Australia, the Rest

Ok, so it’s now January 26, 2007, and I never got to finish my posting about our trip to Australia. To make a LONG story short. Lady Elliot Island was amazing! Gorgeous weather, amazing sights and sounds. Birds nesting, birds hatching, turtles nesting – Ashley and I got to see a HUGE turtle lay eggs one night and Anthony got to see two different turtles build nests but he doesn’t think they laid any eggs in them. The snorkeling was amazing – seeing lots of fish, coral and turtles. We swam with turtles – turtles as big as Ashley – even bigger, how amazing is that? Anthony went scuba diving and saw a shark – that was cool. We also saw a HUGE ray at the bottom of the ocean floor while snorkeling. I have no idea how big he was, but I would guess about 8 feet wide. The girls had fun too, playing with the kids club “Reef Rangers”, playing in the sand and checking out all the things in the water on the coral reef.

We left Lady Elliot Island after 5 days and went to Fraser Island, which is just south of Lady Elliot Island. It is a very large sand island – nothing else, just sand – not exactly true – they also have dingos and some cool rock formations and a neat shipswreck called the Maheno. It is here where Ryken has an accident, we have to quickly pack up our stuff and take the ferry back to Hervey Bay (which takes an hour) and find the hospital to get him checked out. He bonked his head (his nose/upper lip area) really hard and since it was a head injury, we needed to get him looked at. He wouldn’t eat as it was causing him a lot of pain. They gave him some meds, then watched him for a few hours. We found a new hotel for the night and stayed there. The next day, we drove to Brisbane and stayed the night there, since we didn’t want to be far away from a hospital for 48 hours after the accident. He was soon back to normal and we weren’t worried anymore.

Our final place to visit in Australia was Lamington National Park at O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat. This is about a 2 hour drive south of Brisbane. It was absolutely stunning up there and we really enjoyed walking the trails and seeing nature at it’s finest. They have a wonderful treetop walk which is all suspension bridges linked together above the trees – it’s pretty cool and the kids loved it.

All in all, we had a great trip. I thought Australia was great – people were friendly and helpful. The best part of all – so many places had baby bathrooms – rooms where there were nursing chairs and baby changing areas and hot water for bottles and clean sinks and sometimes even little potties for the little kids. It was just brilliant! Really made me see how child friendly Australia is and how unchild friendly China is!