Ceder Falls

I met up with a couple of my Italian friends, Simone and Federica, in Airlie beach, I'm going up the coast and they're going down. On the day we were all leaving we drove out to a place called Cedar Falls. The place is amazing, you walk about 200m into the forest and theres a huge waterfall running into a nice deep water-hole, perfect for swimming. It was like something out of a movie!

Spent the afternoon swimming around there, jumping off the rocks and being nibbled at by small fish! You could even swim out under the fall for a nice cold shower :) After that we said our goodbyes and I started the drive to Townsville, where I'd meet the Swedes for Magnetic Island.




Ceder Falls, beautiful!



Me havin a swim :)

Piccys

I'm on Magnetic Island now. Just arrived so I haven't really done anything yet but I got 2 hours free internet so I thought I'd upload the pictures from Noosa to Airlie Beach, enjoy!

Also, I managed to upload the video of the crabs, you can see it at here. And a video of the dolphin, which you can see here!



The Dolphin at Tin Can Bay!



Me feeding it (the woman wasn't an expert with the camera but thats really my arm, honest!)



The huge sandblow that I walked across to reach the coloured sands of Rainbow Beach



Rainbow Beach and the coloured sands on the right



The sunset in the town of 1770



A strange looking duck-type thing in the zoo



A big factory and a boat pulling some little boats!



This factory was as big as a small town!



Looking out over Gladstone



Cape Hillsborough National park at low tide. Usually the two little hills are islands!

Moving again!

I've decided to leave Airlie beach today. Its the Easter holidays and all the sailing tours are either booked up or more expensive than they should be, damnit! But no worries, I can do it in a couple of weeks, on the way back down. The last five days have been cool though, I keep bumping into people I've met previously on the coast! I met up with the two Swedes that I went to Melbourne with and did some partying. When we were out I randomly bumped into the Irish couple I was on Fraser Island with....and yesterday I met a couple of Italian people I knew in Manly.

Airlie Beach is quite a nice place but there is only has two things to do, sail the beautiful Whitsunday Islands and party....I haven't been able to find a good sailing trip so I've been doing a lot of partying.....and watching 'womens jelly wrestling', but I won't go into that ;)

So, I'm off to Townsville, where I will meet the Swedes again and we'll go to Magnetic Island for a full moon party....oooooh! Should be fun!

I've got loads of pictures for the other posts but there is nowhere that allows uploading in Airlie Beach so I'll add them later!

Rockhampton to Airlie Beach

The next place to go was Mackay. The north of Queensland is much less developed than the rest of the coast and on this particular 400km of the main road there is NOTHING. I counted 4 petrol stations/stores and that was it. Not a stretch of road you'd wanna break down on! Managed to make it without falling asleep though and arrived in Mackay at about 4pm.

As usual, it was a ridiculously hot day and, even though you can't go in the water, I wanted to go to the beach. When I got to the beach the tide seemed to be miles out and the sand was all brown and muddy. There were two islands on the horizon and it looked like you might be able to walk over to them so I walked out in that direction. You couldn't walk over to them but the water was really shallow and there were loads of fish jumping out of the water, I've never seen anything like it! I stood watching the fish for about 5 minutes and then suddenly realised I was ankle-deep in water. The tide was coming in faster than I could ever imagine. I looked back to see the path I had taken being closed off by the fast moving tide. It was so quick that the water didn't wash up and down it just kept advancing in one go. I was joined by a load of local kids who would run out to high sand points and let the tide chase them into the shore, was good fun!

The next day I went to Blacks Beach, on the north side of Mackay. The beach was beautiful and it was hard to resist the temptation to go in the water, so I decided to drive to the next destination, Cape Hillsborough National Park. This tiny national park includes a bay, a small mountain and two islands just off the shore. When I got there the tide was going out and, as it got further out, a rocky path appeared to the two islands! As I walked over to the path, I noticed the sand was all bumpy with lots of holes. Probably a few crabs, I thought. Then about 50 meters later I happened to look at the beach in front of me......the whole beach was moving! It was actually millions of these little blue crabs all marching about in a formation covering about 10 square meters! As I walked through them they parted like the red sea, it was quite spectacular. I got a video of them which I'll try to upload when I get the chance! The Islands were beautiful, as was the whole bay and I was the only one there for most of the time......

After that it was about 90km to Airlie Beach, the gateway to the beautiful Whitsunday Islands :)

Noosa to Rockhampton

It took a while to compose the Fraser Island post, that was actually all over a week ago!

So, I was dropped back in Noosa and recovered my car, which was slowly being buried by bits of the tree I left it under. That evening I drove over to a place called Tin Can Bay. The main attraction of Tin Can Bay is that every morning at about 7am two dolphins swim in and you can go in the water and feed them for free! I got there at night and slept near the place they were supposed to come. Woke up at about 7am and by the time I got down there the dolphins had already arrived. There were only 2 people there so I got in the water and got to stroke one of the dolphins! At 8am we could feed it some fish - you could drop the fish right into its mouth!

Later that day I went to rainbow beach, named because of its coloured sands. They were much the same as the coloured sands on Fraser Island but I viewed them from a massive sandblow that also overlooked the entire bay, beautiful! Next stop was Bundaberg but there wasn't much there (except free internet) so I didn't stay long!

That afternoon I drove to 'the town of 1770', which sticks out from the mainland and curves round to form a big bay. This means that you can sort-of watch the sun set into the water - one of the only places this is possible on the east coast. While I was watching the sun go down a couple of South African girls called me over to see a group of dolphins that had come over to the shore (it must have been dolphin day!). I got talking to them and we got some dinner and chatted long into the night :)

The next day I went for a final surf for a while. Further north is the home of the Box-Jellyfish, a highly deadly jellyfish which ensures that no-one even goes in the water, let alone surfs!

The next stop was Gladstone but I was delayed getting there cos my car broke! Suddenly the temp gage shot up so I stopped to take a look. One of the hoses had a hole in it and coolant was coming out of it. Filled it up with water and just about managed to get to a service station. Unfortunately it was the least accessible hose in the whole car and I didn't really have any tools, so I had to pay the mechanic to fit the new hose. Luckily repairs are quite cheap in Oz so after parting with $50 (about 20 quid) I was on my way again! Gladstone is just a really big port, so didn't really have anything interesting to do. Took a few pics and grabbed a late lunch and buggered off!

Got to Rockhampton late-ish and had a wander around. Again, there wasn't much in the way of tourist attractions so I went to the cinema to watch Pan's Labarynth, which is really good! The next day I went to the city's botanic gardens. They had a small zoo there which was quite good - there were chimps, snakes, koalas, baboons, loads of weird birds and many more!

Fraser Island!

Note: I've added some stuff to the last couple of posts :)

Day 1

I didn't need to look for a place to sleep that night, the woman at the booking office said I could leave the car round the back of the shop while I was away, so I thought I might as well sleep there too! I was so excited about going to Fraser Island that I didn't sleep much that night and woke up at 6:30am. It was pissing it down with rain. I stood outside the shop waiting for the bus to come get me at 8am and by 8:20am I was wondering if they had forgotten me! But no, the bus turned up and the guide introduced me to all the other people in the group. There was a German couple, a French girl, an Irish couple, a Swiss girl, two American girls and an Italian couple (who I practiced my Italian on!).

Once we were down the road a bit the guide said that usually the weather is good on Fraser Island if its bad on the mainland.....I thought that was quite optimistic but he was right! By the time we rolled up the beach to the crossing point the sun was beating down on us and it was a beautiful day :) It was nice to get out of the bus because we had just done about 80km of unsealed 4WD tracks and sandy, bumpy, beach roads (anyone who knows me well will know that I get VERY travel sick!). Anyway, as the ferry carried us over, the guide told us a bit about the island. Fraser Island is the biggest 'sand island' in the world and is composed entirely of sand apart from one anchor point, an old volcano sticking out of the sea. Over thousands of years sand that was washed off the mainland built up around the anchor point to create the island. The island is home to loads of rare animals and trees. For example, Fraser Island is home to the purest dingoes in the world (because they don't allow dogs on the island to prevent cross-breeding) and a species of tree that resists salt water and only grows there and in French Guiana.

Once we were on the Island we thundered up the beach (the main 'road' on the island is the beach!) to the accommodation owned by the company. This comprised of three, 6 bed, dorms, each with a shower (with hot water!) and toilet - a luxury compared to my usual accommodation (the bed in the back of my car). The guide said they had a room for the couples, a room for the girls and a room for the boys....this meant that I got a room for myself!!!

We had lunch and headed off to our first destination, Eli Creek, a freshwater creek running over bright white sand into the sea. The guide explained that the island collects rainwater like a sponge but it can't escape because the salt water under the island is denser. Consequently, it just bubbles up out of the sand, heavily filtered along the way, and runs off into the creek. All the taps on the island were basically pipes shoved into the ground with little pumps on them. He said that more fresh water flows into the sea daily than Sydney uses in a week! Next was a quick photo stop at the Maheno shipwreck, which was blown ashore by a storm while being towed to Japan in 1935. Apparently the Australians trained the RAAF on Fraser Island, who used the boat for target practice. At one point a bomb landed right in the middle and split the ship in half, one half sinking into the sand! After that we went on to the coloured sands. These are cliffs made of compacted, different coloured sand, each layer left behind by a different ice age....there is also an aboriginal dream-time story of how the coloured sands were formed.

The Butchulla people, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Fraser Island, who call Fraser Island k'gari, tell of a girl who left her man to go off with the rainbow man. Now, the disgruntled jilted lover was a bit of a hero when it came to using his killing boomerang, and he decided to hunt down his ex and kill her for shaming him. He eventually found her on k'gari and threw his boomerang at her. The rainbow man, however, threw himself in front of her in an act of selfless love, and when the boomerang hit him he was shattered him into a million colourful pieces that fell onto the dunes of k'gari.

We ended the day at Indian Head, which is the remainder of the volcano that is the anchor point for the island and the only body of rock on the island. The main attraction of Indian Head is to sit at the top and look down through the crystal-clear waters at the sea life. There are a LOT of sharks in this area (so much that you aren't allowed to swim in the sea), so we were all looking out for them. There were millions of small fish, loads of big tuna, a few stingrays and some manta-rays. Then we saw about 10 bottle-nose dolphins surfing along on the waves! They would surf down the wave, climb back up it and do a jump at the end! We saw a small shark and then just as we were about to leave a 2 meter long shark but it was quite near the bottom so was more like a big black blob....and that was all on day one!

Day 2

Got woken up at 7:30am by out guide making cockerel noises outside the rooms! After a quick breakfast we drove into the rainforest (on the bumpiest road I've ever seen!) for a 5km hike through the bush. It was quite hard going because I couldn't really stand on the back part of my right foot (due to the cuts I got from surfing), but I made it in the end. When we reached the end of the track the guide met us there to show us a couple of trees. One was a 2000+ year old tree that only grows in about 20 places in the world and was used by the BBC in the documentary 'walking with dinosaurs'. The other was a patterned tree which inspired an American to create the classic camouflage pattern!

After that we drove to Lake Birrabeen. Apparently the lake exfoliates you and is known to the aboriginals as a healing pool! But the next lake was the most amazing. Lake Boomanjin is surrounded by Melaleuca trees, which is where tea-tree oil comes from. the oil seeps out of the Melaleuca trees into the lake, creating a big healing pool! I spent ages in this pool and the next day my foot didn't hurt at all. In fact, at the time of writing (3 days later) all the cuts have almost completely healed, amazing! At the end of the day we returned to the camp to find that some dingoes had got into the kitchen and were trying to find our food. The guide had to chase them out with a broom!

Day 3

After breakfast we were dropped off on the beach at the start of a walking track. We walked through the forest for about 30 minutes until we came to a huge sandblow (a dune with no vegetation to hold it in place that gets blown over by the wind). After walking about 3km over this sandblow we came to Lake Wabby, the deepest of the lakes on Fraser Island. The surroundings were beautiful, there was rainforest on one side and miles of sand on the other side. We had brought a body board to slide down the sand dunes on and some bread to feed the 'giant catfish'. I jumped in the water with some bread and waited for a catfish to come. Suddenly I was surrounded by all these big dark shapes and could feed them right out of my hand! Spent a while trying to catch one but I didn't manage it!

After a 30min walk back we returned to the camp for a late lunch and then headed off the island. It was a great trip, if you are ever in the area you have to check it out!




Our bus!



A Wedge-Tail, the biggest raptor in the world (I think!)



Driving up the beach!



The Coloured Sands



This spider was just outside the kitchen!



Eli Creek



Looking left from Indian Head



And right



The group



The wreck of the Maheno from the front



And again from the back, most of which is under the sand!



Lake Wabby



Feeding the giant Catfish at Lake Wabby



Trying to catch one



Healing myself in Lake Boomanjin




A dingo that lived near our accommodation



Lake Birrabeen

Noosa

Noosa is a beautiful place. This area of the coast is dominated by resort-ish type places with high-rise buildings and fast food restaurants everywhere, but Noosa doesn't have any of that! It is like a small but modern town in the middle of a tropical paradise....the shops and apartments are surrounded by palm trees and beautiful beaches with no high buildings to spoil the view!

As soon as I arrived I headed over to the national park, which is also where the good surf is. The best place was just behind a load of rocks....the waves were quite easy but getting into the water was a mission cos there were rocks running from the car park to 5 meters out to sea! After that I went for a look at the national park. The park is fairly small by national park standards with 5 walks that take you through different types of forest. I did them all (over the next three days), the best was the coastal walk - I saw a koala while walking it!

In the evening I headed over to Noosaville to do some fishing. Surprisingly, I caught a load of bream! Its unusual for me to catch more than one or two fish so, for the first time, I actually had enough fish to make a meal! Cooked them on a BBQ wrapped in foil...mmmmmm

For the next couple of days I just surfed in the morning, walked in the day and fished in the evening. On the third morning I was surfing in the usual place but the waves were much bigger. This was great for the surf but made it really hard to get in, and even harder to get out. As I was getting out the water I was standing on a rock and looked back to see a big wave coming towards me. Just managed to turn back into the sea before it smashed me. Luckily I landed on my feet. Unluckily I landed on a rock covered in little mussel things with sharp shells. After I got out I looked and saw a load of gashes on the bottom of my foot and a small chunk missing from my heel! There is a happy ending to this story in the next post so don't worry.

Anyway, later that day I randomly bumped into some people I'd met in Manly! They were booking their trip to Fraser Island and that got me thinking I should sort out my Fraser Island trip! Went into the booking agents to have a look and before I knew it I had booked a three day trip leaving the next day!




The sun coming down just after I finished surfing on the first day, notice the bastard rocks!



The sunset, going....



...going...



...gone!



Dolphin Point on the coastal walk



Somewhere in the rainforest!

I know I said I'd get a job in Brisbane....

...but I missed the beach too much!

So I left Brisbane to continue my travels up the coast. Drove to a place called Caboolture and took the loop road through the Glass House Mountains national park. The drive through the forest was cool but the mountains themselves were amazing. I climbed the Mt. Beerburrum lookout, which was really steep but gave a great view of all the mountains. Then I drove to the Glass House Mountains lookout for a 360-degree view of all the mountains in the range. Ended the day in Caloundra and did a bit of surfing!

The next day I drove to Noosa. It is the nicest place I've been to since I left Sydney, the surf is good and the place is beautiful! But my internet time is running out so ill write about it properly later. To summarise, I got some good surf by the rocks and consequently cut my foot so I can't surf for three days (boo!), I achieved my ambition of catching some fish and eating them (yay!) and went on some beautiful walks through the rainforest (yay!).

Gonna head to the Fraser Island area soon, should be good!

Here is an aboriginal story the guide from Fraser Island told me about the Glass House Mountains. I actually nicked it from Wikipedia, hence the extra interesting bit on the end.

The mountains are the subjects of several Aboriginal tales and Coonowrin is said to be the son of Tibrogargan and Beerwah. During a violent storm, Tibrogargan commanded his son Coonowrin to take his mother Beerwah and his siblings and help them move to safety. Being scared of the storm, Coonowrin instead ran off and when his father found him he hit him on the back of the head, resulting in Coonowrin's crooked neck. Tibrogargan was so ashamed of his son's cowardice that to this day he sits with his back to Coonowrin.

It used to be possible to climb Coonowrin, but this is now forbidden for safety reasons. During a geological survey of the mountain some years ago, substantial cracks were found near the peak (behind Coonowrin's "face") and it is thought that at any time half of the mountain could suddenly break away from the remainder.

Mt. Beerwah



Mt. Coonowrin



Mt. Tibrogargan



Mt. Coonowrin again!