Airely Beach and Whitsundays

Airley Beach is an awesome place and Whitsundays is absolutely breathtaking. On Airely Beach, the town immaculate, there are loads of cool bars and resaturants and our hostel was really lively and rammed with travellers, not all of whom were tossers! We didn´t have long in Airely Beach as we got there wuite late in the afternnon and had a really early start to start our trip but we managed to get a few beers in an catch up on emails and what not. We checked out of the hostel at about 7.30am the next day and took Marge to her resting place for the next couple of days while we took our tour.

Whitsundays are a group of islands off the barrier reef, I´m not sure how many there are but there´s shit loads and they´re all uninhabited, with the exeption of one oe two, and they´re all beautiful. The standard trip usually entails about 20 guests being assigned to a sail boat and working alongside the crew to sail around the islands with one or two nights on the boat. I was surprised that there are two groups of islands called Cumberland Islands and Northumberland Islands with loads of islands being named after some places in Northern England. We were assigned to The Hammer which was a trquoise sailing boat which used to take parrt in competitions around Australia - I don´t know anything about boats but it was pretty cool.

The first destination was Whitehaven Beach which was pretty mad considering that Whitehaven is about 9 miles away from my home towm in the UK. I have to say that the Whitehaven Beach in Oz is slightly more attractive than that in Cumbria, it is absolutely stunning and the fourth most photographed place in Australia. There were hundreds of baby sting rays and the odd sand sharks swimming around the shallows and the sand was almost pure white and as soft as cotton wool. Unfortunately the weather started to change early afternoon and we got back on the boat and had a sail to our spot for the night.

On the boat, the crew were awesome and the rest oof the guests had degrees from the university of cock end! The crew were three, Mick was the skipper and Zak and Angie were the deck hands and Kev and I spent most of our time chilling at the back of the boat talking cod shit with them and ignoring every fucker else. Mick was nuts and just wanted to sail which meant that for the most part the boat was at a 45 degree angle with the sail dipping into the waves. Pretty scary shit but it was awesome fun. When The Hammer was a race boat it had a crew of 18 so to keep us going we had to help out the crew putting up the sails and all that jazz which was good crack.

That night we had dinner and proceeded to get pissed up and after a while Kev and I accosted the iPod situation, at least for a short while. To give you an idea of what we were up against, our iPod tunes were replaced by Kylie´s greatest hits, I mean for fuck´s sake some people shouldn´t be let out of the house let alone have iPod rights! Apart from that we had a good night and retired a little worse for wear in the ealry hours ready for another day of sailing and sunbathing. Next day I had a dive booked and I have to say I was very exited at the prospect of a dive off the great barrier reef. Unfortunately it was the worst dive I´ve had to date due to poor visbility and a dick head instructor we put me witha group of non qualified divers and never really took us deeper than 3m. I got about 5 minutes on my own with him and took in some decent swim throughs but the fat waster ran out of air before me so I surfaced a pretty pissed off chappy!

Post dive, we sailed back too the dock at full speed and experienced some of the best sailing of the trip for about 4 hours while Mick tried his best to capsize the boat, which incidentally is supposed to be almost impossible. We had a pretty uneventful evening after that in the hostel before we had yet another early start to drive to Cairns to drop off our beloved Marge. Two points to note were that for the first time ever I was pulled over by the cops and breathalised and I was very close to smashing a little dick head 20 year old´s face in for stamping on a rhino beetle that I was trying to photograph. Fortunately, somehow, compassion prevailed and the young man escaped unscathed. At about 4am it was time to set off again and after yet other challenging time trying to wake Kev up, we were on the road again.