Hey Everyone,
I know its been a few weeks since I’ve done this, but its been absolutely crazy here for the past few weeks and even right now, I am almost too tired to begin to tell all about what has happened. But I am going to try.
A couple of weeks ago, on a Tuesday, Luke, Devin, Ben, Sanna, and I packed up some clothes, a couple of tents, and some sleeping bags, and headed up the coast to the Whitsunday Islands for some camping. Getting there was hard, but so worth it. (Train, bus, train, train, plane, bus, bus, ship) This was probably the coolest camping trip I’ve ever been on. If anyone watches the show Lost, it was kindof like that. Actually, a lot like that, minus the polar bears.
We were on Whitsunday Island, the largest of the 72 islands, but we were completely alone on the island, most of the time. We were taken to our beach via landing craft style boat, our stuff was unloaded on the shore, and we were left to fend for ourselves for 3 days. There aren’t many things I would rather be doing in this world then extreme camping.
The first night, it rained, but our tents proved to be very waterproof, although cooking in the downpouring rain tended to be difficult. Lucky that we had one of the grill lighted and covered before the rain really came down. Lucky that I had a raincoat, although noone was really concerned all that much about getting wet. It was pretty much the only freshwater shower we were gonna get. Luke and Ben just made rain ponchos out of garbage bags. That kinda sums it up. We made hamburgers, which werent all that bad, given the conditions.
The next day, we hardly did anything. We got up at a fairly reasonable hour, like 9, and played frisbee, swam, snorkeled (with not much luck on the visibility) and even had some visitors. And I dont mean people. When we were down at the beach, a 4 foot monitor lizard wandered into our camp. It was fortunate that I was the one to find it, because it only freaked me out for just like 2 seconds because I nearly stepped on it, but then I found out that it was a very chill animal, and after a good many pictures taken of it, I went back to the beach, where he eventually followed me to. The lizard wasnt the only massive animal that visited us that day. Sometime during the middle of the day, I went to use the non-porta-hole-in-the-ground and walked in the door and a MASSIVE spider was on the floor, which promply scurried off under the floorboards. I have never seen an arachnid this big before; at least the size of my hand. Needless to say, the toilet was not the most popular room on the island, even though it was the only room on the island, if that makes sense.
The third day, we went for some hardcore exploring. While we had been swimming the previous day, we saw a point that was much higher than the rest of the island, and that was our goal. Our campsite was surrounded by steep slopes on all sides, so we decided to head straight up from the camp, to keep orientation. And that was quite a climb. But we finally reached the top, and it wasn’t as steep as we thought it looked, and it wasn’t much a view, so I climbed up a tree to see where we were, and when I reached the top, we could see the peak, which wasn’t even close to where we were. So we traveled down the other side of the hill we had just climbed, and, at the bottom, we found a pretty large creek, where we had lunch. PBandJ. So good. So college. So camping. Anyways, at this point it had been a few hours, and the girls decided to follow the creek downstream to the ocean and head back to camp for some more sun and relaxing. The three guys were determined to get to the peak though, but the path up the side of the hill was extremely thick, so we also decided to head down the stream to the beach to see if we could find a better path. Going down this creek was awesome. Waterfalls and massive boulders were everywhere, and as we got closer to the ocean, the forest became very tropical. We eventually made it to the beach, saw our target, and began up the next hill. Nearly halfway up, we came upon a rock outcropping jutting from the forrest off the side of the cliff, and we climbed up the boulders via the vines that hung down off the sides, and took pictures on top of this rock above the treeline. And at this point, it was so hot we decided that it was high enough. So we headed down.
The rest of the trip was spent relaxing, eating mac and cheese, beans, PBandJ, and oatmeal. That was pretty much it for the food situation. Oh, and Lambingtons. Dont ask.
The boatman told us he would be back between 9:30 and 12:30 to pick us up, so we were having breakfast at 9:30, oatmeal, thinking that it would still be a few hours before he arrived, and in the distance, we see a boat bookin’ it towards our island. And someone said, “uh, i think they are landing here.” and then we realized it was our boat. So we had like 2 minutes to pack camp. It was crazy how efficient and quickly we can move when we need to.
I think the pictures will speak for themselves on this trip. So check em out on the photos page.