That night I slept in a friends apartment for free - bargain! I had to be up early for the bus which was a bit of a killer after a 20 hour session :-s I was sat next to Ben again, the guy who I kept ending up sitting next to on buses. I got off in a town called Ayr and was picked up and taken to the middle of nowhere to my hostel. When I say hostel it was actually a house with a couple of bunk beds put in. It was really nice actually with a proper kitchen, TV room with comfy sofa's and I even had my first bath for about a year! I was only here for one reason anyway, scuba diving.

The two dives were on the Yongala Wreck, which is rated as being one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. And it isn't hard to see why... the boat ride out there was the closest I've ever come to being sick on a boat; at first it was really fun shaking from side to side and getting air off massive waves in a small over-powered boat but after a while and once we'd come to a stop at the site it suddenly hits you! I sat for a couple of minutes before entering the water, still feeling sick (5 out of the 11 of us were!) and we began making our way down the guide rope. Not even 30 seconds into the dive I was taken by suprise seeing the biggest fish of my life, though it wouldn't be by the end of the dive. Then you begin to make out the outline of the ship, though you can't really work out where the boat starts and ends because of the unbelievable amounts of coral and fish. On the first dive you kind of forget that you're diving around a historic shipwreck because you're so overwhelmed with everything surrounding it. We saw three types of turtle, one who was resting on the sea-bed, one who was eating coral and one who was just crusing along next to us. The one on the sea-bed was at least as big as me. We also saw stupidly sized fish which were definately bigger than me. I saw a school of barracuda, every coloured fish you could imagine, too much to list really. On the second dive we paid more attention to the ship itself, and i also saw a 2m diameter, 4m long eagle ray - similar to the one that recently killed Steve Irwin. Scary stuff! These were definately the best dives I've done and I urge everyone to take up scuba diving just for this dive!

When I hopped on the bus I saw my good old Irish friend (Mono) so sat down next to him and we headed up to Townsville together. We made our way through this scumhole of a town, seeing 3 people getting arrested on our 30 minute walk and arrived at the ferry terminal to go over to Magnetic Island. Here we also met up with the 5 lads from the boat trip, we were all over there for a full moon party. The party itself was a let down, there were a quarter as many people as there were supposed to be and a tenth as many people as the previous month. The island was really beautiful though and myself and Mono rented bikes for a day and cycled around the island. We cycled about 30km in the heat, a lot of it being up hills, which with a 7km walk completely wore us out! We also made our way to a Wildlife Sanctuary only to get there and be confronted by an old grumpy lady who told us to leave her property or she'd call the police - very odd. But we did see a little snake and 2 koala's in the wild on our walk through WW2 buildings.

My final stop Down Under was Cairns where I headed with Mono. From there I did a 2 day 1 night trip up to Cape Tribulation, the real rainforest. On the way we stopped at Mossman Gorge which had a fresh water river that I had a swim in. After that we went on a boat trip on the Daintree River where we saw a female saltwater croc on one of the river banks. We also saw a python, though it was dead and being eaten by ants. The ants that were eating it are have green heads and green bums with a red body and you can actually eat the ants, which I have been doing. Well, you only eat the bum and it tastes kind of citrusy, quite nice. That was the weirdest food chain I'd ever come across with the python being at the bottom! I went on a walk up the cape with 3 Swedish guys and we spent the rest of our time there messing around by the pool and playing volleyball in the heavy rain.

Then back down to Cairns and into the crappy hostel that I'd unfortunately booked into in advance. It was a rip-off, miles out of town, the staff were the most unfriendly people I've ever met... you get the picture. Plus the first time me and Mono were put in a room with this weird, old (60 odd) Hobbit like man who sat watching TV all day and had nothing but the clothes he was wearing and had apparently been there for 6 weeks already. Mono only stayed the one night and then luckily I was moved into a room with 2 Ozzie guys who were there just partying. Every time I came back to the hostel they were on the balcony drinking and offered me a beer! I had a great time in Cairns because everyone I had travelled up the coast with since Sydney made it up there before I left. So there was me, Mono, the Canadians from Surfers, the lads from the boat, the English and Dutch guys from Surfers and more. Had some really good nights, my favourite being when we did the challenge of drinking 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes. In the end though only 3 of us accepted the challenge, one went out on 69, one just made it to 100 and I kept on going to 122! 2 hours of drinking a shot of beer every minute, I was proud :-D Shot glasses are bigger in Oz too, being 35ml not 25ml. But before I knew it, it was sadly time to say goodbye to all my new friends and leave Australia.

Let the party begin in New Zealand...!