Cairns

After our big road trip we stayed in Cairns for four days with Olli and Becky and their two dogs. On our first day we went snorkelling on The Great Barrier Reef on a trip we booked through Olli's travel agency Travel Finns. He also helped us book our Jucy van. On the reef we saw an amazing amount of very interesting corals and colourful fish, that really made us think about getting an underwater camera someday. It also most conveniently happened to be Ville's 30th birthday so in the evening we went to Macalister Brewing Company to try some craft beer.

On our second day we went fishing with some friends of Olli and Becky. We went to a beautiful place called Big Sands and even got to experience a short leg of 4-wheel driving on the sand on our way down to the river. Here we spent half the day swimming, fishing and just sitting on the sand. And Ville even caught a fish called Sooty Grunter!

On our third day we didn't do much, except some planning for our last month of travelling. In the evening we had an amazing seafood dinner with prawns, mud crab and bugs. They were delicious!

On our last day we went on a tour to the Tablelands just a bit inlands from Cairns. We stopped to look at some huge trees (too big to be photographed properly with our camera), swimming in a crater, eating delicious scones and local cheese and gazing at nice waterfalls and the beautiful landscape.

East Coast Australia Road Trip, Part II

And up the coast we continued! At this point the weather wasn't really that great since it was both windy and rainy, so we drove past the Gold Coast quite fast, just stopping to have a quick swim at the beach when the sun happened to be out. Instead we headed inlands again to the Tamborine Mountains. Here we stopped at Fortitude Brewery for some craft beer and Witches Falls winery for another go at Autralian wines. In this area there were also quite a few small but pretty waterfalls and some walking tracks through the forests.

Brisbane would have been our next stop, but since we didn't really find that much interesting to do in the city and it didn't seem campervan friendly at all, we ended up just driving through it and up to the Glasshouse Mountains instead. Here we had intended to do some trekking but since Malin was sick (again) we mostly hung out by our car. And we were not the only ones:

After spending some time inlands we kind of missed the ocean again. Noosa was a little town with a lot of trendy shops and restaurats and a very popular beach.

We spent the night outside Noosa close to a farm. Here we played some minigolf, which was a lot of fun. Especially since Malin got a hole-in-one on her first time playing.

Fraser Island is a big island of sand just next to the coast, north of Noosa. Trips there were unfortunately way over our budget so instead we headed to Carlo Sand Blow - sand dunes and kind of a wannabe Fraser island. And we actually liked it very much! It was big, filled with soft sand and nice views over the ocean. Another interesting thing here was the line of at least a hundred caterpillars of back-shelter moth (or processionary caterpillars) crossing the path to the dunes. We guess they wanted to look big to avoid being eaten by birds.

Okay, so enough nature now. Let's go and taste some Australian rum! Bundaberg is the biggest rum distillery in Australia and we joined a very interesting tour around their premises.

The taste of rum was apparantly so intoxicating that it made us forget to take pictures of our next few destinations, though. We followed the coast up stopping mainly to swim and eat at the town of 1770, Rockhampton, Sarina and Mackay. Or then maybe it was just because we were so excited about our next destination: the Eungella National Park. And why were we so excited? Because there you can see platypus in the wild! Platypus is like the weirdest yet funniest animal on earth. A mix of nearly everything. And there they were just casually swimming around in the Broken River!

In Eungella we also made a long 16km trek in the beautiful subtropical rainforest following the river, during which we saw a lot of birds, a few turtles, some more platypus and even a HUGE wild boar. Back at our campsite we were accompanied by the very common australian bush turkey.

Si Phan Don

After our motorbike adventure we needed a vacation. Si Phan Don (Meaning 4000 Islands) was the perfect place for that. It's located in the southernmost part of Laos, next to the Cambodian border, where the Mekong river is 4 km wide. The river is dotted with thousands of smaller and bigger islands. We chose Don Khon and Don Det, two bigger islands in the south, connected with a bridge.

First we spent four nights on Don Khon, mostly chilling at our guesthouse while gazing over the Mekong and occasionally going for a swim to cool down from the heat.

Sunset over Mekong, the mountains in the horizon are in Cambodia 

Cows gone amok in a garden near our guesthouse

The biggest sight on Don Khon was the Tad Somphamit Falls.

Here we also got really close to some water buffalos. They didn't mind us at all.

We also took a boat trip with a local to go see the biggest waterfall in Southeast Asia: Khone Phapheng Falls. It's not very high but the water volume coming through here is gigantic: 9 500 000 litres per second (double that of Niagara Falls). The best part of this trip was that our local guide took us to a small island right next to the waterfalls. There was no one else here, but we could see all the other tourists standing on the other side of the river.

(Picture by Vanja)

We also had some delicious grilled Mekong fish

From Don Khon we moved to the other side of the bridge to the southern tip of Don Det for four more nights. Here we had a bungalow next to the river from where we could watch the sunrise from our balcony.

Here we also enjoyed our last cup of Lao coffee so far. Lao coffee is very strong an thick, and served with sweet condensed milk.

Every once in a while we went cycling around the islands

On our last day in Si Phan Don we went to the southern tip of Don Khon where you can also see Cambodia in the horizon.

Our main reason for coming here, though, was the possibility to see the very rare and nearly extinct Irrawaddy Dolphins. In Si Phan Don there's only a couple of them left. We took a boat early in the morning and since we were the first ones here the dolphins were actually quite active. We didn't get a good photo of them but if you look closely you can see the fin and back of a dolphin in the picture. Sometimes they came quite close to the boat but mostly they kept their distance.