Monday 3rd September 2007

When we woke up this morning, the sky looked pretty grey - but it wasn't raining, so we thought we'd give the surfing another go - Nikki really wanted to be able to stand up, like she did in Hawaii. We got dressed and then went for some breakfast. Nikki made herself egg on toast, whist I used up the last of the pancake mix... mmmmm!

We checked out of our room and took a walk up to the surf shop. On the way we booked our place on this evenings Greyhound, which was getting into town at 7.50pm. We decided that we'd stop at Rockhampton - other people were going to Airlie Beach or Cairns - which was going to take over 7 hours, so we didn't fancy that. Plus, Rockhampton is the 'Beef Capital of Australia' - so we thought we'd go out for a nice steak (brilliant, food now dictates where we stop!).

With our surf lesson booked we collected out wetsuits and walked down to the beach. We couldn't believe it - the waves looked huge, and were coming in really thick and fast. As we'd already had a surf lesson, the guy gave us a quick talk and then let us go into the water, whilst he chatted to the others in the group. The waves we're crazy - much worse than Saturday and we were having trouble getting out into the sea, let alone surfing back in. We tried our best to surf, I managed to stand up a few times, but poor Nikki had a nasty accident. When she was trying to get out a huge wave crashed down on her, wiping her out, and the surf board hit her in the neck - after that we decided to call it a day.

Nikki was in a lot of pain, and so when we got back to the hostel this afternoon, we decided to chill out. We had some egg on toast for our lunch (Nikki's second lot of the day), had showers then did some reading before resuming our Scrabble battle... I won 2-1.

This evening, the hostel cooked a meal of 'Grandpa's Stew' - me and Nikki had a plate each before we left for the bus. We had to catch a smaller shuttle-bus out of town and then board the Greyhound from there. By the time we finally got on the bus, I was exhausted so I slept most of the way to Rockhampton. When we got off the coach, two other people were staying at the YHA, so we shared a taxi with them.

Stupid surfing...!