Australia and beyond......

On the Whitsundays cruise a lady asked the question, 'My 5 star friend says that the outer reef is the only place to really go to see great coral, is this true?' the response: The coral here is just as good if not better. I wish we had believed that as we could have saved ourselves a lot of money! Don't get me wrong the reef was great and we did get to go scuba diving (Rich's first time), but the reef was looking sad and very similar. lots of patches of dead reef and apart from the giant clams size -Huge!!! the coral we saw at the Whitsundays was in better shape. We did see one part of the reef that looked like it was out of saving Nemo which made up for the disappointment of the morning snorkel, but would like to know what impact the tourist industry is having on the reef as it was startling how much of the coral was dead.

the last full day in Cairns was spent running round the shops, changing money, buying tyres, getting bike boxes, parcel tape and all the boring stuff you have to do when you move on. Finally when we were back at the campsite we set to work on the bike packing it up, we gave ourselves plenty of daylight hours to complete the job, as last time in Auckland we ended up scrabbling around with head torches on, not great to find that bolt that just pinged off!

So having started the job at 4pm you may ask why we were still struggling with one, yes ONE part of the bike 3 hours later!! we had not had the bike apart for the entire two months which should not cause a problem except it had a good coating of sea water on several occasions, the water got down in to the dry coupling for the hydraulic brake and that was it, not budging. So after about half a can of WD40, Rich's patience had deserted us, pliers, adjustable spanners and a rubber hammer (Thorn, the bike shop's idea) we were no nearer to getting it off and starting to panic. Our saviour was in the guise of a guy who runs cape york 4W drive trips. He had a trailer of wonders and we eventually sorted it with monkey wrenches a and G clamp. Talk about saving the day. Panic over we stripped the rest of the bike and set to work packing the rest of the baggage. Our major moves always seem to have a glitch somewhere.

That was it Australia was over for us and it was on to cheap Bangkok!! We thought we would do a quick summing up of our thought on Australia:
Expensive
Friendly to the unusual traveller
Grey nomads zipping everywhere in their RV's and caravans
Massive divide between indigenous and westerners
same same countryside for very long stretches
Grey nomads more fun, less noisy and friendlier than backpackers
Big difference between tourist and non tourist spots, latter were the better
good trip and got lots of mileage in, but on the whole weighing up the money spent and things seen we could have missed it out and gone straight to Indochina and seen all of Oz another time