KM 5663 to 8733: Alice Springs//Townsville//Great Barrier Reef: From the Outback straight to The Reef

Actually, there's not much to say about our next stop Alice Springs: It's just another boring little desert town, the only difference to the previous ones being that it's much bigger. In fact, it was such a big town, after three weeks in the Outback it felt to us like downtown Manhattan. So, as there's not much to say about our stop, we'd finally like to dedicate a couple of words to our ride: Our brave campervan who passed the magic age of 444.444 kilometers just before we arrived in Alice Springs. More than 5.000 kilometers of those he has spent with us.
He's kind of like somebody who works for the government: He does his job. He's totally overpaid, he does what he must, not more, not less: He takes us where we want to go, along the thousands of kilometers of Outback highway, the fridge cools what we give it, the OVEN cooks what we give it, the air-conditioning works, the radio plays music when we're not too far in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes it's even good music.
However, we wouldn't be our Austrian selves if we didn't have something to complain about: For all the kilometers we feed it, it also needs tons of gas; you can only open or close the cupboards with short, hard taps in the exact right places; with all the dirt on the curtains you could knit another set of curtains; the gear shift works as smooth as the knee joint of a 90 year old; the radio does work, but our left speaker constantly switches "Radio CCHHHRRRRR" and "NoMusicAtAll FM", the air-con does provide us with cool air but the air it provides stinks (for whatever reason) like rotten eggs; it is almost impossible to get some fresh air in without being eaten alive by mosquitoes because only two windows are protected by mosquito nets and opening them refreshes the air about as much as when I light one of my farts; for every little action (eating, sleeping, getting clothes out of your backpack that's stored underneath the seat) you need to rearrange half the van; etc.
However, as said above: It does the job, we save money and it gets us to our destination. And that destination was for our next step: Out of the desert, back to the coast. And that means in this case driving down the most boring of highways for 1800 kilometers, three days of almost non-stop driving from sunrise to sunset, the only "highlight" being an unwanted "pause" when we were stopped by the police, his basic message being: "You're travelling through Australia? Well, do it at the speed limit!" 71 km/h in a 60km/h-zone, ups...
Our exact destination on the coast was Townsville, a small town, nice and cute, but only slightly more entertaining than above mentioned Alice Springs. The major difference: It's got a beach! But even though our stay in Townsville wasn't exactly exciting, after more than three weeks of constant travelling, changing location pretty much every day, it was nice to just chill out on the beach and stay put in one place for a couple of days.
After these couple of days, however, this became too boring for us, also we were told numerous times that there's a great dive site on the Great Barrier Reef just outside of Townsville: the wreck of the "Yongala", a cargo ship that sunk in a storm in 1911, wasn't discovered until the 1950s and has since then become one of the Top10-dive sites worldwide (at least so we were told). As we wanted to go diving at the Great Barrier Reef anyway, and had too much time and money (actually it was just too much time, but Visa and Mastercard took care of the money issue), we decided to go for it and just a day later we were heading towards the Great Barrier Reef onboard the "Sea-esta' (yeah, we know, itÕs probably the worst play on words in the history of mankind).
Our determination to go diving was already put to the test the first night, as we had to fight quite hard to keep our dinner from coming back up. We'd both been on several different swimming vessels, but I think none of us had ever had that much trouble not to become seasick. However, the ten dives to Wheeler Reef, Davis Reef and finally to the "Yongala" proved to be worth everything (even the price of the trip): During our three days at sea we saw a tiny sandy island surrounded by the Reef, turtles, nurse sharks, huge manta rays, sea snakes, clownfish, lobster, hundreds of fish that we don't even know the name of (neither in German nor in English) and last but not least the wreck of the "Yongala" itself. It was basically just three great days, full of wonderful impressions. And on top of that we got some genuine Australian experiences onboard, with Australian icon Jimmy Barnes blasting through the speakers day and night, breakfast with Veggiemite-sandwiches and an apparently typical New Zealand-Australia drinking habit called ÒSlap the GoonÓ where you drink cheap wine straight out of a, hm, basically a plastic bag, but only after giving it a nice slap ;-)) Sounds pretty weird, but if you're in the right mood (read: drunk enough) it's actually quite fun. Even more so, when there's a whole crowd around, chanting "SLAP THE GOON!! SLAP THE GOON!!!"
After Townsville and our diving trip the Australia leg of our journey is slowly coming to an end: We will now head further up the coast to Cairns now, to check out Cape Tribulation and also to meet again some of the friends of our Southeast-Asia-group and after that it's "Bye-bye OZ, Kia Ora New Zealand!" :)