...Three Fish

Day Five:

Well, after our adventures on South Mole Island, our Whitsunday resort, and around the other Whitsunday Islands it was time to mosie on to our next destination: Mission Beach. And indeed, we had but one mission there: extreme white-water rafting on the Tully River. The Tully River is primarily a rafting tourist attraction because it is considered one of the best rafting rivers across Australia and New Zealand. Even though Australia is a sun burnt, draught-stricken country, the Tully is always full of water.

Rapids are rated on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the most extreme and dangerous, and in fact, impossible. No one has ever rafted a grade 5 rapid. If someone does in the future, the scale jumps up to 6, with 6 being the most extreme, dangerous, and impossible.

Well if anyone still had any doubts about how extreme our day of rafting was going to be even after learning that our rafting tour was called 'Raging Thunder'...those doubts were eliminated soon enough; turns out, we would be rafting grade 4 rapids all day. Lots of them.

Since pictures are worth 1000 words here are just a few to give you an idea of our day:

Apparently I was pretty excited...

Our guide was Al, the rookie of the rafting guides. He got us into a few scrapes, but we had the best time because of it! I may have fallen in...once...in a grade 4 rapid...

The day was awesome. A solid 5 hours of rafting and a very delicious barbeque along the river during a pit stop at lunch time. Afterwards we were dropped off at the Raging Thunder office which turned into a pub in the afternoon. Here we got to chill with Al and some of the other rafting guides before our departure for our final desitnation of our trip: CAIRNS!!!

From the Tully River we hopped into our bus and set of for Cairns. The bus ride was relatively short (only an hour and a half) but seemed much longer because the bus' air conditioning broke down; 34 degrees celcius and we were sitting on hot, sweaty, leather seats with no air conditioning. It was not pleasant.

But as soon as we pulled up to Gilligan's, our luxury backpacker's resort and home for the final four days of our trip, the uncomfortable bus ride was forgotten...we had again arrived in paradise! After another awesome free meal, this one provided to us at the biggest bar in town, the Woolshed, we partied with some of the locals and had a blast!