Airlie Beach - Gateway to the whitsundays!

Made it safely down to airlie beach, via townsville, through the magic of long distance bus travel...

For 230 bucks, i have a ticket which lets me get on and off as many times as i want and move south from Cairns to Sydney. Townsville was actually pretty cool, staying in a rabbit warren of a hostel and eating cheap noodles and eggs - We found out that the rum had leaked during it's journey down the coast, so we had to drink all the spillage and ended up passing out pretty early :) After another 6 hours on the bus, we made it to airlie beach, which is beautiful, and cheap (deluxe hostel room, $17 a night) and rowdy.

I think the attempt to keep costs down has forced us onto the british backpacker model - find a new town, check into sketchy accomadations, get blitzed on whatever the cheapest booze is while eating chip butties or 25 cent noodles...

Not quite as satisfying as you'd think, but it does involve a lot of $8.50 casks of wine (4 litres in a cardboard box). Anyways, sworn off box wine for at least a day after last nights interesting events... Paul hasn't woken up yet, but when he's moving again i think things will be cool...

This morning, booked a cruise in the Whitsunday islands on a small sail boat - white sand beaches, beautiful scenery, etc. etc. so that will give me a few days to recuperate and take some more photos...

Anyways, at this point i'm just rambling, but hopefully you get the picture, and once the effects of the box wine wear off a little i'll be more coherent...

Chris