We have been quite lucky with the weather conditions as the sea was pretty calm providing us with a quite relaxing night. Venus II proved to be extremely comfortable assuming you are in the back cabins, but earplugs are still a must-have to decrease the engine noise. Rooms are spacious and so are the bathrooms. Being 8 people on board instead of a maximum of 14 gives us enough space. The dive briefing is once again a shock for me: we are diving using tables and maximum dive time is 40 minutes. Holy crap, you must be joking ?!
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I phoned Qantas today to figure out when I could fly to NZ. The saturday flight is full so I’m booked on the next one which is on tuesday. This gives me a couple of day to reach Brisbane. I had to choose a chronophagic activity to spend this time, so I booked on the Salty’s liveaboard leaving tomorrow night. I’d be back on friday evening. Got a stand-by rate 30% off.
I arrived in Bundaberg this morning at 9AM after a more or less sleepless night in the train. It looks like in every compartment, a few babies or nasty kids were hired to prevent people sleeping. I’m staying at Salty’s rest (A$18.) and I have yet to see someone to figure out the diving around here. The place could not be more different than Airlie Beach as there is nearly no one in the streets and it’s extremely quiet.
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As I wrote yesterday, Airlie Beach is absolutely superficial and I feel like the main objective is to squeeze money as much as possible from tourists (with success should I say). The city centre is packed with flashy advertisement of all sorts which is far from giving a nice character to this place. Everything here is centered around the Whitsundays, so you have the choice beween sailing, snorkeling and diving. It might be nice, but I would need to stay here for more than a week to investigate what can be done and unfortunately cannot afford to stay that long as I’m running out of time.
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I left this morning from Cairns to take the Tilt train to Airlie Beach. The Tilt train has been in service since mid-2003 and offers business class seats. I took it as it was the train leaving today and it allowed me to do some work with the laptop all day since there is a power point available for each seat. It was a minor upgrade cost from the basic Queenslander economy seat and I took a pass to go to Brisbane ($A220). The train however can hardly reach 90km/h except in specific conditions, so it is hardly comparable with the TGV even though it looks visually similar.
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