Airlie Beach

This morning I caught the shuttle bus again back to the airport for my flight to Hamilton Island, one of the 70ish islands that make up the Whitsunday Islands. Almost all of the islands used to be volcanoes at some point and have now grown into lush tropical islands that were amazing from the air and equally as impressive when we finally landed.

Getting off the plane (the only pic that turned out this morning...)

The Hamilton Island airport was extremely small and only services a handful of flights each day, and when looking for accomodations right on the island I was shocked at how expensive each place was. Large hotel companies have bought up shares of land and built either grand hotels or very ritzy cabins which I found started around 350 per night. On to plan B..... A ferry operates from the airport terminal and took us into a town called Airlie beach that has become very commercialized due to its proximity to the islands. The town is pretty much a main street with shops offering boat tours to the reef and islands, along with some surfwear stores with ridiculously priced clothing.

I checked into a place called Magnums backpackers and is pretty neat being situated a short walk away from the busy road in a rainforest style setting. The rest of the afternoon I spent on the small beach in town trying to get back into reading mode since its been a few years since I conquered a novel. The temperature was perfect-around 26-but the overcast skies didn't exactly make it beach weather which meant I was one of the few actually at the beach. I grabbed a dinner at a local bakery and am going to call it quits now at 7:00 pm (technically 5 am hometime). I thought I'd be able to make to at least 10 tonight but have no real desire to stay up since the town is sparse when it comes to sightseeing.

Tomorrow I'm booked on a 2 night island tour which begins in the afternoon and takes us to Whithaven beach on Whitsunday Island. When I was booking the tour, the lady at the desk told me that National Geographic ranked Whithaven as the best beack in the world so I'm expecting great things. The weather sounds like it might be cloudy again tomorrow so it kind of takes away from the beach effect but nonetheless there's snorkelling and island walks happening the following day. The two nights are spend on a boat that sleeps 25 and has everything from showers to a full kitchen, sounds interesting but I've heard some of the boats are far from clean, as long as the beds are ok, I'm fine.

After getting back from the tour on Monday, I get ready to catch an early morning train to Cairns on Tuesday and have only 1 day in the city before heading to the outback for 2 days at Ayers Rock. When I was booking the boat tour the same lady also told me the train I'm on doesn't run on the coast like I thought it did so I should be prepared for a long day of trees, trees and more trees. I wanted to at some point take a train through part of Australia and this seemed like the shortest and most reasonable option but hopefully I won't be regretting it.

My first post I was at a computer that didn't read memory cards so I couldn't upload any pics. I tried to upload multiple ones but it's taking too long so here's my cheesy pic of the day: me covering up half the Opera House with my head (didn't realize this until now).