I didn’t sleep. Dingo may still officially be in the tropics, but the ventilation in the dorms was a bit too good for my liking and no duvets were provided. Not having brought a sleeping bag, I froze in my bunk.

By the morning I was stiff and hungry – not a very good start to my birthday, but Dingo didn’t disappoint as far as breakfast was concerned. Rumours were flying around thick and fast about who was going to be driving our bus now that Phil had been arrested for drug possession. Would the company let him carry on or would they have sent a replacement?

At 9am we discovered that the complaints to HQ had found their mark, and that Phil was no more. His replacement was a hippy type called Steve who clearly belonged in the sixties and couldn’t understand why free love and flares had gone out of fashion. His bus decorations clearly showed his experience though – where Phil had made a somewhat simplistic, albeit patriotic, statement with a single australian flag, Steve’s redecorating job had installed several hundred photos, a whip, flynet, lots of things that were basically furry dice with character, and an enormous CD/minidisc collection.

The trip to Bargara was largely uneventful, except for spotting a trailer parked on the side of the highway that was used for transporting extremely heavy objects like turbines around. This would have been pretty uninteresting except that the thing had over five HUNDRED wheels. Steve (the new bus driver) knew it was coming up and asked everybody to guess. I think the highest number was around 50. I thought it was a trick question and said zero. I imagined large amounts of freight being sledded across the outback. No, that was a bit silly, actually.

When we arrived at Bargara, Steve told us that we would be in the lap of luxury this evening – the hostel was one of the nicest in the country. He certainly wasn’t exaggerating. The place was a sort of village, with a river running though the centre, and very modern accommodations that were spread out into lots of individual houses. Each one slept about 7, and had a lounge area with TV (sofas convert into beds) a double bedroom, a bathroom, small kitchen, and a loft area on a mezzanine floor with 4 single futons. David and I opted for futons while John decided to sleep in the lounge. We would be sharing with two other groups of two.

Having showered (plenty of hot water too), changed, and generally wallowed in the splendour of it all, we went to find the beach. It was getting dark, and a total lunar eclipse was promised for about 9:30pm. This area was much more suburban than Airlie Beach, so finding the shore was a little easier, and as it turned out, it was closer. The roads were still deserted, and as the time approached 9:30, we studiously ignored the sky so as to get the full impact of the eclipse when we got to the darkened beach. Walking on to the sand, I waited a few seconds for my night vision to improve, and then looked up at the sky. Any preconceptions I had about the effect of lunar eclipses were washed away in that instant as I gazed upwards and saw more stars than I thought could ever be seen at the same time. In London massive light pollution obscures the night sky and you would be lucky to pick out many of the brightest stars, but that couldn’t have made more stark a contrast to the display now hanging above our heads. Not only was the sky filled with the bright light of millions of stars, but also the planets, several of which were clearly visible, and even areas of shading that I guess may have been galaxies, or part of our own.

My digital camera was quite capable of capturing this scene, but would have required a very long exposure, and I did not have a tripod. This oversight probably cost me one of the finest pictures of the trip, but I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it in a hurry.

We slept comfortably in our luxury suite/house, for the following day we would be leaving at 9:30am, quite a lie-in by recent standards.