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Published: July 13th 2013
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The next top on our trip was Hervey Bay, so we left Noosa on the 6
thof July and had a drive of around two and a half hours to get there. Although we got to Hervey Bay Flashpackers (the sister hostel to the one in Noosa where we had just been!) by around 12pm, which was much earlier than the check in time of 2pm, we were actually able to check in straight away as it was fairly quiet and our room was ready. We dropped off our bags in our room, which was similar to the last one, then went to have a look around the local area and grab some lunch. We had a walk down to the esplanade just down the road, which runs the whole length of Hervey Bay, with a few shops, hotels and cafes dotted along there. We then returned to our room later that afternoon and had a chilled out evening in the room, with Emma reading a book and Craig browsing the internet on the first free wifi that we had come across on our trip – though it did make up for the fact that we didn’t have a TV in our
room for the first time!
The following day we had a drive down to the Marina, where we stupidly left the camera back in the room in another bag which we hadn’t unpacked – d’oh! We had a lovely lunch one of the restaurants along the front, Craig going for a Sunday roast and Emma having a lasagne. We then had a little walk around the marina, before deciding, as it was another gorgeous day, we would go and have a walk around the botanic gardens. We took the 10 minute drive and parked up before strolling around the paths of the gardens – it was more like a mini forest, with lots of trees providing a large canopy to walk under, before opening up to some pools, where we found ducks and turtles swimming around! We sat on a bench for a while and watched out for the turtles bobbing up their heads every now and again, and just basking in the lovely sunshine. Unfortunately, this would be the last sunny day that we would see in Hervey Bay, which made us all the more gutted that we had not taken the camera out with us!
Over
the next few days, the weather unfortunately took a turn for the worst - it rained on and off every day, and the skies became cloudy and overcast. We also found that there was really not a lot to do in Hervey Bay – there was not really a ‘town centre’ as such where we could spend the day walking around the shops. The main attractions here were a trip to Fraser Island or whale watching – we already did Fraser Island from Noosa and although we did consider another whale watching trip we found out that it was still early in the whale season this far up the coast and they had not been having much luck with spotting any! We had considered hiring bikes from the hostel and taking a ride along the 16km esplanade, however we figured it wouldn’t really be much fun in the pouring rain! Boo!
We didn’t want to be stuck in the room so when the rain eased we did take a couple of trips on various days to take some pictures. We first visited Arkarra Lagoons – a series of lagoons just outside of Hervey Bay that had a few small
trails leading around them. The gloomy weather and the fact that no one else was there gave it a bit of an eerie feel, but we did enjoy walking around and trying to spot the various wetlands wildlife that call this habitat home.
We also went back to the esplanade to get some pictures of the beach and the botanic gardens to try and snap some turtles – again the weather was pretty overcast on these days but at least we had the camera with us this time!
So that’s about it, pretty short and sweet for Hervey Bay – it was a shame the weather wasn’t better otherwise we probably would have done more but never mind! When planning our trip, our next stop was going to be Airlie Beach, however after finding out that it would take a drive of over nine hours to get there, we decided that we should probably book a night somewhere around half way to break up the trip a bit – we therefore booked a night in the town of Rockhampton.
We left Hervey Bay at around 9am on the 11
th of July, and the drive to Rockhampton <em
style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should have taken around four and a half hours. However, we soon realised when we had ‘arrived at our destination’ according to our sat nav, that our destination was probably not a little dirt road in the middle of a tiny farm town! We then realised that the street address on our booking for our hostel was actually spelt wrong – we had gone to “McPherson Street” in some town within the Rockhampton area, when we should have gone to “MacPherson Street” in Rockhampton. Unfortunately this meant we had taken a detour of over half an hour, which we then had to backtrack to get back to the highway to continue to the correct destination! Always one to see the positive side of things, we did get to see some wild kangaroos during our little detour – the only ones that we had seen along the highway were squashed at the side of the road L
There was also a lot of roadwork along the Bruce Highway, which meant that we came to a lot of stop signs to wait for trucks to move around, and to let oncoming traffic through the one lane that we were sharing.
In the end, the total journey time was around seven hours, so we were quite relieved to finally arrive at the YHA Rockhampton, where we would be staying the night. We had booked a double ensuite, and we were quite impressed to have a little cabin to ourselves which would be nice and comfortable for our short stay. We had also heard that Rockhampton was famous for its steak, and so we had booked a table at a local steakhouse to sample what they had to offer! We both went for the Porterhouse steak, which was - for the most part - lovely, juicy and tender, and agreed that it was one of the better steaks that we had had, although were a little disappointed that it had been cooked more medium to well-done than medium-rare as requested, and there was also more fat on it than we were expecting, which was quite gristly and chewy. It still tasted good though, and we both got $10 off our meals using a voucher that they were offering online for the month of July. Satisfied and very full up, we returned to the hostel and got a good night’s sleep before continuing
our journey to Airlie Beach the next morning.
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