turn into one soon.

At Prosail, we had to fill out a questionnaire.  One of the questions was, what type of swimmer are you.  I classified myself as a weak swimmer so the lifeguard will pay attention to me.  We also decided to buy a 24 pack for the 3 of us on the 2 days 2 night trip - XXXX gold (pronounced four X gold) baby!

We were warned not to swim in the ocean because there are dangerous creatures, mainly deadly jellies, in the water.  We rented sting suits for our sail trip.  The water at Airlie Beach was beautiful shades of blue.  Almost like the water in Zanzibar.  It was a shame we couldn't swim in it.  Steph and I did take a swim in the manmade lagoon.  It was a bit weird because it was like a nice natural pool...that was surrounded by grass and road.  We laid in the shade on the grass, right next to the road.  A bit odd.

After some time passed, we did the beach walk towards where our sail trip takes off from.  The walk was nice, basically along the beach and the docks.  Picturesque, but hard to capture the beauty in a photo.  We still had to finalize our New Zealand magic bus tickets and figure out where we were going next, so we stopped by tribal travels for some suggestions.

Tribal travels helped us book our magic bus tickets.  She also suggested that we go to Magnetic Island for 3 nights and Mission Beach for 1 night, so we rearranged our travels accordingly.  Afterwards we had to do some admin internet stuff and change our greyhound bookings.  It all went smoothly and by the time we were done, it was time for dinner.

Bernice really wanted sushi, so we tried to look for it but didn't have any luck finding a decent looking one.  So we decided to go for tex-mex.  The three of us shared a chorizo and steak fajittas and a grande nachos.  It was ok, satisfied our mexican crave.

After dinner we just headed back to our hostel to shower and started packing our packs.  We were all pretty knackered from the overnight bus, so went to bed at around 10:30am.