So after much hesitation, I decided to go all the way up to the Whitsunday Islands and head back to Brisbane afterwards. When booking at the travel agency, I was proposed a cheap flight to the Whitsundays. “Well that’s great but what about the bus?”, I asked. “The bus?! Well it’s going to be 18 hours for the one-way journey and it will 3 times the price”. Ouch, sticking to my rule is definitely not easy… “I’ll take he bus then thanks.” The travel agent couldn’t believe it!

Sailing in the Whitsunday Islands

The bus wasn’t as bad as I feared it luckily and the journey went rather fast. One day later I was boarding on the S.V. Whitehaven in the port of Airlie Beach. I was off for a two days, two nights trip in these magnificent Islands. We stopped several times for some snorkeling and to visit the amazing white sand beach of Whitehaven. At night the skipper gave us a lesson on stars and showed us the different constellations and galaxies. I love the stars in the Southern hemisphere and had missed them a lot since the 6 months I spent in South Africa.

After my boat trip I had planned to stay a couple of days in Airlie beach, the city from which most boats leave. But I really didn’t enjoy the atmosphere there: all hostels are noisy and dirty with huge bars that look a lot like (very) cheap English clubs. To be honnest this is not really an exception and most very touristic cities on the East coast look like that. Probably the biggest plague I found when visiting Australia. So I decided to leave quickly and to head to 1770, halfway between Airlie Beach and Brisbane.

Riding a chopper around the town of 1770

1770 has a great vibe, the locals are really friendly and the hostels are the best I’ve experienced on the East Coast. I had a great time in my hostel, called Cool Bananas. I ended up staying there for 5 nights! During that time I mainly relaxed, went to the beach, cruised around the town on a chopper to find kangaroos and wallabies, and finally learnt to surf! I absolutely loved it and it made it harder to leave Australia as I would have been glad to stay longer to become a bit better at it. However it wasn’t as though as I thought, I already managed to stand up several times and catch some good waves during the first lesson! I might make a little detour to Indonesia to practice some more!

I would have been stuck in Airlie Beach if I had booked flights and I would not have been able to discover 1770! So I’m very happy to have stuck to my rule so far! But the biggest challenge is still ahead of me: my 13 days on the cargo ship are approaching fast!

Sydney Harbour

I’ve been having a really good time in Sydney and stayed there for nearly three weeks before I eventually decided to start my journey towards Europe. Sydney is a cool city nested in an impressive natural location with its famous harbour. It does really feel like a big city with its wide busy streets and tall skyscrapers but I have found people to be more relaxed than in most European cities, or at least they appear to be so! It is quite polluted though and at the end I was getting a little annoyed by all the cars everywhere. It very much ressembles american cities with huge streets and urban design that is totally optimised for cars and not at all for pedestrians.

Surfer in Byron Bay

So after three weeks I had seen most of the major attractions and it was certainly time to move on! My first stop on the East coast was Byron Bay, where I enjoyed the beach and the relaxed atmosphere in the town. The town used to be full of hippies in the 80s and a few are still around today.

Our 4x4 on the beach

The first real highlight of my trip was still ahead of me so I quickly moved on further north towards Fraser Island. This is the biggest sand island in the world. To explore it I signed up for a self drive safari with ten other people in a big Toyota 4×4. The other people turned out to be very cool and we had a good time camping for three days on the island.

A wild female dingo on Fraser Island

Fraser is home to a lot of dingos (Austalian wild dogs) too, and we saw a couple on the way. Dingos are said to have become overly agressive these last years towards tourists. Feeding them made their fear of humans vanish, causing them to attack when they are too hungry. Feeding them today is strictly prohibited. Interestingly the local aboriginals that I met there had a different opinion: it is because they can’t feed them that the dingos now sometimes attack. Their elders have always left food remains for the dingos in the past and it is because that food source dissapeared that they became aggressive. In any case the ones I saw didn’t look aggressive at all!

So far I’ve been having a great time traveling and have met loads of interesting and surprising people: a producer of the UK Big Brother show, French cancer researchers, the gardener of an English lord traveling the world, countless other people having left their jobs to travel for a while and many more improbable characters…

My next stop before returning to Brisbane to catch my cargo ship will be the Whitsunday Islands where I’m going for a three days eco sailing cruise. I can’t wait!

A beach in Wollongong with factories in the background

Time went by so quickly! I just arrived in Australia and am already starting my journey. It’s a strange feeling to have what always seemed to be like a distant dream finally become reality!

Leaving wasn’t easy though. I spent the past three years of my life in Dublin and have left several very good friends behind there and of course in Belgium. I will miss you all!

But of course I’m also very excited about my trip. During the journey, my goal will be to focus on environmental problems through my photography. I’ll try to photograph changes to the environment caused by human activity in the countries I’ll visit. However I will also do my best to meet people involved in positive initiatives, and will hopefully come back full of optimism and ideas on how to change things for the better. If you have any contacts of such people who are on my way, please let me know!

As a first illustration here is my first picture that I took in Wollongong, where I’m starting the trip. It’s the most southern point that I’ll see but luckily going north also means that the climate will get warmer because it’s pretty chilly here (15 degrees Celsius)!

Finally I plan to stick to my initial rule of not flying. Things turned out not to be as simple as they looked on the map. Indonesia and East Timor indeed look so close to Australia, but in reality crossing by boat is much harder than I expected! As I wrote in my previous post, there are only two options to do so. In the meantime I found out that November and December are right in the hurricane season and that no sailboats cross at that moment. This left me with one single option: the cargo ship. I managed to find a cabin on a German freighter and will board on the 15th of November in Brisbane for a 13 day trip to Singapore. It promises to be a very interesting experience!