We originally chose Gladstone because we thought we might get the chance to visit the Great-Barrier-Reef from there. On the other hand, we knew before that the tours were too expensive. These cost 190$ for a 5 hours boat tour in order to spend two hours on a bird-poo-island calles Lady Musgrove (Indeed, the island consists to 100% of bird poo, which laid down over the years and solidified on the Great-Barrier-Reef 🙂 ). We just had some hope to catch a tour of a local provider or a simple ferry, but this hope was destroyed after we found out that the local tourist information and the ferry terminal had no different offers.
So we drove our way to Stephen who is very difficult to describe. The best way might be a simply “incredible nice and likeable”. He is 39 years old and made somewhat like a hobby out of couchsurfing. So, he usually has a full house of travellers (once even 17 people in one night). Additionally he is a very good cook, why he dishes up great food or barbecues together with self-brewed beer and self-burned spirits (yes spirits!). Beside that he has a very good sense of humour and just a lot of fun in his life (maybe that’s just typical Aussie). One of his stories is about a day in work, where he appeared in his full body panda suit or picking up his girlfriend from the airport in the same one. Of course, he was surrounded by children and missed his girlfriend. There are a lot of other stories, but that would blow up the post too much (one of them is about two fighting geckos in the air condition) 🙂
As we decided to give the bird-poo-island a miss, Steve suggested us to visit a beach nearby (Tannum Sands), what we did the next day. It was a very relaxed day, with a quite nice beach as its highlight, but we think we deserved that one 🙂 The actual highlight of the day was a long burger barbecue with Steve and another couple of couchsurfers (Sven and Sabrina from Germany) at the same evening. The next day we headed off to Carnarvon Gorge, which is only 500km inland of Gladstone. However, we stopped being worried about such distances a long time ago, why we had a relaxing 5 hour drive, but this, my friends, is another story to be told…