Up at the crack of dawn is an understatement. We were up LONG before the crack of dawn. Our first alarm was going off by 3:30, and by the time the second one sounded at 3:45am, we had fallen back into a deep, deep sleep. Fortunately, by 4:15am we were outside waiting for our cab.
Just one problem, the cab was not there. And there were no cabs driving by that we could hail in the meantime. Fortunately, by 4:25, we found and empty cab (it may have been our original one, we'll never know) and were at the airport a whole seven minutes later.
So, interesting thing about Australian domestic flights - they're slightly different that US domestic flights. At security, you do not remove your shoes. You do not remove your jackets. You do not remove your separated and measured liquids in a three ounce bag. You are not subjected to harmful radiation. Instead, you leave on all your clothes, you remove your laptop and any form of metal you're wearing, and you walk through a metal detector. Turns out, you can even send through an entire 20 ounce metal water bottle and they don't put you on the Do-Not-Fly list. That said, hot beverages are not allowed on flights (good thing we're not coffee drinkers).
Made it to the gate by 5am, which meant I got to sleep a whole half hour in a chair against Stephen. Stephen people-watched and made sure we did not miss that 6am flight.
We made it - and landed in Brisbane by 8:30am. Isn't it lovely this time of year?
We then went to baggage claim, picked up our backpacks, checked in for our second flight, we back through security, and got sketchy airport food for breakfast. Our flight from Brisbane to Airlie Beach (near the Whitsunday Islands) was uneventful - we did crosswords for most of the hour-long flight.
We then hopped on a shuttle into town - noticing the Whitsundays were even lovelier than Brisbane:
This picture does not even capture the true glory that was Airlie Beach, as you cannot see the rain or the humidity.
We found our hotel - no problem, got checked in, and turned on the AC immediately. We had a nice room, fairly large, and reminiscent of our college dorm rooms with the cinder block walls:
By then it was close to 4pm, so we decided that despite the rain, we should check out the local town and figure out the whole food situation. We walked through most of downtown, discovering we were in just about the perfect location - dead center - both close to the main bus stop and far enough away from the number 1 bar in Airlie Beach that the late-night music wouldn't hinder our ability to sleep. Our hotel was also right in front of a manmade lagoon, e.g. large amoeba-shaped swimming pool. Sorry - no pictures this time. We'll make up for it in later posts.
For dinner we happened upon a sushi restaurant run by a middle-aged white woman who was quite talkative and had numerous regulars. The menu was light on the fish, heavy on the fried chicken, and everything came with avocado. Between the tracks, there was a large aquarium filled with only obese goldfish - apparently visiting Japanese tried to order anything that wasn't goldfish.
We spent a few hours there talking to locals, visitors, and the shop owner before returning to our hotel and calling it an early night since we had been up since the wee morning hours. Tomorrow we go jet-skiing - we'll see how that goes!
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