Airlie Beach

The first stop on our journey down the coast was Airlie Beach. Airlie is a small town with a population of around 4,000 and is roughly 200km south of Townsville. It is very popular with tourists and is basically one big tourist resort. The reason for its popularity is due to the fact that it acts as a gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, just off the coast. We only stopped off here to have a look around originally and meet up with Ian and Amy as they were working on one of the islands. We thought that we may also find work, however when we seen the size of the place and the amount of backpackers crammed into the resort we realised there was no chance, unless we wanted to work for our accomodation and food, with no wages, on one of the islands. This is what Ian and Amy had decided to do in the hope that after 2 weeks of this on trial they would get kept on with pay.

We arrived in Airlie late at night and parked up outside a National Park that had been recommended to us by backpackers we had met earlier in the day heading North. In the morning we parked up on the main street to have a look around the place and within 1 minute we seen some familiar faces. Chris and Nichola, who we had met in the outback were walking towards our van. We started talking away to them and discovered that they had just gotten into Airlie that morning. It was interesting to find that we were still on the same time schedule as them who had no problems with their van unlike us who had been held up for a week in Townsville with gearbox problems, not to mention our reduced speed all the way back from the Outback. Whilst chatting with Chris and Nic we seen Amy crossing the road in front of our van and shouted her over, which is just as well, as she was running late for work and we ended up having to throw her in the back of the van where she had to sit on our unmade bed to catch her ferry to work.

Later on in the day we met back up with Chris and Nic and hung about with them and ended up having a bbq with them that night. The bbq was pretty good after going a week without any meat! It consisted of huge steaks and crap link sausages. I was getting laughed at for eating this 500g steak with my hands.

We spent a couple of days here hanging about the man made lagoon. At the lagoon we managed to pick up our first job, if you can call it that. There was a smoothie bar that had an advert for a dishwasher so we went in and enquired. The guy said we could start the next day but he would only give us a 1 - 1 & 1/2 hour shift each and would pay us $10-15 and the rest would be paid in smoothies and a sandwich! Needless to say that we didn't turn up the next day and spent the day getting sunburnt instead. It was then time to move on and we said our goodbyes to Amy who had decided that Australia was too expensive and she was flying out to Asia for a couple of months. We didn't get the chance to catch up with Ian as he had been on the island working.

One of the mornings we woke up in the car park to find we couldn't leave as we were blocked in by film crew vehicles who were filming a car advert on the road outside the car park. We had to wait 5 mins until it was ok for them to let us out. So watch out you might see us in our camper in an advert coming soon!

A funny incident happened in Airlie one of the days we were there we had done a washing and didn't want to be in the sun as we were a bit tired of it. So we were driving around trying to find somewhere quiet to park up in the shade and dry the washing when we came across this quiet street that looked like a country road with some grass and trees at the side. We decided to pull up there and hang our washing and have some lunch. We had been there for a couple of hours and a few cars had drove by and not bothered with us when this particular car slowed down to take a closer look. A womens voice shouted "What the hell are you doing? This is my property, if my husband sees you he'll set the dogs on you! You better move." We told her it was fine and we would move as we only parked here as it looked like a public road. We started putting away our washing and were almost cleared up when we heard this guy's voice. We turned round to see this guy on a mini tractor/forklift threating us that he was going to ram his tractor through our van if we weren't gone within 3 minutes. The guy was pretty much just being a jackass as it was obvious that we were leaving. This seems to be the typical reaction of many Aussies to people in campervans and we have found them to be a bit of a pain.