Falling down hatches and toilet holes
Trip Start
Oct 21, 2006
1
21
31
Trip End
Feb 28, 2007
Whitsundays to Fraser Island,
Australia
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
I did not think it possible for Oz to get more humid than Cairns but i was very clearly wrong. I arrived in Airlie Beach (hop on / off point for sailing in the Whitsundays) to a pleasant 32 degrees and not so pleasant 80% humidity. I melted, with much bad temper, and looked like i had just stepped out of a shower most of the time. Airlie Beach itself is a fairly mundane place, a strip development geared almost exclusively to tourists and sailing. That said it has a nice fake lagoon where you can sit and cool down while being dive bombed by kids and watching obese families float / bloat past.
I had hooked up for 2 days and 2 nights sailing round the Whitsunday Islands aboard Apollo - a 22m racing Maxi (sailing boat to those of us who did not know) which had previously won every race on the East Coast at some point including the Sydney to Hobart twice. I am sure that means a huge amount to sailing buffs but being amongst the great unwashed masses i failed to see the significance - especially as, with light winds, the thing wasn't destined to go anywhere near that fast with me on it. Though i suspect that the quality of the crew may also have slowed it down ! We had a fabulous time on board. The skipper was a professional racing yachtsman and really knew his stuff and also the surrounding environment. Spent a wonderful two days gently sailing round the islands, which rise suddenly out of the crystal clear deep blue water covered in forest and fringed with bright white sandy lips. Snorkeled on both days on the coral fringes round several of the islands. While it did not match the diving in Cairns it was still spectacular - huge coral formations punctuated with lazy parrot fish having a nibble and the occasional painfully shy turtle. I thought i spotted a seal and got very excited, broadcasting it to the whole boat. Needless to say seals don't hang around here as the water is too warm - did my street cred the world of good when first mate pointed it out to the excited huddle leaning over the boat for a look.
The first night on board was a relatively quiet affair as we all jostled for position and tried to suss each other out. The second night was anything but quiet. The drinking games included some bizarre effort involving pirates - cannot remember much of the evening in truth and crowned a very entertaining evening by falling down the hatch - tres cool. I was to be found later that night asleep on the floor of the boat. A couple of the guys kindly lifted me back into the bunk. I knew it would not be a wise idea to start the drinking games with a Scot and a freshly graduated hard drinking rugby lad and so it proved. The bunks incidentally are tiny - this must be what it is like to sleep on a plastic toothpick. We all had to peel ourselves off the things in the morning, dripping with sweat - reckon i would have been better off on the floor !
On our second days sailing we visited Whitehaven beach, which was simply stunning (pictures to follow). We set anchor and headed over to the island we must have seen 20 turtles intermittently surfacing for air during the short trip to the island. Whitehaven has the whitest and purest sand (97% Silica) in the world and was used, untreated, to make the lens for the Hubble Telescope. It was a beautiful setting, the white beach, shady lagoon (where rays and sand sharks were mating) and blue blue water studded with forest ridden islands. Went for a swim in our not so fetching 'stinger suits' which look like a cross between a leotard and an old mans pyjamas. Still, it is the only time i will get to wear a leotard without being arrested so i made the most of it. Surprisingly flattering these all in one Lycra affairs - might get myself one when i get home. Had various fish nibble the air bubbles on our legs as we waded through the water.
After a couple of days combination of sweat, salt water and alcohol abuse it was a genuine surprise to find that i had quite an attractive group when i later met up with them in Airlie Beach for a post excursion session. More drinking games and some food later and i was to be found at midnight dribbling and deeply incoherent wandering along the high street with that ' collapsing knee' gait that is reserved for the truly pissed.
FRASER ISLAND - SAND, SAND, MORE SAND, BOOZE AND PASSING OUT IN THE DUNES
It was with a great deal of effort that i managed to haul my ass out of bed the next day to fly down to Hervey Bay for a 3 day 2 night self guided 4x4 safari on Fraser Island (largest sand island in the world and reputed to have more sand on it than is in the Sahara - still, that was an Aussie who told me that so take its validity with a bucket of salt). I arrived late into Hervey Bay and as i walked in saw a swarm of giant fruit bats gunning it down the high street in search of food. There must have been hundreds of them and they made a beautiful, if somewhat horror movie esque, sight. I quickly met up with my group - all under 20 and mostly female and felt oddly crestfallen. Should have been feeling good about being in tents with a bunch of young women but all i could think of was the inevitable drinking games - not sure i can hack falling over drunk again.
We set off early the next day and i got to do the first driving stint on the island which was enormous fun. Driving a 4x4 in very thick sand up and down dunes and deeply gouged sand tracks is a bit like a cross between playing about on a skid pan and aqua planing. It is incredible to see what one of these beasts can do - i swear we ascended damn near vertical sand banks with relative ease. I hit the trail a bit hard and had the whole group airborne at one point which was accompanied with a loud crash as all the cooking gear fell down from the internal shelf in the roof. Fortunately people took it in good spirit. We headed for lake Wabby on the first day, having set up our tents on the dunes overlooking the sea. It was one of several freshwater lakes on the island and came as a welcome relief from the suffocating heat and invasive sand. The lake is bordered on one side by a huge sand dune which we proceeded to run down as we dived in to the lake. To my great surprise the lake is very shallow for the first 5 metres and so my jump ended with me toppling knee deep in water with a great splat onto my face. It is a genuine wonder to me that people talk to me at all after my seemingly endless stream of retarded gaffs ! Dinner that evening was depressingly familiar - stodgy food and drinking games. I gainfully resisted the temptation to pickle myself for most of the night and by the time i had developed the taste for it i was so knackered i fell asleep anyway and so was spared the pain. We had dingo's wander the camp late at night scavenging for food. To me they look just like dogs but the group were suitably impressed by the wild poodle sniffling around and broke out into a chorus of screams that both scared the thing off and woke me up, when i promptly poured beer all over myself in the initial panic. Still, could be worse - two of hte boys went to the toilet (hole dug in ground) and got so excited on seeing a Dingo that one of htem staggered backwards into the toilet, post evacuation ! I woke the next morning with great smugness at 6.00am feeling great. Quick jog down the endless beach (67km of it end to end) and i was back to wind up the troops.
Day two saw us head for Indian Head at the top of the island which was like walking into a David Attenborough film in fast forward. As i perched on the cliff head i got to see a whole marine soap show erupt in front of me. First i saw giant Rays languorously flap by, which was followed by an enormous turtle, equally on slow go, surface for air before lazily swimming off. The pick of the action though were the Tiger Sharks. Two 3m sharks were watching over a bunch of smaller young as the chased shoals of fish about looking to break the group up and pick one off to chomp. At one point one of the young sharks broke the water thrashing about with glee as it caught a fish. This was followed by a fish eagle swooping to pick off a fish that must have been half it's size and swoop back to it's nest on a rocky outcrop just below us. An incredible couple of hours. We finished the day back at Lake Wabby for a swim to cool us down before the evening festivities. We swam with a horde of turtles that night that had come out of the water to roam around for a bit. It was a wonderful scene.
We dispensed with the drinking games that night and decided instead just to neck the vodka and whiskey we had brought in a round robin race. We had managed to pick up a huge / fat, loud, foul mouthed and deeply ignorant Canadian at some point earlier in the evening. After he savagely took the piss out of the group for drinking 'like a bunch of girls', which most of us self evidently were (i helpfully pointed this out to him) i decided to take him up on his challenge and we each proceeded to chin what remained of the whiskey and vodka. I don't remember any of the evening after this but i am reliably informed the following things then unfolded; I constantly took the piss out of the Canadian in an attempt to get him to bugger off and leave us alone ('come sit down here with your man boobs and spare tire big man, i would just love to listen to you crap on again' was apparently my least subtle line). I then spent half an hour doing the salsa with one of one of the Spanish girls which must have looked fabulous as i was by this stage too drunk to stand and we were knee deep in sand. In defense i apparently uttered the immortal line 'i am a lover not a dancer' (Jesus, if only that were true !). I then challenged a young Scots guy who had joined us to shotgun cans of beer for half an hour as i clearly hadn't had enough to drink by this point (conjures up larson esque images of some intellectually challenged nerd head butting a big red self destruct button). I was later to be found passed out on the camp ground and had to be helped into bed by three girls at about 1.00am.
I woke up the next morning oblivious to all this fully clothed and with a raging hangover. I can now testify that sand, 38 degree heat and bumpy roads are the closest thing to hell one can get with a hangover. I had to stop the car twice on the 11km trip to Lake Makenzie to vomit by the side of the road. To make matters worse i seemed to pick up some flees during one of these visits to the undergrowth and now had the combined agony of nausea, sunburn and intense itching to deal with. I fell into Lake Makenzie like a flaccid corpse and floated for two hours before being reluctantly pulled out to catch the ferry. It was a strange couple of hours as people i didn't;t know kept coming up to me to greet me by name and ask how i was doing today. Apparently i was quite the socialite during my self combustion the previous evening. I embarrassingly had to admit to each of my new found friends that i could not remember last night and was terribly ill so would they mind terribly if i did not talk and just went back to floating which was already taking up a herculean amount of effort. Lake Makenzie was a deep blue where lake wabby was an intense and dark green. It too was fringed with perfect sandy beaches and peppered with bikini clad tourists.
After all that it was back to Hervey Bay to fly out to Brisbane for a bit of a wander.........
