Hokay, so while I'm not sitting around and getting fat off of Tim Tams (if you have no idea what I am talking about, you're behind a post so see below), I am still making my way up the cost towards Cairns. Along the way there is a lot of middle-of-nowhere territory, and with such places there is a mandatory stop for people traveling along the Oz Bus at a cattle ranch in Kroombit (where I also saw my first kangaroo on the side on the road, hopping along).
I was particularly excited about this stop because they mentioned you could ride horses. I ride each summer with my family out in Wyoming at Lost Creek Ranch, but with traveling I'll miss that this year for the first time in 12 years. So I jumped on the chance to do it here. You have to fill out a waiver, etc, and I wrote that I was an advanced rider. The female wrangler asked me several questions to confirm this fact (How long have you been riding? Do you own a horse? Do you know what you're doing and how to guide a horse? etc) before giving me a horse named Tramp. Good thing she asked all these questions, because we did nothing more than walking. That was not cool.
What was cool was our task on the horses: rounding up goats. We, as a bunch of goat-rounding newbies, had to drive a couple hundred goats up a hill and then along a fence into the gates. The goats don't respond to the horses, so you have to yell--very loudly--to get them to move. You feel a little ridiculous, but it's fun. After rounding them up we had a goat rodeo. Teams of three: one lassos the goat, another flips it on its side, and then the last person pretends to brand it. I had to lasso the goat (I failed, miserably), so I had to grab the goat by its back leg, then grab the horns, and drag it across the ring. Pretty fun stuff. Then we ate goat for dinner.
Then last weekend I did my sailing trip along the Whitsunday Islands. The Whitsundays are a chain of 74 islands that emerged after the ending of the last ice age with water levels rising 400ft. Captain Cook was the main discoverer of these islands, and we visited Cook Island during our trip.
I was on a boat called Ron of Argyll, and then kept mentioning how Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin had been on it. There were twelve passengers including me and two crew members. We had a nice sail out to the islands (approx three hours), and went to Whitehaven Beach the first day to see it's spectacular white silica sand. The water all around the Whitsundays is just a pure turquoise color. Incredible colors everywhere you looked, and the views of the beach were phenomenal.
Day two involved a lot of snorkeling, which I hadn't done in years. But we saw lots of beautiful fish, including parrot fish, bat fish, and Nemo's cousin (a black clown fish). Day two also gave us one of the most incredible sunsets I have ever seen. Right over the water, the perfect amount of clouds in the sky, and some of the brightest colors I could have imagined. Check out all these pictures on facebook if you can.
Unfortunately, the last day provided us with zero wind. Like nada. Zip. Nothing. We spent some time on some of the smaller islands, but had to use the motor to get all the way back in. And if you've never been sailing before let me tell you that hearing that motor go for several hours on the way back into the harbour instead of rocking back and forth with the sails flapping is one very disappointing experience. But overall, a pretty fun weekend.
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