Trip of a Lifetime Our 10 month journey around the world.

Well we are still alive and haven’t ever seen a single animal that could kill us.  Australia isn’t turning out to be very scary after all.  We are trying out a tourist park tonight to see if they are like New Zealand or not.  A LITTLE SCARY  but it turned out ok.   We of course stopped for our 50cent McD cone in Townsville and headed back to the ocean were Holly was braver than me and swam in the stinger enclosure.  She did watch the show I did on jelly fish and how much it hurts obviously.  We headed down the cost the nest day and decided as we had already gone out to the reef we wouldn’t go again on a boat to the white Sunday islands as you can’t swim.  We did take a dip in the lagoon at Arlie beach, which was a nice little town.  Tonight we would stay at the National park and work on the Van as I had picked up some tools.  First encounter with a living wild Kangaroo.  The bugs are insanely loud here.  Just before bed you get this mirage of hissing and clicking louder than any car alarm.  They die down after about 20 minutes but you are almost going insane by then..  There is always some sort of noise at night either a bird, lizard, or bug..  I think the ear plugs are going to get good use.  As there is no swimming in the ocean due to stingers, and lakes due to Crocks we headed down south were we heard that there are safe places to swim and cool off as it is still well into the 30’s every day AND NIGHT!!!…   Today is Sunday and everything is closed.  We headed to the closest swim able water source which turned out to be a dammed lake and as we pulled up what do you know you could die if you swim there..   No not the crocks or stingers but blue green algae.  We ended up talking to the ramp operator and she said it was ok so we jumper in and just to be safe used her hose and rinsed off.  She laughed as she said no one had ever got sick as far as she new.   The next day we headed to Agnus water and a town called 1770 because Captain Cook landed on his second voyage to Australia in 1770..  Sounded like a tourist trap to me..  It was a nice little town and we leaned that we were know out of Croc territory and soon it would be safe to swim in the  ocean too.  We didn’t swim and headed down the coast further just to be safe..  Today we would stay at a rest site for free..  Hervey bay is our destination and saw no signs for anything that could kill us so we got wet.  We booked a trip to Fraser island and national park island to see the rainbow sands crystal clear lakes and untouched wilderness.  The ride started out slow or a ferry that went 5 mph.  Only 4x4 are allowed on the island as it is all sand (claimed to have more sand that the Sahara desert).  We were riding in a hug 4x4 bus.  The driver was nice (Karl) a little crazy driving 80kmh with inches to spare on either side of the bus. We drop thought the jungle and onto the 75 mile beach crossing crystal clear streams and dodging ocean swells.  At the end of the day we got to swim in an amazingly clear small lake that I doze to the bottom of in the middle with a depth of about 35 feet.  After Fraser island we retuned the the backpacker YHA where we were staying.  The next day we walked the longest pier in Australia (880 meters) where there was all sorts of fisherman and a few had even caught a couple nice size mackerel.  Tonight we would drive to Inskip park as we had booked in advance at the National park again as they are cheep $10 a night.  The area was quite crawled but the beach was nice.  In the morning we would move on to Rainbow beach to see the rainbow sands we keep hearing about.  I think they are all high as the sand if brown or light brown  no rainbow to be seen.  In any case the beaches are spectacular the water warm and Holly even got bashed around in the surf for a while.  We didn’t make it as far as Brisbane as I was not feeling well so we did a quick walk to Carlos sand blow (Sand dune) and then headed to a cheap site for the night.  In the morning we headed to Brisbane to get our India Visa’s and wend looking for a site for the night that had a place for me to cool off as I still was feeling ill.