Australia gets crowded

Some stats for you. Much of Australia is impossibly flat, brown and empty and it is far and away the most thinly peopled nation. At home, the average population density is 660 people per square mile, and the world average is 117. By contrast, the Australian average is 2.8 per square mile. But this is wildly skewed because Australians live in a few clustered spots along the coast and leave the rest of the country mostly undisturbed.

In fact, around 80% of Australians live on the strip of land from Melbourne to Cairns. This is a very different part of Australia, and we'd left it until last. And boy, was it busy!

We had heard that 7,000 backpackers were on the move from Sydney, going north. We, being used to 'winging it' when it came to travelling, hadn't booked any buses or accommodation and we soon realised there was nowhere to sleep in Byron Bay. Thankfully, we had looked into this before we left Sydney so made a brief detour to Port Macquarie, where we bid farewell to George.

I won't bore you with the details, but let's just say there's plenty of accommodation left in Port Macquarie as there's not much going down in "the Port". Still, we made some good friends and rediscovered goon while watching kids karaoke. Oh, and there was a very cute koala hospital.

When we did eventually get to Byron, it was heaving with 'the beautiful people'. And I mean by that the biggest bunch of posers in Australia, per square mile. Still, the beautiful people had chosen a beautiful beach to work on their mahogany tans and we enjoyed the ripple of sea and human traffic from afar. After almost a week in Sydney, a bit of pure laziness did us the world of good. We rented bikes to explore and walked to the most easterly point of Australia, we'd already done the most southerly and almost the most westerly.

Then it was on to Brisbane.......sorry, almost fell asleep there for a second, it was that boring! I'm sure I'm doing it a huge disservice, but Brisbane didn't thrill me at all.

We quickly moved onto Rainbow Beach, where we could catch the boat to the well-trodden Fraser Island.

Rainbow Beach was an apt name for the town, minus the 'bow'. It rained steadily for two days, the worst we'd had in Australia. Let me tell you, a very small coastal town in Australia is not a fun place to be if it rains, there was nothing to do but drink tea, Skype and catch up on world news via the internet.