It was a long drive… Fifteen hours. 1200 kilometres. And the car was really noisy! It was baaaad!

Airlie Beach, it seems, is a town of about 3,000 locals and probably just as many backpackers. My flatmate Lene and I were going there to get our open water dive licenses.

The whole thing wasn't really that well planned. We called for a rental car just two days ahead, and we didn't book the dive course until the day before we left Brisbane. The dive medical was also done rather late, but hey… It all worked out well!

Day 1, Brisbane – Rockhampton (6-JULY-2002)

Having welcomed our new flatmate Guro at six in the morning, Lene and I set out to track down the car. It took a while. Andy's Car Rental turned out to be in Logan, about 20 rail stations away from home. Our train stopped at all 20 stations!

We found the car, and left Brisbane an hour behind schedule. The drive was relatively unexciting! Except that we probably drove through a wormhole or something else that can be understood only through highly advanced math of sorts! All of a sudden we were about 50 kilometres away from Motorway 1 (where we were supposed to be), in Bundaberg! I still haven't comprehended what really happened. But it wasn't entirely my fault. Lene, navigator of first class, fell asleep on duty…

Anyways, we got to see the beautiful landscape around Bundaberg. It was really nice there, not really the kind of landscape one would expect to see in Australia. (Just remember, when you are driving through that area, to look out for trains hauling sugar cane! The railway tracks crisscross the roads in the area and I'm pretty sure there has been an accident or two up there!)

Speaking of accidents: when bad things happen on Australian roads, alcohol is usually to blame. Another common cause of accidents is fatigue, drivers falling asleep behind the wheel. Queensland's traffic authorities know how to deal with that! They post signs all over the place telling you "Take a break before it's too late" and "Don't sleep while driving[!!!]" (Really… Don't sleep while driving???) Well, we didn't want to cross the traffic authorities, so we stopped in Rockhampton for the night.

Rockhampton is situated along a river, about 20 kilometres inland. The only exciting thing about this city of 60,000 people is that the area around is one of the most densely populated areas in the world... In terms of cattle! You find about 2.5 million cattle within 250 kilometres of Rockhampton.

Like I just said, Rockhampton wasn't that exciting… Lene and I walked around in the CBD at 10pm. (It was a Saturday.) And there was not one single person around! Rockhampton CBD was actually quieter and more desolate than Mullan (Idaho – USA, pop. 700), where I lived for a year as an exchange student a long while ago!

Day 2, Rockhampton – Airlie Beach

After improvising a brekkie in Rockhampton's riverside park, we hit the road again.

We did a stopover in Mackay, just for a couple of hours. Got something to eat and some candy (for me)! Mackay is supposed to have a really nice beach, and we wanted to see it. Weeell…

The tide was out when we were there. To get close to saltwater at all, we'd have to walk for more than two kilometres. And we would have been buggered if the tide had turned while we were out there!

(I later learnt that the really nice beaches around Mackay are a few kilometres outside the city centre!)

If at all possible, fewer things happened this day than on the previous one! I'll summarise the day using my favourite device in communication, bulletpoints:

- Cruising the seemingly endless stretches at 125 kph, anxiously looking for phantom speed cameras;

- Going bananas because of Toyota Echo's incredibly noisy coupe;

- Using all my slalom skills to avoid hitting tons of pancaked and very dead kangaroos and wallabies; and

- Reaching Airlie Beach.

To be continued... Sometime later... When I get time to translate the next part of the story... :-)