Whitsunday Islands, Australia, Australia

You’ll all be happy to know that I woke up this morning after a very good night’s sleep, AND I didn’t fall off the top bunk. Jackpot!

We had breakfast and lounged around for a couple of hours until we got to Tongue Bay on Whitsunday Island. From there we took a walk through the woods to the other side of the island until we reached Whitehaven Beach. This is the beach that holds the Guinness Book of World Record’s record for the whitest sand. It is made up almost completely of silica and is worth an absolute fortune. Because it is a world heritage site, you are not allowed to take any of the sand, or you will be fined $50,000. It would have been nice to get a little souvenir, but it’s not worth that risk…

We didn’t have great weather when we got there. It was very overcast so the lighting wasn’t great and the beach hadn’t been able to completely dry out since high tide. It was still a stunning place to be and when the sun peaked out from behind the clouds you could see that this place was like heaven on earth. We were hoping to see some sand sharks or rays, but unfortunately they didn’t want to make an appearance today. The only thing we saw that was strange was a sea fern. It was very cool looking, in an alien kind of way.

We spent an hour on the beach before heading back to the boat to move on to the next bay. On the way back through the woods we spotted a golden orb spider that was about the size of my hand. It was ridiculous. I’m not a huge fan of spiders so I got a few pictures and left him alone. We also saw an olive python which was just a baby, far too small to do any damage.

We moved on to Nara Inlet where we did some sea kayaking for a while, but the water was too murky to see anything when we were moving around. There were some cool caves and waterfalls around the inlet, but I didn’t have a camera with me because I was too scared to get my camera wet. We got back on the boat to find that a white cockatoo had set up camp on the lifeboat at the back of the ship. We fed it a couple of crackers on the deck until it was comfortable enough to take a cracker out of my hand. It was a pretty cool thing to do considering this was a wild bird, and not one kept in captivity and trained to do just that.

The rest of the night was very quiet. We had the best meal of the trip (steak with potatoes, and críÂme brulee) and then all relaxed for our last night on the boat. There was a lot of picture exchanging and card playing on board while we all try to string this night out as much as possible. None of us want this trip to end. It has definitely surpassed my expectations. Tomorrow we will wake up and sail back to Airlie Beach and will arrive at around 11am. Then I’m going to have to work on getting my “land legs” back. I have a feeling I’m going to fall over a lot when I get back onto solid ground.