Dolphin and Turtle spotting

I booked a day trip in advance for today to get my fix of Australian sea life – today we’re off to Moreton Island with Whales in Paradise cruises.

Naturally I slept the whole of the bus journey from Gold Coast to Redcliffe Jetty and then we boarded our vessel to begin our journey. It was a fairly quick journey over although we did manage to spot some majestic Dolphins swimming around in the crystal clear blue waters! We the  arrived at Tangalooma Wrecks where 15 ships have been purposely sunken to provide a break in the water and a safe shelter for boats during storms. A bonus feature of this is the dozens of natural corals which have begun growing off the old shipwrecks – and of course the marine life that comes with!  

         

We spotted many fishies swimming around and even managed to see a turtle come up for air a little later on our Eco-cruise.

Moreton Island is the third largest sand island in Australia after Fraser Ian’s and Stradbroke Island and it is just beautiful!!  

 

Good old Babs

We left the rainy Sydney behind (much easier to leave than a sunny Sydney) and flew into Tasmania for our final week before heading back to Melbourne. I’ve got to admit I’m more excited to get back to Melbourne than for the week in Tasmania at this point, a night in my bed and some clean clothes are well overdue!!

We started with a relaxing and sleepy day at the hotel ready to start our group trip with a 7am pickup. Day one on our trip consisted mostly of chasing waterfalls across the south of Tasmania and the heaviest bulk of driving (which was still nothing compared to previous trips thankfully).

We also visited an unfortunate old mining town which doesn’t have a lot going for itself nowadays called Queenstown – unfortunate name for this town as most travellers will instantly compare it to the infamous NZ Queenstown… Not an easy one to win!
We’re spending the first two nights of out trip in Stahan, a no network coverage zone apparently! Not ideal when I’m mid way through fixing my university timetable for next semester.

The next day we saw another waterfall in the morning and headed to some sand dunes before lunch. I thought the funniest part would be watching Hannah try to make up the dunes (by somehow crawling) but in actual fact it was much better watching her try to walk back down them – and fight off the flies!!

It was a refreshing change being able to cook out own spectacular lunch and not just choose off a limited menu – ahh the little things! And my chief chefing skills haven’t completely vanished.

We spent the evening at the longest running play in the whole of Australia at a whopping 22 years!! They use a large number of the audience to take part in playing some of the roles to tell the story of a group of pirates who steal a ship but try to justify it to a court. All though confusing it was funny as we watched Barbara (Babs) continue fishing the whole way through the play and some other people from our group act out cats and jellyfish!