Whitsundays and Airlie Beach

After Bundaberg, we caught a bus and drove 12 hours to Airlie Beach. It is a cute little beach town. You can tell a lot of backpackers come to the area but it doesn't feel overly commercialized. The hostel we stayed at was great. The owner was very friendly and helpful. We met some fun British people and a fellow Albertan. We came in second at a quiz game the hostel offers nightly to win a bottle of champagne.

The next we got up early and went down to the marina. We got our stinger suits and then boarded The Apollo, a maxi sailing yacht. It came in 1st two times in the span of 9 years in a sailing race, which is pretty impressive. Our crew were awesome. The captain/skipper was named Mat and he was pretty funny. He was also a great cook. The dive instructor was AJ and then Jed helped with cooking and sailing. Jed was pretty hilarious as well and we found out he was only 16. He definitely didn't look it.

We had some great wind and sailed to Blue Pearl Bay where groups did an intro dive and the rest of us hung out on the beach and snorkelled. We met some great people and hung out with them on the beach. They were Laura and Craig from England, Brenden from the US and Lisa from Germany. The beach we were on was made up of shells and coral with no sand. It really hurt to walk on (especially with no flip flops since they were collected by the crew when we boarded the boat) but the shells were pretty cool. Laura loved them and started a little collection of the pretty shells. When then nicknamed her Shelly as she talked about building a house out of shells. She said Mike, Brenden and I could live in it with her and Craig would have servants quarters and he would brew us the perfect cup of tea every morning. We had a lot of fun.

When then sailed to a bay to anchor for the night. We watched the sunset and then had a wonderful dinner. We sat and talked until 10:30 and then crashed. We had to be up by 7am the next day.