Prince of Whales

Hello!

Since the last blog we have basically been in Rockhampton. Rockhampton generally sucked, but there were a couple of ok things to do there. On our first full day we went to the Capricorn Spire which marks where the Tropic of Capricorn crosses Australia, which was fun. Then we went to the zoo, which was pretty cool as we saw a Kangaroo who had a Joey in her pouch (6 legged roo from our last blog), and also Koalas, Crocs, Chimps, Cassowarys and lots of birds. We got a cool picture of a peacock displaying for is, which we'll post up on the next blog. We then spent a bit of time walking around the botanical gardens which is on the same site as the zoo, but decided it wasn't that interesting so we swiftly got a cab home. That night we had the best steak EVER!!! Rockhampton is apparantly the beef capital of Australia, and so we obviously had to test this out, so in our hostel there was a restaurant which had this special way of cooking their steaks called a Stonegrill. This is basically a volcanic rock which they heat up to about 400 degrees centigrade and put whatever cut of meat you want on it, raw and give it to you with veg or whatever. You then have to cut the meat and can cook it to however you want. The steak was absolutely amazing, and really tender and juicy, and to Stew's delight was served raw, so he could eat it while it was still mooing.

The next day we decided we were going to go and play minigolf, and so we trekked the 2 or 3 kilometres up the road. On the way we got visciously attacked, but a 7 week old ball of fluff pretending to be a dog. He was apparantly very good at escaping from his garden and continually followed us down the road, until we eventually picked him up and dropped him over his fence into his garden, which he promptly found a way out of and followed us again. after this we picked him up again and took him to the house in the first garden we'd seen him in and asked the guy who lived there if it was his puppy, it was his neighbours. So we dropped him into his own garden and locked the front gate, and luckily he wasn't clever enough to realise that he would have to go back on himself to follow us again, so we lost him. Shortly afterwards we got to the minigolf, and found a big sign saying it was closed today, open again tomorrow as usual. At this point we started cursing Rockhampton, and decided to go shopping. It turned out that there was a reasonable shopping centre here, so we bought some clothes, sunglasses and books and stuff for dinner and went back to the hostel. Unfortunately, when we decided to have our dinner that night (a healthy feast of frozen pizza and garlic bread) we discovered that we didn't actually have an oven. After a brief experiment with the garlic bread in the microwave, we decided that this was never going to happen and Stew went and got us something else. A pizza.

Rockhamptons saving grace was that the hostel and all the people there were really nice. We had a good couple of days chilling out and catching up on old school movies that they had for us to watch, so it was really ok.

The next morning we were up at 5 to catch our bus to Hervey Bay. It was a fairly uneventful bus journey mainly consisting of us sleeping or reading (and then falling asleep whilst reading). We arrived at Hervey Bay around 1pm and got picked up and taken to our next hostel. It's a really nice little family run place, with cute dogs and a four year old to liven things up. After we checked in, we took literally minutes to decide what tours we wanted to do, booked them at reception and went to explore the town. We had a nice meal, found an English bar that shipped in proper English beer that, as it turned out, had actually left England for Australia about 2 months before we did! Nice of it to wait for us!

This morning we were up early again to go on a whale watching tour. We left the harbour at about 8.30 and went out into Platypus Bay and reasonably swiftly spotted some whales, apparantly a group of 1, 2 or 3 whales is called a pod, and if they come up to the boat it's called being mugged. We were mugged repeatedly by various pods of whales, which was very cool. We got loads of video and tons of photos (most of which look like unidentifiable dots in the sea) and had a really good time. Yesterday evening whilst we were using the phone, Stew was convinced he saw well over 100 bats fly over us, today we discovered where they came from. We were walking through town again and back down to the coast when we came across a flying fox colony, containing not just 100 or so but thousands of flying foxes. They were all squawking and flying around and hanging in the trees like weird fruits, but unfortunately we didn't have the camera with us and the only evidence is on Stew's phone, never mind.

Tomorrow we're going to do a 1 day tour of Fraser Island, which you will hear about v soon!

Ali & StewRead more