Friday 24th October - arrived at Hervey Bay

Went out for the drinks Monday night with the people from the boat trip, and a lot of the original ozintro group came out aswell so it ended up being a very good (and drunk!!) night. Most of the following day was wasted with me not moving far from the hostel to McDonalds and back again!! Wednesday morning I had to get up early (5:45am) to catch the OzExperience bus down to Hervey Bay. It would take 2 days to get there as we were stopping at a cattle ranch overnight. We got to the cattle ranch at around 6pm, had a beer and waited for food. For food we had soup to start followed by a roast dinner. It was really nice. After food we learnt how to crack a whip (I managed it!!), and then saw how long we could stay on a mechanical bull (I didn't manage that 2 well!!). Then had a couple more beers and went to bed. This was the scary part. There were bugs and cobwebs everywhere on the cattle ranch, and the gap at the bottom of the door was massive. The were also huge gaps in the wall (a ghecko got in and was wondering around). The toilets were outside, so tried to make sure I didn't need to go in the middle of the night!! Didn't manage that!!! One of the girls in the next room had a mouse in her bag that night, and another one the next morning!!

Needless to say I didn't sleep too well that night, and was awake from about 4am listening to the birds. We then had our alarm call at 6am. This was a man standing outside our room shouting that it was 6am, check out was open, breakfast was ready, and we all needed to be on the bus by 7am. He then fired 3 shots from his gun up into the air. I've got to admit it wasn't the best way to be woken up!! Some people had chosen to go horse riding and clay pigeon shooting. I didn't want to do these so assumed I could sit at the cattle ranch or on the bus and read/sleep. I was wrong. We all had to go and take part in activities such as wrestling with goats and standing in a circle and being shocked with a cattle prod. We were all holding hands so the current went around the whole circle. At 7am I don't really find this fun, so needless to say wasn't impressed!!!

After all this the people going horse riding and the people not were split into 2 groups. The group not horse riding were basically told to walk to the top of a hill. It would take 20 mins, but we had 2 hours to get back to the bus. After about 10-15 mins of walking, 2 of us had enough, made our way back to the cattle ranch where we bought chocolate, sat, ate and complained!!! 2 hours later we had to catch the bus. We then had 6 hours to sit on a bus to get to our final destination. We weren't in the best of moods when we arrived at Hervey Bay, and had no idea how to get to our hostel. 2 of us went for a cheaper hostel than everyone else to save a bit of money, but we were stuck at a shopping centre with our bags, while the other hostels had minibuses to collect people, we didn't. We asked the OzExperience bus driver how to get there and he said that he knew where it was but didn't know how we were going to get there. He wasn't the most helpful of people!!! We got the phone number of the hostel from the lonely planet guide, phoned them up and they sent a car to collect us. At this point we were thinking that this place would be a dump after the last 2 days, and because it was cheaper than everywhere else, so were just waiting to see where we would be sleeping for the next 2 nights.

We were pleasantly surprised. The hostel was lovely. It was very homely, had plants and incense sticks, etc in the room, had a huge common room with kitchen, tv room, etc. and it was small so not many people staying there. There were also magazines in the room for us to read. On the way over to the hostel we had stopped at a bottle shop to buy goon ($13 for 4 litres - that about 6 quid), and sat in the hostel room, drinking goon out of plastic cups - very classy. After cooking food we had an early night. We haven't done much today. We went to the supermarket and found out that a saying about Hervey Bay was very true. One book has said that it is God's Waiting Room, because people come here to die basically. We walked into the supermarket and the average age was about 80!!! We then passed a sign on the street for meals on wheels!!! Despite this though, Hervey Bay is a nice place to chill for a few days, before doing Fraser Island trip next week.