This is an email I wrote to my family the other day:



So when I last talked to y'all (sorry dad that the connection was lost and I ran out of time to call back--sorry I left you hanging. i felt bad about that all day!) it was Easter and I was in Noosa. From Noosa we pilled back into the cars and drove to Hervey Bay which was like 2.5 hrs north of Noosa. We drove around for 45 mins and found a place to stay at the Best Western. This tends to be the trend everytime we arrive to a new town...we spend atleast 45 mins searching for a suitable place that's not a disgusting hostel. We had a bad experience with one in Noosa that we stayed in so we've opted not to stay in hostels when we can find better apartement-style places for the same price and they're much nicer. We didn't do much Sunday night...just went to dinner and then went back to our motel room. We woke up early Monday morning to went on our tour of Fraser Island. We took a big ferry (one that can carries cars too) across the bay to Fraser Island. It was about a 45 minute ride to Fraser and when we got there we got on our Fraser Island Adventure tour buses. These buses were huge 4WD beasts! It's like a greyhound bus on HUGE 4WD wheels! We walked/drove through Fraser Island...walked through a rainforest, drove on the beach highway. The beach is a legit highway...it was so crazy seeing so many cars driving on the beach just like on a normal highway....you have to stay on the correct side of the road/beach, follow the speed limit, and there are police who will come after you if you don't. Fraser is the biggest sand island in the world. It is 76 miles from north to south and 15.5 miles across at its widest point. The water off the coast of Fraser is the deadliest place in the south pacific ocean....lots of sharks and stingrays that can sneak up on you and you're a goner. There are also massive sandy plains on Fraser. This one area is really steep and we ran up the sandy hill and ran down. It was a lot of fun tumbling down the hill in the sand. Unfortunately the weather yesterday on Fraser was rainy so that kind of put a literal "damper" on the day. Would have been really beautiful had the sun been out and things were dry. It was still neat though to see the island...there is also this huge fresh water lake called Lake McKenzie. It's really blue with a sandy bottom. I didn't get in it though because I didn't feel like being wet for the rest of the day. On the ferry ride back to the mainland I met two guys who go to Clemson! They are studying abroad in Sydney for the semester and are doing the same type of things on their holiday as we're doing. They were really nice and such a small world to run into them! We left Hervey Bay about 6pm and loaded up the cars again and started on our long trek north to where I am now. We drove through the night--about 10 hours and made it to Airley Beach about 5am this morning (after lots of stops along the way). None of us really slept much. We slept in the car for about an hour and a half yesterday morning and waited around until places started opening up so we could find accomodation for the next two night. So glad we're not staying in a gross hostel. We are all happy now with a place to stay but totally exhausted. The boys just cooked us a big yummy breakfast. I wandered next door to the internet shop...I'm about to go back to our condo and take a long nap. Tomorrow we are doing an all-day Catamaran trip through the Whitsunday Islands. I think this is going to be the best part of the whole trip...it's going to be beautiful and we're going to go snorkeling on the reefs. The Whitsundays are the closest islands off the coast of Queensland, AUS to the Great Barrier Reef so it should be really pretty.



Update since then:

Yesterday the Catamaran cruise was awesome...saw the beautiful Whitsundays and went snorkeling at a reef. Weather was kinda of rainy at times but we still had a good time! Breakfast, lunch, snacks, and alcohol were served on board. We watched a man propose to his girlfriend on board--it was so cute!

Today we are leaving Airle Beach and driving north to Cairns/Port Douglas. Tomorrow we are diving the Great Barrier Reef!!! I'm running out of time here at the internet cafe so I have to go.

Will write more later...

Heading to Aussie!

Two weeks ago I went on this awesome two-night backpacking trip in Fiordland that I talked about in my last blog post. I went with 8 of my closest friends here and we had a blast! The weather was beautiful...beautiful blue skies the whole weekend. We basically hiked through the bush and jungle the whole way to the valley that was at the top of the mountain which was our destination. Some parts of the tramp (hike) we were hiking literally straight up the side of the mountain, crossing over streams, and plowing through bushes, basically blazing our own trail at times. There were organe markers on trees that directed us on the so-called "trail"...come to find out after we completed the tramp for the weekend that we were only the second group to hike that certain trail this whole year! No wonder it wasn't very broken in! We got to the valley after several hours of hiking and had a delicious lunch of salami and apples, a tramper's delicacy! After lunch we proceeded on in search of a lake that was supposed to be in this valley. We followed a river up the valley towards the mountains ahead...we kept walking and walking and never came upon the lake. My friend Bryan who was our trip leader had a 17 year old map and we thought maybe the lake had dried up since then (not sure why he didn't have an up-to- date map!) So we never ended up finding the lake but had a great time the rest of the weekend. We set up camp for teh night, explored around the area and just enjoyed gorgeous scenery that surrounded us. I've never seen so many stars as we saw that night--it was so amazing! This was probably one of the most fun weekends I've had so far here in NZ. It was my first overnight backpaking trip and I enjoyed it so much. I look forward to doing a nother one really soon!

Last weekend I stayed here in Dunedin. A bunch of my friends were going to Queenstown and I had already been there so I decided to just stick around town and relax. I went to the farmer's market that they have here every Saturday morning and just explored around Dunedin.

Today, however, everyone is in town and there is this all-day party on this street here in Dunedin. It's like the biggest day party of the year here at Otago and everyone I know here is going...you go in a group and dress up as a theme. My group is dressing up as different holidays and I'm Halloween....I rented this awesome pumpkin costume and Caroline is wearing this Santa costume. Our other friend Tristan is the Easter bunny, Laura is Mardis Gras and Emily is Cindo de Mayo so she's wearing like a pancho and sombrero. Some of our other friends are going as pirates. I'm sure there will be lots of outrageous costumes at this party. It should be a fun day.

What I'm even more excited about is my mid-semester break trip to Australia!! There's a group of 7 of us going and we leave in 4 days!! On Tuesday we are taking a night bus up to Christchurch which is about 5 hours north of Dunedin. Our flight flies out of Christchurch Wednesday afternoon and we are off to Aussie! We fly into Brisbane where we will hop in our 8-passenger van that we already have reserved and will begin our 10-day roadtrip north to Cairns, stopping at different places along the way. We've mapped out a great itinerary including stops at Noosa Beach, Brisbane Zoo, Whitsunday Islands, Fraiser Island, snorkeling/diving the Great Barrier reef and lots more! We fly out of Cairns on April 18th and have a 12 hour layover in Sydney on the way back. We will leave the airport and go out in Sydney for the night and hopefully stay at the flat of one of my friends who is studying abroad there. This trip's going to be a blast and I'm so excited!!

Well, I better go get ready for the day...I hope everyone back home is doing well!