Unlike chartering your own yacht in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, sailing yourself around the Whitsunday Islands in Queensland is prohibitively expensive and so we opted to join a tour on a monster-big catamaran. A 26 metre (85 feet) lilac-purple one at that! Those who know me well know that I’m not a great sailor […]

Ever since I first visited Florida as a child, the image of palm trees always stirs my memories of exotic holidays and far away places. I love tropical holidays and couldn’t wait to see my first line of palms in Queensland, signalling I had arrived somewhere that was likely to have sun, sea and snorkelling. […]

Like “The Artist Formerly Known As… “, 1770 also causes a fair amount of confusion. In fact, apart from Ray and Gillian in Hervey Bay, I bet that you haven’t got the foggiest idea what I’m talking about…? 1770, sometimes written as ‘Seventeen Seventy”, is actually the name of a town. Not just any town […]

The weather’s cleared-up a lot and, after spending a week in a luxury home, the memory of soggy camping is becoming a mere distant haze… and to top it off we’ve just spent two glorious days bashing through the world’s biggest sand island in a dirty great, modified Land Rover Defender 4×4. After the professional […]

..skipped a post. The Fraser Island post was published ahead of the Hervey Bay post by mistake… scroll back to see that. 

After a seven hour drive from Ballina through the torrential rain, we were glad to arrive at Ray and Gillian’s brand new luxury home in Hervey Bay. True family friends, they managed to ignore our bedraggled state and welcomed us in to their home. After a cup of tea and a tour of the grand […]