Australia celebrated the Queen's birthday twice this year because of the diamond Jubilee, once in June and once on October 1st (we have already exceeded my knowledge of the subject) so we took a few extra days off and spent a week in the Whitsunday region.
The week before our trip, Sev worked at his company's facility in Mackay which is a 2 hour drive from our destination in the Whitsundays. They had a bucket order to complete so he was there for support. The bucket is above, which is more like a small house than a bucket.
I met Sev in Mackay on Wednesday evening and the next morning we drove around and checked out the facility where they manufacture large machinery for the mines in the area. The buckets and such are built in these buildings then hoisted onto huge semi trucks out the bay doors.
All of these giant metal pieces are waiting to be used for some machinery. This was a cool thing for me to see since it's exactly the opposite of what I do for a living!
Then, we drove north for two hours and saw nothing but sugar cane and...
road construction. The highway runs parallel to the coast but is just far enough away that you can't see the ocean from the car. Sugar cane is an important part of the economy in this region, and was the main economy before mining began.
It's harvest season for the sugar cane and just like in Fiji, there is a mini railroad to transport it around the country. I can't help but sing "Hi-ho, hi-ho it's off to work we go!" every time I see the mini sugar train.
These machines are terrifying! They just rip the sugar cane out of the ground and shred it up! You can see how bare the earth is after they harvest the sugar cane, and it looks like they plant new sugar every year.
This was a particularly charming mini train that crossed our path.
We stayed in Airlie Beach, a backpacker's colony on the coast which contains no actual beaches, but does have some wonderful views of the ocean.
We checked into our posh hostel in the center of town. We even managed to get a private room with private bathroom! Here is our room, number 37.
The hostel was perhaps more like a compound. There were probably 20 buildings in our area, and at least twice as many abandoned buildings behind us! Here is the pool, the "shed bar" (which exclusively plays tunes from the 90's) and some dormitories.
Then had some pizza for dinner and checked out the town.
Sev likes thick crust as much as I like thin crust so we had to rock paper scissors it out and I lost (probably why he's smiling so big), but the pizza was still really good, and I'm pretty picky about my pizza!
After dinner, we took a walk in search of a grocery store and didn't find the store, but we did see a beautiful sunset over Abel Point Marina just outside of town.
And we saw some of my favorite birds, white cockatoos, hanging out in a tree. These ones had some yellow feathers also, and were just amazing (like all cockatoos)!
The next day we took this boat, the Aristocat, to Hardy Reef on the Great Barrier Reef!
Boating through the Whitsunday Islands is indescribable. There are layers of beautiful forested islands everywhere you look, and they're all so pristine. There are about 75 islands in the group, and it seems like most are uninhabited.
We got coffee on the boat and inadvertently took silly pictures of each other!
The only explanation I can think of is that I was mid sentence...
My small bladder didn't cause me to miss the sights like it normally does because there was a large window in the bathroom! This proved unhelpful when I was feeling seasick, however.
When we got closer to the reef we could see it under the water.
This is the pontoon where we spent the day snorkeling and freezing our butts off! It's really big and has sunning areas up top, docks to jump off for snorkeling and scuba diving, a water slide, and lots of other things that I didn't care about because I just wanted to snorkel!
One of those things was a viewing hole in the pontoon with some giant grouper fish hanging out in the ocean below. The top fish is named Fred, and he lives under the pontoon all the time. It's hard to tell here but he is actually 9 feet long! The bottom fish is a different type (I forgot the name) and it is a predator unlike Fred which migrates and lives under the pontoon from time to time. We saw both types of fish while snorkeling as well.
We went for a ride on the semi-submersible boat with a glass bottom and saw some coral and a few fish.
The boat's propeller stirred up too many air bubbles for us to see much, but here's a good shot from the boat.
It gave us a blue/green tone that made for some fun pictures!
It was amazing being out in what seemed like the middle of the ocean but the water being so shallow! Coral needs sunlight to live so it always lives just below the surface.
The coral does drop off in what seems like a cliff into some very deep water. There are millions of different coral animals that make up the Great Barrier Reef.
The air temperature that day was 77 degrees but it was very windy so if felt colder, and the water temperature was only 71 degrees so we definitely needed our wet suits to swim around all day like we did! We felt very silly in them and took some pictures accordingly. Sev calls this my "terminator" look.
We got a waterproof cover for my phone to be able to take some pictures in the water but it was very tricky and many of our pictures ended up looking like this! Or, like this video in which we thought we were taking a picture:
We're like kids with a camera.
I'm not going to lie, I was disappointed when I found out that the Great Barrier Reef isn't all kinds of bright colors in real life like it is on tv. The reason for that is something having to do with colors of light being filtered out through the water (help please?) and apparently the documentaries we've all seen with the rainbows of coral are filmed at night with bright lights shone on the coral to show its colors.
We took a guided snorkel tour and learned that there are many different types of coral as you can see here - all of these bunches are coral. They're all hard coral, but soft coral also exists, and Nemo (also known as clown fish) live in the soft coral!
This huge mass is called boulder coral and it's the slowest growing coral that exists. It grows about 3 centimeters per year, so imagine how old this thing is!
A big school of little blue fish swimming by the reef.
This string looking thing is called whip coral and it just grows off the side of the reef like a rope!
This is branch coral, and the tips of this one are bright purple.
That's me and our guide swimming with some fish up ahead.
This giant clam is about 3 feet wide, and we saw an even bigger one before this which our guide said was about 80 years old!
Here are several types of coral, some parrot fish and another smaller giant clam.
That chain is probably attached to the pontoon we were on! And of course, more coral! There were many fish but they are so hard to photograph. My favorites were the male parrot fish, which look like this picture that I got off the internet:
We also saw a clown fish in its soft coral home which was my other favorite sighting! Soft coral are actually poisonous to fish but the clown fish goes in it starting at short intervals from a young age and becomes immune to the poison!
Hardy reef actually wraps around, making a lagoon on the far side of it. I didn't realize that the tide went in and out in the middle of the ocean just like it does on shore, so when we were first snorkeling the tide was going out and it was almost impossible to swim against it!
When low tide comes, the coral is exposed to the sun and it creates a natural sunscreen so that it doesn't burn!
This is a couple hours before low tide and the coral is already exposed.
Little rivers form in between the coral pieces as the tide goes out and there's even white water from the fast flow! After a while, the water was much more calm and easier to snorkel in!
We started calling the Whitsundays the place of everlasting low tide. The water is so shallow that it looks like it's always low tide! This sand bar is in the middle of the water and barely covered at high tide. You can see that people actually hang out on it like an island during low tide!
The Whitsunday region is the most popular sailing destination in the Southern hemisphere.
As the sun began to set, we saw an almost full moon rise above the islands and sailboats.
Sev loves to get candid pictures, so this one's for him!
We both have our boat-related ailments: I get seasick, and Sev gets sea-fro!
The next day we decided to relax in Airlie Beach. This rainbow parrot is one of dozens that lived in this tree.
It's hard to get a good picture of them, but they are very brightly colored and quite vociferous as well!
These birds were numerous around the hostel as well. This one is sitting on its knees and it was sitting so still that I thought it was fake for a minute! They ended up being quite annoying though, as they make a horrible screeching sound.
We decided to check out Coral Beach which was just a few kilometer drive from Airlie Beach, but got desperately lost in the hills. We came upon some impressive homes with even more impressive views!
If this is the view from their garage, imagine the views from the house!!
Here's a good picture of all the islands on the horizon.
Everywhere we turned, we got more lost, but saw even better views!
Finally we found the parking lot for Coral Beach and walked the 1k trail to the beach with incredible views yet again!
That fuzzy tree in the foreground is a pine tree that grows over all of the islands and used to be logged until the islands were made into a national park.
Finally we found Coral Beach and it was, well, made of coral.
Needless to say we had no desire to lay on this beach and of course low tide was coming and the coral in the water was starting to be exposed so we weren't able to swim or snorkel either.
We did find this cute cactus and a grassy area in the shade to bask in for the afternoon!
After such a hard day, we decided to move to a sandy beach in Airlie Beach. I know I mentioned earlier that there are no actual beaches in Airlie Beach, but this place is in Airlie Beach. You wouldn't consider this a beach either after smelling that wet muddy sand at low tide!
We laid here for a while and watched the sunset. Being on the east coast of Australia, we never get to see the sun set into the water but it's still nice!
That evening we had the best dinner of our trip! This is the dessert, a banana fritter with homemade vanilla ice cream! It was absolute heaven! The best part was that Sev didn't like it very much so I got to eat most of it!
When we passed by the Shed Bar at the hostel, we thought all bars in Airlie Beach played the same music, so we went to see who this band was that sounded just like the band we had seen at a bar the night before. Lo and behold it was the exact same band!
Our second relaxing day in a row, we went to see Cedar Creek Falls, which are supposed to be beautiful, and this is what we saw:
That's right, there were no falls; only a sludgy pond. That's what we get for going to see a waterfall at the end of dry season!
We imagined what the falls would look like and decided they would be very beautiful.
Then we walked around in the dry riverbed for a few minutes, and saw a very large lizard running into its rock home.
These falls and river must be huge based on the size of the dry river bed at their base! It seemed to go on and on.
We learned that we shouldn't dive into the swimming hole from the top of the falls.
One thing you can count on in the Whitsundays is a gorgeous view no matter where you go!
Next we went to a beach for which we saw a sign on the highway and this is how we were greeted.
Yet again, it was low tide no matter the time of day. And yet again, amazing views of the islands.
Some little creature created millions of holes and little sand pellets all over this beach.
We walked out on the beach a ways and still never found the water line!
The next day, we got tired of slumming it in the hostel so we bought this little thing!
Actually we took a tourist boat to Whitehaven Beach, which may be the pinnacle of my beach chasing life. Here is Airlie Beach from the boat.
As we pulled up to Whitehaven beach, the white sand seemed to be sparkling!
Whitehaven is on Whitsunday Island which is uninhabited and highly protected which means there is no pier to park the boat on, so the boat simply pulled up to the beach and we hopped out!
It was quite cloudy and even a little rainy which is most unfortunate because these pictures just don't do it justice. It was the whitest, finest sand I could even imagine!
Whitehaven Beach is 7 kilometers long, and the ocean is so shallow between this and the island next to it that you can walk from one island to another during low tide!
Normally I don't like sitting in the sand but it was so soft here that it actually felt good!
Sev did some warm up exercises to get ready for snorkeling in the cool weather.
And I figured the only appropriate things to do in my stinger suit are warrior 2...
And crawl in the surf like a sea monster!
A woman next to us said we look so ridiculous in our stinger suits that she had to take a picture of it! That validated my fears - we are silly tourists. But after learning about all the different deadly Australian sea animals during my recent first aid course and promptly forgetting how to administer first aid for them, we decided it's better safe than sorry.
Since there was nothing but white sand and some weird poop-looking piles of white sand in the water, we played around with the camera while snorkeling.
I took my first video in water, and practiced diving under water. Why Sev's stinger suit is half unzipped to reveal his luxurious chest hair we will never know.
And mostly, we just swam around and tried to stay warm!
Sev did the obligatory white sand angel and said the sand warmed him up a little.
After accomplishing a life goal of rolling around in pure white sand, we celebrated with some champagne on the boat ride home! We also had afternoon tea, which is a snack in the afternoon, but for some reason they call it tea here. Afternoon tea included some sausages that I found inedible and actually spit out, and which Sev devoured gladly.
On our final day in the magnificent Whitsunday Islands, Sev woke up with violent food poisoning and spent the day doing this, among other things that I won't mention:
I was so glad I didn't eat the sausage!
