Mackay

We all woke up at 4am and headed to the airport. The plane left at 6:10 am and we arrived in Mackay at 9am. Mackay is a 2 hours drive south of our final destination but due to cheaper flights, we had a stopover here. Mackay is in Queensland and is no where near my home town Brisbane. It is roughly halfway between my home town and Cairns, here's a little map:

Okay it doesn't say where Mackay is but see the red dot?

Lynch Wine!

The sun was relatively cool as Australia is heading into winter season but it was so much better than the 3 degrees we left Melbourne in!


From Mackay airport, we headed into the city. Taxis are a ripoff in the regional area with a per kilometre rate of $2.10 and other rubbish charges! We went to Hog's Breath Cafe for lunch but it was still closed so we went shopping. We walked 20 minutes with our heavy luggage to the shopping centre to get toiletries.


Then the boys needed to get thongs and Carlos was too lazy to carry the bags so he stole a trolley. We headed back to Hog's Breath and it was still closed so we had thickshakes and frappes at Coffee Club.

Stash

We finally got to have steak at Hog's Breath Cafe. We ended up returning the trolley as we decided to stock up on alcohol before we headed into the smaller city where prices and variety shrinks. Then we took a taxi to Harbour Beach, the closest beach to Mackay city.

Photo bombed his scenery picture

It was absolutely deserted except for one lifeguard and maybe two people swimming. We ended up just chilling and playing cards for 3 hours then caught a taxi back to the airport to wait for our bus pick up at 6:15pm.
The boys caught using the female toilets


The drive was 2 hours and we finally got to Airlie Beach. We walked down the esplanade hunting for food and settled on a place on Shute Harbour called Mama's Boys. The food was crap. I had bitter, burnt barramundi which totally turned me off the beautiful fish.


We listened to live music and then checked in at Base Hostel. It was our first experience staying at a hostel and it was obvious we were lucky. The hostel was more like a resort (as it took over an old resort) and we only had to share it with one other traveller, Luca from Italy.


We played cards and went to bed.