Rachael and I went for a drive to Crows Nest National Park yesterday afternoon for something to do; it’s about a one hour drive north of Toowoomba. In addition to the road being lined with beautiful tall trees for most of the way, the Hottest 100 of the past 20 years was playing on the radio, making for a pretty good drive.
The camping grounds were pretty good, I think they must be fairly popular during summer.
On Saturday we got the bus to the Uprising Beach Resort in Pacific Harbour, where we stayed for 7 nights. We had lunch at the restaurant while we waited for check-in time and I had fish and chips (the fish was awesome) and Rachael had Kokoda (photo right) which was fish in a coconut shell with Cassava chips (sort of a cross between potato and cooking banana).
Our beachfront bure (pronounced like Boo-Ray) was quite awesome.
Easily the highlight of the trip was white-water rafting down the “Grand Canyon of Fiji”. That is what the posters called it, but two American’s we met who had been there said it didn’t even compare. It was still magnificent though.
We got picked up from the hotel in a 4x4 again and taken to a nearby resort, The Pearl, same as we did for snorkelling. It’s kind of dodgy really, both cars were full of junk in the back and the seat belts in the back seat were stuck under the seat so you couldn’t use them.
We got a bus into Suva on Monday morning to check out the big city. The bus in was an adventure, we got a local bus, which was only $3.30 FJD to Suva from Uprising. The bus stopped for anyone on the way that waved it down, even in narrow sections of the highway at the top of hills, or in the middle of a turn off so that it was blocking traffic from turning.
On the flight over to Fiji, we flew over some other islands, which were probably New Caledonia. Those islands, and the reefs of Fiji itself looked awesome from the plane. As we are landing I also noticed a pretty cool temple, which a quick Google reveals it is called the Sri Siva Subramaniya temple. We later saw it on the bus/in and out of Nadi but didn’t visit it for a close look.
So after finishing up my rotation in Brisbane, Rachael and I had a few days free to do some travel before moving up to Toowoomba.
The drive down south almost started off slow, with a major accident on the highway, but we managed to use the traffic layer on google maps to take a massive detour that meant we didn’t have to wait for hours for it to clear and made it down to the NSW border without wasting too much time.
After Byron, we quickly stopped by Lennox Heads for a squiz, where we also good to see some cool wildlife. There was a group of sea birds swooping an area where you could see fish jumping. There must have been dolphins or something scaring the fish and the birds were taking advantage of it.
From there we pretty much headed straight to our final destination, Coffs Harbour. Rachael really wanted to check it out since she had some work friends that had grown up there that must have given it rave reviews.
Mum & Dad came down for the Easter long weekend, and on the Saturday we went on a day trip to Moreton Island.
The ferry over was kind of interesting, we went down the Brisbane river and so went past the port where they load all the shipping containers as well as all the all refineries. There was a crazy amount of jellyfish in the water at the mouth of the river as well.
Before coming down to Brisbane for my new graduate rotation, I wanted to do one last trip to visit all the cool places Rocky has to offer while I still had the chance. When you live somewhere, people never seem to visit the places nearby because it will always be there and there is no pressure resulting from a lack of time in the area. On my last weekend before leaving, Jan, one of my roommates from Switzerland, just happened to be flying into Australia before starting his new graduate rotation for ABB in Melbourne.
In the morning we did some harbour furls (neatly rolled up the square sails), then briefly headed out to sea so that we could come back again for all the family members on shore. We stayed up on the yards for the berthing, and fired cannon blasts as is tradition. The tradition being that by having everyone up on the yards, there is nobody to reload the cannons - and since they have already been fired the ship poses no threat.
