Day 28

Spent the afternoon in Bundaberg today, so I went for a tour and tasting at the Bundaberg Rum Distillery. Turns out that ginger beer and rum is pretty good. My other Bundaberg adventure, after walking around the city centre for a while,  was going to the Mon Repos Turtle Rookery to watch the turtles come up the beach to lay their eggs. Our group saw a loggerhead that had just laid infill the nest hole and lumber back to the sea, but she had laid her eggs too close to the sea, where they would be destroyed with the coming king tides, so we dug them up and reburied them higher in the dunes. Turtle eggs look a lot like table tennis balls, and if they need moving it must be done in the first 1 or 2 hours or the egg will fail as the embryo attaches to the shell and this bond would be damaged. The gender of the baby turtles depends entirely on the temperature inside the nest, so the new nest that was dug out had the same environmental features, such as sun exposure.

Day 25

Had a Whitsundays day trip, so went to Whitehaven Beach where the sand is fine like flour, went snorkeling,  saw some huge turtles and then had a couple of hours at a resort. There are two weeks of the year when the March flies come out, and the day of my trip coincided with these 2 weeks, so a lot of the land based parts of this trip included swatting the flies that had bitten me, but the views from the hill behind Whitehaven Beach are lovely, and it’s not every day that you get to swim in the Whitsundays.  The snorkeling was quite different to the last time in Cairns as it was on coastal reefs which didn’t have all of the bright colours, but I did see a few fish. and once I was back on the boat I saw a couple of turtles that were at least 1.5m long, which was fantastic. I didn’t enjoy the resort though, as there was nothing to do apart from mini golf, going in the pool or going to a bar, so I spent some time walking around deciding not to go to a resort again.