Okay, okay, okay I’ve seen some beautiful place in my life but sailing around The Whitsunday Islands was just breath-taking. I can honestly say that Whitehaven Beach is the beautiful beach I’ve EVER seen. We strolled up to the look out and it was AMAZING!!!!! Perfect white sand, torquoise and navy striped water, just beautiful. The photos don’t even do it justice really. The only slight downer was that we had to wear stinger suits because it’s stinger jelly fish season here in summer. The suits provided good entertainment value though.

Anyway we after messing around in the suits we swam here…….

You see, I wasn’t exaggerating, it is just beautiful. It’s supposed to be one of the top ten beaches in the world. Now for the science bit…… 🙂 There’s a really high silica content in the sand which makes it soooo white, so much so that it’s not even hot to walk on. It’s also really fine and soft, amazing!! So we chilled out there for a while and took some funny trick photos like this one……

Sorry, me thinks this blog is going to have a lot of photos…

We decided to choose a diving boat, Kiana, so we headed off to the outer reef on the promise of some great diving and it didn’t disappoint. We saw some amazing coral, tons of fish, including a few Nemos…..

……..turtles and white tip sharks. I did four dives in total and the last one, a shark came really close. No worries though, as the white tip shark has a mouth about the same size as a human’s so you could totally fight back 🙂

It was such a treat sailing around for a few days, lots of early starts because of the diving and the crew were great fun. I’d highly recommend it. As The Whitsunday Islands are part of a World Heritage site, we were told to take nothing (unlike someone who allegedly stole a bag of sand(!) and got fined $10,000 or the guy who carved his name into a turtle – who does that!!!) but memories and photographs and leave nothing but your footprints, so that’s exactly what I did 🙂

DO YOU SEE HOW SOFT THE SAND IS???????? Well satisfied, we headed back to Airlie Beach to get a good night’s sleep before our 9 hour drive (which we were dreading) to the twin towns of Agnes Water and The Town of 1770.

The drive wasn’t too bad at all actually, we swap around every couple of hours so it’s all good really. The Town of 1770 is very small but extremely chilled out, a real surfer town. It was a great place to stop after a long drive. We had a good night out in the pub and the following morning we signed up for a surfing lesson. Now I kinda thought, oh I have to try this but it’s not really going to be my kind of thing. Well, I just LOVED IT!!!! Only stood up a handful of times but I think I’m addicted already…..

Sooooooo have to try again and again and again!!!!!! I was just full of energy and on a high after it 🙂

Please check out loads of great photos from the Whitsundays, including some great underwater ones (they really are worth a look) on http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindybear/sets/72157610926707351/ and the Town of 1770 is on http://www.flickr.com/photos/lindybear/sets/72157611321653272/