To the Tropics!

July 18, 2012

ROCKHAMPTON, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA – It was another early 6am wakeup call for the delegation, with a 630 checkout from our hotel. All of our luggage was loaded and keys collected by 704am – pretty impressive for our first checkout thus far!

We had breakfast at the hotel, then departed on the A1 motorway north for the Rockhampton area, some 600km+ away. The A1 motorway is the primary road up the east coast of Australia (and in fact the entire country of Australia), and goes from Sydney to Cairnes and beyond – we will be spending most of our trip driving up and down the A1. For the first time, it is actually raining during daytime, but since we’re on the coach it isn’t such a big deal – if it’s going to rain, we have pretty good timing actually.

Four hours of coach riding and contemporary pop hits later, we arrived at Gin Gin, a small country town right off the motorway. We visited the Gin Gin Primary School, grades 1-7, which has 372 students from as far as a one hour bus ride away – quite the daily round trip commute! For the past 21 years, People to People students have been visiting the school, donating school supplies (as we did), books (their library has more on American history than most US school libraries do), and money in the form of lunches. As we were having lunch at Gin Gin, they get a small profit from each lunch, and the funds are put back into the school. Over a thousand delegations worth of lunches later, and the school has gone from below-average to the second-best test scores in all of Queensland! We ate our lunch (with a delicious mini meat pie) over a short lecture, and then got to meet and play with the students during their recess. They were all smiles, and plenty of waves and high fives went around. It was definitely another unique “People to People moment.”

July 18 - Visiting Gin Gin State School, Queensland

Our entire delegation donated several large bags of school supplies as part of our community service

After our school visit, we continued north along the A1 until we eventually made it to Rockhampton, the cattle capital of Australia, and the Tropic of Capricorn! Upon entering the tropics, we found that most of the students had never been to the tropics before, which was cool for them. We got off the coach and took photos at the sign, just as the rain held off for a bit. 

We made it to the tropics!!!