Want to guess how the night was? Besides a little kid that came by on a scooter twice and several unidentifiable sounds that sometimes resembled someone being killed (not that I would know out of first hand how that sounds but I have watched enough horror movies in my life) we slept pretty well and it was not too hot.
8:15am we were ready for our tour to the Whitsundays. The Whitsundays are an island group just off Arlie Beach. I’ve seen postcards and wanted to find out if the postcards were real. Well, they were. It was an awesome trip. We went on a boat with about 40 other people (there are smaller boats available but this one seemed to have the most bang for your buck) and as we were quick enough we got the prime spots on the sundeck.
Past Daydream Island, South Molle Island, Long Island and Hamilton Island our first stop was at the Hill Inlet outlook on Whitsunday Island, the biggest of all the islands in the group. On the way we saw a few turtles and heaps of sun. The sky was blue and we slowly turned red. No worries though, we are tough chicks. At the outlook our crew consisting of Turtle, the skipper, Cam, the deckhand and a third guy whose name I don’t remember – let’s call him Smokey because I think he smoked too much, brought us to the shore with a dingy. We walked the 600 meters to the outlook and were amazed. It looked just like the postcards – the view was awesome! The water was turquoise blue and the sand the whitest you could think of. You could see fish and rays in the shallow water and islands in the background. We were quite eager to set foot on the nice beach, so our next stop was Whitehaven Beach. I have never seen a beach like that before. The sand was like powered sugar and got everywhere. We had about two hours for swimming, sun bathing and beach walking. Included was also a beach bbq that Cam and Smokey prepared for us. We had burgers, sausages and steaks. It was all yummy and we were eagerly watched by a goanna and several ravens. The goanna was quite cheeky and we had to chase it away several times.
After the beach trip and lunch out last stop was Mantaray Bay at Hook Island for a little bit of snorkeling. There were plenty of fish around and Turtle decided to feed the fish while we were snorkeling which resulted in a feeding frenzy – no sharks about though, so no worries. We did saw some Maori Wrasse. With that and some more sun on the way back out day trip came to an end. Back at the resort we checked out our wonderful burn marks. There were plenty and I resembled a rather large lobster.
To finish a great day we had picked out a Mexican restaurant in town. I should have known better having lived in Texas for so long that nothing quite resembles TexMex in Texas. The food was pretty bad. The fajitas which my mum and sister ordered were made with bbq sauce and tasted nothing like real fajitas. The chimichanga I had was also pretty bad and decided to go round and round in my stomach afterwards. Margaritas were surprisingly very good. If there is one thing Aussies can do it’s drinking – this just proves it again. Also the chocolate nachos for desert were very yummy and made up for all the crappy food beforehand. After desert we decided to walk back to the resort – about a 20 minute walk from town. As it was dark there were quite a few things we did not see but that surely saw us. One thing my sister did see was a tarantula. She started “running like a little lamb” (as she put it, I don’t quite know why, I thought it looked much more like a full grown sheep). We got to the resort safely without any further incidents and in one piece each.
After I got rid of the Mexican food in me, I calmed my stomach with some good Scottish single malt. Then it was already bedtime again as for tomorrow we had planned quite a drive.
