If you have a funny, exciting or unusual Australian adventure travel story: We all want to hear it.
Enter approx 100-150 words about what, where, when and why it happened.
Here’s one in from Bath, UK
Well Fraser Island is supposed to be the island where you hire a 4WD with a bunch of other backpackers and drive round the island getting pissed. Us? No, we decided to walk. Nice idea, pity we didn’t have a clue what the hell we were doing. We packed enough food to get us to Central Station, thinking there would be shops etc there. But no, there was a toilet and a tap.So after begging some raw spaghetti off some campers and picking some cheese out of a bin we pressed on to Lake Wabby. Camped for the night in the middle of the path and woke up at 5am to a monsoon. Perfect for finding our way across the sand blow. Traversing deep sand in strong winds and torrential rain, Golden orb Spiders blocking every “path”, we managed to arrive at the beach, by this time giggling maniacally.
Anyway we ended up in Eurong (just before the 90mph winds started) and proceeded to break the only tumble dryer on the island by putting our tents through it. Oh and Rolf Harris drove past us without picking us up!
Adam Gretton, Bath, UK
We visited this zoo one day and my three year old daughter wanted to see the (big bird) emus, so off we went to the walkthrough to see them. My daughter was giving an emu a piece of bread when it tuned and walked away. She followed it in disgust that big bird walked away, and as she grabbed for it’s tail feathers it let go of the most emu poop I had ever seen, problem being, my daughter was too close and ended up covered from head to toe in very wet emu poop.
After I picked myself up off the ground and stopped laughing, we cleaned her up. She managed to be bitten by an Ibis five minutes later and now at the age of fifteen, she will not go near a bird for fear of being pooped on or bitten. But wow, what a laugh it was.
Colin Sheperd, Melbourne, VIC
I was in Western Australia for a 4WD holiday. There were no toilets about and I was busting to go to the loo, so I decided to squat down by the side of the road. There I was, with my daks around my ankles when a tourist bus full of tourists from Japan drove by! Some took some photos of my butt.
Belinda, Sydney, NSW
I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Cairns from June 1st to 12th of this year. We rented a beautiful vacation home, with an open floor plan which opened up completely to a lagoon pool and nature. My husband decided to wander the backyard to check it out through the trees – I followed with my camera of course. No sooner had we reached the farthest point when I heard my husband say “Oh, @#$!” I looked and he had found a spider web, with a good size spider that looked similar to a crab shell.
He said “Well, I’ve seen enough,” so I snapped a pic and turned to trek back. As we were leaving I rounded a corner and to my right spotted a different spider. I said “Wow, hon, look at the size of this spider” and proceeded to take a picture. My husband came around and saw the spider (about 4 inches counting legs), yelled, ran to the beautiful house, barred the metal doors shut, then the wooden doors, then the windows…I then spent the last of my vacation in a well-defended fortress with my husband checking for spiders constantly. The big ole baby 🙂
Fonda, Oregon, USA
WANTED: ONE LOST CARAVAN
In 1998, my husband Joe and I were travelling Australia doing the retired couple thing with our 4WD and caravan, and having come all the way from our home in far North Queensland, we arrived in Gosford around 4pm, about one hour out of Sydney.
After looking at four caravan parks, we settled on one close to the city. After setting up camp we then went to the local RSL club for a good meal and a few well-earned beers.
The locals were wonderful, great country folk. We left about 8pm. Well, we both got totally confused as to which caravan park we had put the van in. Joe thought it was the second one we looked at, and I swore it was the third, so here we were driving through the caravan parks – yes, you guessed it – all of them, until after midnight, then just as we were about to go to a motel, we found it.
Connie & Joe Parkerville, North Queensland
Last year I was travelling across Australia with my friend Jason when he insisted we go on a canoe safari down the Ord river in the Kimberly in Western Australia.
We had hired two canoes and on day 2 after leaving the lake Argyle dam and with crocodiles all around us Jasons craft began to sink, this was so funny because he had lectured me for two days about checking the drain plug and the danger of capsizing in these waters. yes! he had put his plug in from the outside and had lost it. Well you should have seen him paddle that thing to shore, ha, ha, ha.
Jody Lang, Manchester, UK