We arrived at midday to Airlie Beach, and proceeded to spend shedloads of money booking stuff for the rest of our trip.

We are off tomorrow on a ship called the Whitsunday Magic (see pic) to sail around the Whitsunday Islands for 3 days and 3 nights.

Sailing, diving, snorkelling and generally having a good time are all part of the agenda. Staying on the boat for 3 nights, so I shall be posting a special report on our return.

We also booked up for next week in Cairns, a trip with Taka Dive. 5 days and 4 nights on a boat heading out to Osprey Reef, to feed some sharks. Should make some good footage?!

May have time for a quick post tomorrow before we leave, if not… see you on the next post!

Woke up in the bush, and drove to Rubyvale, an even smaller town a few km up the road.

Here we did an underground mine tour showing where they mine and process the sapphires, after which we had another go at fossicking. This time we didn’t have much luck. So we headed back to the coast. Pretty uneventful really, just a straight road for hours and hours and hours!

Now camped at a town called Mackay, nothing here to speak of, just a pit stop on our way to Airlee Beach tomorrow.!

Sorry for the lack of photos, but the little blog camera has memory card holder is screwed, and we can’t transfer the photos… bugger… guess we shall have to switch to the big boy camera for blog pics.

Total distance travelled in OZ so far…. 4500kms…

Today, we hit the road West into outback. After 4 hours we reached our destination of Sapphire. We then went fossicking for the little gems, and after 3 hours of scraping through dirt, washing rocks, and generally not knowing what to look for, we managed to bag a couple of the beauties!

Jens is the larger one in the pic. It weighs 4.68 carats, and is a green sapphire. NICE!!! I wonder what it will look like when we get it cleaned and cut back home…

So, tonight we are camped in the middle of nowhere, ready for another warm day tomorrow…

SD