The best way to earn money...

... is to spend as much as you can! ;)

Well, we are not quite sure if it works out that way but it definitely is our prefered way of life at the moment! As we told you the last time on this blog, we were about to abandon our traveller's life for a while and become hard working "Australian" farm hands. The only problem with this idea was a cylone. Not one that threatened us at present, but rather the one in March this year. It destroyed basically all the banana plantations in Australia's North-East and did not only leave the farmers without income but us without work. So after some desperate attempts at finding work, we VERY reluctantly ;) gave up the pursuit and decided to spend some money instead.

So what did the two desperate travellers do? Without much hesitation we booked a tour to go diving on the Great Barrier Reef, a very cheap thing to do! :) So, two days later we were setting foot on the "Falla" (photo), an old sailing ship that has done about everything possible a ship could do to have an interesting history. She started out as a pearl ship, became a fishing boat, re-sailed James Cook's (discoverer of Australia) journey around the East Coast until she was accidentally set on fire by a fire-cracker for the 200th birthday of Australia, she became a tourist boat until she was sunk by some silly captain and some even sillier tourist clothing that plugged up the emergency pumps, and finally, she was all redone by the present captain and is now sailing out to the Great Barrier Reef every day - on board about 20 tourists, the funky captain, the dive teacher Ken, and the ocean-adicted German girl Rosy.

We had chosen this boat instead of a shiny catamaran with about 80-300 tourist on it for the obvious reason of having a quieter journey and the true feeling of sailing out there. Well, the true feeling of getting out there we did get. With the wind blowing at about 20 knots, David unfortunately had some trouble to keep his stomach quite, although I had been the one worrying about that all the time before... I had to enjoy the lunch, fruits, cheese, etc. almost all on my own but at least he was better on the way back and could still enjoy the ride and the dives.

Yeah, the dives. What should I tell you to make you the least jealous? When we got to the Great Barrier Reef, the sky was shining blue, the sun was grilling us, the cay (small sandy island) stood out shining white from the water, and I was so afraid to do something wrong during the first dive of my life... but once down in the water, everything else was forgotten. The experience was just too impressive, too out of this world, it was simply fantastic. The corals were presenting themselves in all different colors, the fishes were not only the most shining you can imagine but there were soooooo many of them, they were so huge, ... it was breathtakingly beautiful. During our first dive we even saw a rock shark which awoke some awkward feelings about big dangerous animals in Australia in us, but fortunately, the shark did not care half us much about us than we did about him. During our second dive - yeah, we even did a second one because it was just too good - we saw those small clownfish which you probably all know from the movie Nemo. And I can tell you, they are some fun creatures! I would not have thought so but they were my absolute favorites! In and out, in and out, in and out, ... they really do that!

Hmmmm, this was defenitely one of the highlights of our travels, that's for sure. As we had not spent enough money yet, we decided to travel some further and down South we went and took a look at the Atherton Tablelands. We stopped over in the extremely ugly city of Tully to ask at the local sugar cane mill if they did not need some workers but luckily they also got struck by the cyclone and we got away without having to work. However, we had another wonderful experience which David claims is due to my smile... after having talked to one of the workers for a while he invited us to take a ride with him on the sugar cane train (photo). As an explanation: the whole country up here is full of small train rails linking the thousands of sugar cane farmers with the mill. Trains are used to deliver metal wagons to the farmers who fill them up with the harvest and afterwards those wagons are taken to the mill by the trains again. Sometimes a train can have up to 250 wagons! And we did not only get to ride on one of those trains and got the explation of it in detail, the guy even let us drive the train!!! Well, of course we have pics to prove it :-) but it was just the most fun you can imagine. David couldn't stop smiling for days afterwards. ;) Soon, there won't be a lot of vehicles left that he has not driven, flown, sailed...

Of course, Peter, the Australian, also gave us a tour of the mill and we could follow the production of sugar in detail and even taste the raw sugar cane and the final brown sugar. Impressive! To finish up, Peter invited us to stay at his place and of course we accepted and enjoyed the comforts of a bed! Imagine, a bed! Well, for you it might be nothing special but for us.... just to keep you informed, right now, we have not seen a shower for five days, so you may imagine what a hot shower or a bed may mean to us! THANK YOU PETER! Australians are just wonderful people!

Well, to finish up our money spending story we drove down to Townsville (where we are right now) and as we couldn't get to Hinchinbrook Island and do a four day hike because you have to reserve at least 6 months ahead of time and we only knew about one hour before that we were getting there (what an impossible thing to demand of a backpacker!!!!), we decided to take the ferry and go over to Magnetic Island. There we spent the last three days but were rather disappointed by the touristy appearance and the not so very spectacular landscape. We wanted to do our first overnight hike there but just after the first 8 km, we met some Rangers who told us that we wouldn't be able to camp out there anywhere. :( So we had to give up our plans of romantically sleeping on the beach and had to hike back. Fortunately, a nice couple finally gave us a lift back, so we didn't have to do all of the unspectacular way twice. Moreover, we made a new friend: the cutest Koala you can imagine :-) (photo)

Ah, I have to tell you another fun story before finishing up. We are on Magnetic Island and of course, the small village that we have chosen does not have a campsite. So we decide to put up our tent in a foreloren area of the beach (camping is forbidden everywhere). We choose a nice grassy area and happy after a long and busy day go to bed and sleep well. At around 2.30 in the morning we suddenly are woken up by the puffing and sizzling noise outside our tent. While still wondering if we are dreaming or not, our tent suddenly gets attact by hard jets of water. Rain? Finally, getting all our senses together, we figure out that this must be an automatic sprinkling system! So there we are, in the middle of the green grass area getting rained on from all sides and that for about 1 1/2 hours! Of course it was impossible to sleep and our only comfort was that we were so lucky as not to have set up our tent on one of those sprinklers!!! That would have been something!!!

So, now we are definitely running low on budget and the need for a job is getting so strong that we might actually start to seriously look for one. Once we drive further South tomorrow we should also be getting into the agricultural heartland of Queensland and a region that was not hit by the cyclon. So, no more excuses - now the jobhunt has begun! Wish us good luck!

Cheers till the next time!