East Coast Cruising

We left Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays still on a high and headed for a national park called Cape Hillsborough.  It is out on a peninsula surrounded by rainforest and sea.  We set off on a walk through the rainforest although it was a little scary as the path was covered in leaves and branches so we weren’t too sure what we were walking in – the most dangerous creatures in Oz apparently are spiders and snakes and this seemed like a good place for them to potentially be living and I doubted they would appreciate a big size 8 Haviana on their head through the leaves, so we were glad to be back to Vinnie unharmed! The views on the walk though were spectacular right down over the national park and the coastline.

The next morning we got up at 5am as we had been assured that Kangaroos arrive onto the beach for sunrise...we walked down quite sheepishly unsure whether we were being extremely gullible and being laughed at from afar by the campsite owners BUT when we got down onto the beach we saw 5 roos on the waters edge with the sunrising behind them – it was so surreal.  There were a few other impressionable tourists had also come along.  We took some pretty cool pictures and kept a safe distance away, then as we were heading back to the van 2 Australian kids arrived down and went straight over and started petting the roos – clearly more confident around their local wildlife than us!!

It was a pretty amazing experience and one of those moments that we were really glad we had the van rather than getting the bus as visiting here would never have been an option!  We have since discovered that the photo on the front cover of our lonely planet book of 2 Kangaroos playing on the beach was taken at Cape Hillsborough! A nice wee quirk to our trip!

We had quite a lot of kilometres to cover over the next couple of days so did a fair bit of driving and not to many adventures to report on.  Eventually we arrived at the beautiful coastal towns of Agnes Water and 1770.  These are described as sleepy seaside towns and that’s basically what we found.  We were lucky enough to find a lovely campsite right on the edge of the beach and we parked up for 2 nights feeling very pleased with ourselves. 

View from edge of the campsite

I decided I would attempt to become a true Aussie chick and went to surf school.  It is incredibly popular around this area and there were 40 in my class!  My instructors, TBone Whitey and Grum were slightly older aussie surfer dudes and not quite the drop dead gorgeous ripped beach babes I had been expecting but still they were good fun and experienced teachers. I will continue my search around Byron and Bondi for the Brads, Troys and Chads of the surfing world that we see in the movies – this may be a task for after James goes home haha!  They warned us in advance that we would likely do many nose dives, swallow large amounts of ocean and get a few bruises – I managed to tick each of these boxes multiple times!! On the plus side though I also managed to stand up a few times for at least 3-5 seconds before face planting which made me extremely chuffed!! Apparently I can now consider myself a level 1 surf chick, yippee!!

Nearly there!!

Given up!

About to topple over haha!

Standing up doesnt last long lol!

I DID IT!!!

I felt having this great title gave me the right to take some very cheesy and posy surfer chick pictures!!  It was a really good fun morning - I seriously under estimated how hard surfing really is! I came away exhausted and with every muscle in my body totally aching but it was still great!

cheesy pose!

We spent the rest of our time here basically just chilling out by the beach and van and making nice dinners.  Just a little snap to show you our cosy dinner setup – my favourite dinner can be recreated campervan style – fajitas YES!!

When we left here we headed during the day for a place called Bundaberg which is home to a famous Australian rum.  James went for a tour of the distillery which he really enjoyed – apparently they sell it at home too so we will have to look out for it.  We had been driving for a few hundred kilometres through acres and acres of sugar cane fields so it was interesting to follow the process through and see what it is eventually turned into!

We headed on in the afternoon to Hervey Bay where we spent another 2 lovely evenings.  Hervey Bay is the gateway to Frazer Island which we had decided not to bother with due to timings, finances and general lack of interest but the Bay itself is a very chilled out coastal town with nice tree lined walkways and a few wee shops.  They have exercise machines dotted along the walkways so we made use of those during our morning run – James just laughed at how weak my arms are!!   We stayed in a lovely modern campsite who offered some free wifi so I am making the best use of it to post this blog. 

Hervey Bay beach

Tomorrow we head further South to our penultimate destination with Vinnie, of Noosa.  We have heard some great things about this place so are pretty excited to get there.  We plan on staying 2 nights, then we have 2 nights in Brisbane before we sadly return Vinnie.  After that we head to the Gold Coast to stay with some uni friends who have been living here for 18months – I am very excited to see Alice as she just got engaged about 2 weeks ago so our timing could not be better to join in the celebrations!! Bring on the bubbles J

I hear the Christmas market is in full swing and Christmas tree lights seem to have been turned on all over the place already – it is so weird as it doesn’t feel Christmasy at all here.  Even though all the towns have trees and decorations and seasons greetings signs the sunshine just makes it feel like they forgot to take them down or something.  I hope all the prep and build up is going well for everyone...no doubt I will be missing lots of Christmas parties in the next few weeks but sure there is always next year J  Hope you all have great craic though and I look forward to hearing the inevitable stories that result!!

Lots of love

xxx