Day 18

No journal available

location:Sydney
summary:Met Deirdre & Geoff, my relatives, visited Palm Beach (set of Home and Away) and the Sydney IMAX
trip:australia00
day:18

Day 17

No journal available

location:Nundle – Sydney
summary:Nothing much
day:17

Day 16

No journal available

location:Bellingen → Nundle
summary:Sheep farm. Evening entertainment and sheep sheering demo.
ihave:Sheered a sheep
_wp_old_slug:16
day:16

Day 15

No journal available

location:Nimbin – Bellingen
summary:Cinema in converted butter factory
day:15

Day 14

No journal available

location:Brisbane – Nimbin
summary:Tour of Nimbin, permiculture centre, solar power plant
day:14

Day 13

No journal available

location:Noosa – Brisbane
summary:Met Cat & Luke, David’s friends, Theatre Sports
trip:australia00
day:13

Day 12

Leaving Bargara, we continued to journey south. We were now entering ‘big stuff’ country. I give the area this name quite simply because the residents seem to like building enormous copies of fruits and vegetables for no apparent reason. This habit would continue for several hundred miles, but today we saw the first such construction, at the aptly named Big Pineapple Service Station. I’ll leave it to your imagination to work out the details of this one.

Day 11

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.

Day 10

Otherwise known as “the day Phil got arrested”. Leaving Airlie Beach behind, we continued our journey south, next stop Dingo. Dingo was to be our first real taste of the outback – a cattle ranch considerably inland from the coast road we had been using up to now. The plan (as conceived by OzExperience) was to arrive by about 4 or 5 pm, and have a tour before the evening entertainments began.

Day 9

Otherwise known as the day Phil couldn’t count. Lots of stops today, one significant one where the bus would pick up or drop off passengers: Townsville. On arrival, we got off to have our one-hour break in the town, and arriving back found the bus was a scene of chaos. There were about 50 seats on the bus, and about 70 people wanting to take them. Musical chairs was out of the question, and Phil was trying to decide what to do. He decided to board people one at a time after checking their reservation slips. The problem with this was that almost everyone had a valid reservation slip. After weeding out the three or four that didn’t, Phil re-boarded the bus triumphantly to find that about fifteen people were standing in the aisle.