Monday, January 14, 2008

Itinerary for Jan 22-31 Queensland Vacation


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So I'm getting to my back-packer roots and heading out on a 8-day tour of the Queensland coast from Jan 22-31, hitting all the awesome beach towns along the Great Barrier Reef coastline. If you open up the map above, you can see my exact itinerary. People usually take 2-3 weeks to do this trip, but I'm cutting it to 8-days, which as the booking agent said, "I've been booking these trips for over 3 years and never heard of anyone try to do this in such little time." Now that everything is booked and paid for, I'm starting to realize what she means. I'm basically doing 2000 miles on a bus with most of the days on boats. That means my skinny, little ass is going to be in a bus seat A LOT for this trip, which is why people take the 2 weeks to break it up. In fact, counting up the total hours I'm on a bus, it's 36.5 hours if all goes well and 5.5 on a plane. And 2 of my "nights" are actually overnight bus trips. Lord help me. One of my bus legs is 12 hours and literally right as I get off the bus, I have to hop on a boat, which is a 2-day/2-night trip. You can be sure I'm bringing the Immodium AD.

Highlights of the trip, since I know you're all too lazy to click the map:
- Lots of scuba/snorkel
- Swimming in natural hot springs, waterfalls, and lagoons with turtles
- Skydiving over the great barrier reef
- 4WD tours through the island wild life, rain-forest
- Completely isolated white sand beaches
- 2 night boat trip through the Whitland Islands on 100-foot party yacht (boat has a disco on it) - scuba/snorkel/beach swims
- Hands On: Impregnate a kangaroo session. (kidding). Although the brochure claims we'll see dingos mating. YouTube definitely needs that video.
- Byron Beach/Airlie Beach - 2 massively famous party towns

I haven't been in a hostel since my last trip to Amsterdam 9 years ago and I'll be in them all week. I wonder what I'm going to get stuck with:
- the 300lb snorer
- the guy on his cell phone all night
- the guy that smells like he crapped himself
- the guy that sleeps on his back spread-eagle in his boxers with the lights fully on picking his nose and eating it.

Probably all the above with one person. I was reading one guy's blog about the 2-night boat tour I'm taking. He, like me, was traveling solo and as the pairings worked out, he got matched up with 2 Swedish girls in his cabin. No way I'm so lucky. My bag will be super small and light since I am starting and ending my trip from Sydney...so I got that going for me....which is nice. Later playas.

2 comments:

JD said...

Thanks for the snorer flashback. I probably won't get any sleep tonight now that it is fresh in my mind. Have a great time, though. I'm not going to say anything about Box Jellyfish.

Paul said...

That spread eagle nose picker hits a little too close to home. Now I know how you really feel...

Trip sounds awesome. Make sure to not pack your own chute when skydiving.