Brisbane or Bust! The Townsville/Ayr Fiasco.

Seeing that simon's not had a chance to update the blog with the dive pictures he was supposed to and wanted to write about I thought I'd update y'all with what we've been up to... perhaps he may place a dive post at some point but until then you'll have to wait for pictures I'm afraid...

So where were we? Oh yeah... North Queensland... Cairns, Cooktown et al...

Well, we've been in New Zealand for nearly a week now - but before I go on about here let's do some catch ups.

Rewind to 4 weeks ago... we were in Cairns, waiting for our trip on the Spirit of Freedom, our 4 day liveabord Scuba thing on the Barrier Reef... I won't wibble on too much about it... suffise to say it was another great dive experience... the only picture I have on me now is this one...

...Courtesy of Peter, Simon's Bro... that's him on the left - we're just about to head into the briny blue for some deep sea exploration mission on some crappy, boring reef, full of really rubbish and not interesting fish and sea life like sharks and stuff... no honestly it was really not worth writing about - Peter's saying "What!? We're supposed to go in there?" - Simon's doing his Paris Hilton wobbly head impression... and I'm doing my Blue Steel look... as yer do... :)

Anyway... enough of that trip as that's supposed to be Simon's domain and I'm not gonna go on about it anymore... besides - it was rubbish so there's no need to say more :P

So, what happened after Cairns? Well, we had to get to Brisbane at some point to get our flight over to New Zealand, but before we could do that we had a fair few number of miles to travel... as you can see from this link. How many miles is that? A fair few! So we hired a car and set off for our first destination - Townsville.

Townsvilles a small place town I suppose... I guess the name itself suggests that? We stayed in a crappy hostel overnight and decided pretty much to move on immediatly... the intention being to try and hit one final dive site - "The Yongala Wreck" - supposedly THE best dive site in Australia... we wanted to find out if it was true. There were trips from Townsville, but we'd been told to go to Ayr as there was someone there who could get out to the wreck in the morning and be back by the afternoon - which sounded great as we were on a tight schedule!

So, we headed down to Ayr, which can only be described as the armpit of the backside of nowhere... we called this organisation, the "Yongala dive company" from Townsville the previous day - and they said they wouldn't be heading out for a day or so and to check by their office the next day. We were very lucky to find it - but they said to call back again the following day at 3pm... there was loads of spaces so no worries - so we decided to hang around Ayr overnight and the following day we'd explore the area... (which mainly consists of a million square miles of Sugar Cane Plantations, the odd creek, road, crossroads, bridge, burnt out cars, farms, that kind of thing.)


We stayed Overnight in rooms over a pub - which was again not exactly the best place we've stayed. Bar downstairs, Bottleshop next door, 'Bistro' attached to the back... Imagine your stereotype of an Aussie pub... you've got it... that's what it was like... but it was alright I suppose - besides we didn't venture downstairs.

The Following day we tried to find some things to do whilst waiting to make the call at 3pm... I wrote a Blog post in some hideous backwater 10 pin bowling alley place with an attached 'cyber cafe' - just as I'd finished the post the bloody PC crashed before I'd managed to post it... which really put me in a right old mood - especially having some bowling alley staffer explaining to me about computers... oh the irony! (especially now since that happened this blogger auto saves your posts - grrr!!!!?!?!)

Anyway... after that I was in a right old strop so we decided to get out of town and explore the sugar cane fields... But, you know, after about 300 miles of nonstop sugar cane it gets really quite boring and monotonous... we began to wonder whether there really was the need for all this sugar... climbing (in the car) to the top of a nearby 'mountain' lookout - the sheer scale of operations was nevertheless quite impressive - it was amazing to see the sugar cane field, stretching as far as the eye can see - the only breaks being the odd lake, river or forest - and of course the mountains in the far distance, presumably beyond those is Narnia - where I think they use all the sugar to make Turkish Delight... who knows? anyway... there's vast vast quantities - the whole area being dedicated to it...

Now, bearing in mind we could have been on the road heading south all day, we'd decided to hang around to see if the wind had died down allowing us to go wreck diving... we called the yongala dive company who were happy to say they were going out the following day... Great... Brilliant... where do we go and what time? But they'd already fully booked... bugger...! It wasn't even 3pm yet and they'd fully booked... we'd assumed they'd have put us down as part of the trip seeing that we'd called multiple times and even headed out to see them in the office in the naval of the armpit in the backside of nowhere... So, alas it wasn't to be... we sacked it off and decided to continue our road trip and get the hell out here... besides we need excuses to head back to Oz I guess.

Next stop - Airlie Beach.