Advertisement
Published: February 2nd 2014
Edit Blog Post
After leaving Rainbow Beach, we drove to Gympie in hope for there to be a food store. We had from Rainbow Beach booked a canoe-trip together with Ruwen and Marie, and we were supposed to bring food for 3days along. Having not much left in the car, we hurried to the first biggest city, and found nothing but a rater expensive 24h convenience store open, but at this point everything was better than nothing. We bought some dried food, 24 eggs and headed off for Noosa. We arrived fairly late, though the boys did the driving so at least the girls got some necessary sleep. In the morning we packed our gear and went for the waterfront in order to catch our transfer boat up the Noosa River. The company provided us with some tents, cooking equipment and waterproof barrels and we packed all of importance into these. We got dropped off at the mouth of the river and from there on we were on our own. We had in advance got given some information about the campsite and what to do in case of an emergency, however luckily this did not come in handy. We were 11 people in total
The Camp at Harry's Hut
The rest of the group - not all the people knew how to put up a tent ^^ divided out in 5 canoes. We paddled together, though Christian did not consider that Louise was not too experienced in canoeing (and therefore should not be sitting in the steering end) - we ended up paddling quite a bit in circles. Nevertheless, all of us reached our planned camp site around midday and we decided to put up our tents and get settled in. Unfortunately we discovered that the zipper of our tent was broken so we couldn’t close it proper. Considering Louise’s concerns about spiders crawling in we had to improvise and collect stones and other weights to close the gaps which were created by the broken zipper at the bottom of the entrance. While most of the group went for another canoe trip in the afternoon we, Ruwen and Marie used the opportunity to relax from the last days exhaustions :-) and ended playing cards until the evening. Although we had brought only low budget food we realized that we somehow ended up cooking some of the fanciest food in the whole group :-) There were even some German girls who actually had no idea what they should do with their canned baked beans and started out placing
the whole can on top of the gas cooker, afterwards they placed the can itself inside a pot on top of the gas cooker which they were not able to start. Ruwen’s opinion about this was that he would not allow these girls to leave their house in Germany if they would have been his daughters ;-)
We played a bit more cards before heading to the jetty where the canoes were tied up, from where we could admire the most amazing star sky we’ve ever seen. Thanks to the total remoteness of the Everglades there were no disturbing lights from cities or similar which made the sky look like a giant ocean full of stars. Once we made it to bed we realized how cold it actually becomes in the Everglades, so we had to squeeze into the only sleeping back we brought which made it a little difficult to turn to the other side ;-). Louise was happy about this sleeping arrangement, since no spiders would be able to get to her (at least from the bottom of the tent.
The next morning all of us got up rater early since we had a big trip
Playing with the camera settingsin front of us. Our plan was to paddle about 2 hours further up the river before starting another roughly 3 hour return hike to Australia’s biggest sand blow in the middle of the Everglades. Paddling up the river was very cozy despite the unusual usage of arm muscles and we saw heaps of birds, beautiful mangroves and rainforest landscape. (By the way, there were no crocodiles, so don’t worry! ;-) The hike on the contrary led us mainly through dry eucalyptus forest and slowly ascended up to the start of the enormous sand blow. The view which awaited us from a lookout point in the middle of the dune, looking like a desert, was truly amazing. Due to its location at the edge of the mountain we walked up, one could see most of the river we paddled and the landscape which lay beyond until the ocean. After some picture time where Louise unsuccessfully tried to make a hand stand :-) we went back the way we came from since including the canoeing, we had still quite some distance to cover. Luckily the river was rather cool and refreshing so we went for a swim, which helped us to
DANGER
Apparently our trail was closed - uiuiuiui -Christian scared . . . cool down before getting into our boats. Also, we could let ourselves be pushed by the rivers current for some time before we had to start paddling on our own :-). We took our time, and enjoyed it greatly being in the total nature. We paddled together with Ruwen and Marie, and at some point we hold on to each other’s canoes, and were just chit chatting along the river. A few Christmas carols got sung, and it was very cozy.
Once we made it back to our base camp we again started cooking our “five star” dinner consisting of fried noodles with carrots, peanuts, and egg. The rest of the evening we spent together with most of the other group members and exchanged travelling experiences while having beers and wine. At one point we realized that we were surrounded by many frogs which came out in the coolness of the night and a Scottish girl was too afraid to go to the toilet alone in fear of getting bitten by the frogs :-) Since Louise was afraid of spiders they teamed up and went together looking out for each other. But before going to bed we
Sandblow
Playing with the settings of the camera couldn’t help but to spend some more time at the jetty where we had again the most wonderful view on a perfect star sky!
Due to our early appointment further down the river where we had to return our canoes, we started the day very early by breaking our camp and packing the boats. We did not paddle as fast as the other boats, so we sank behind the group, leaving us in the total remoteness of the nature. We used the paddle time for exchanging Christmas stories from our childhood, and teaching each other Christmas songs in the other ones language. This was really fun, and we really enjoyed our time in the canoe. With some minutes to spare we finally arrived at the meeting point with our “taxi” and from then on continued down the river by motor :-) There we even saw a kangaroo taking a bath at the river bank which according to our driver was very unusual…
Since it was already the 24
th of December our driver even offered to the whole group to spend Christmas eve at his place, with drinking beers and eat lots of sea food, but despite we were
Sandblow
Louise enjoying the view tempted by the offer both of us had already agreed to make our way down to Brisbane as soon as we were ready to leave Noosa. We were going to spend Christmas at Miyako and Lasse’s place (2 friends of Louise). Since we also agreed to have a last christmas lunch with Ruwen and Marie on the 25
th before our ways would separate, we went once more shopping with them before turning southwards to Brisbane.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.08s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0373s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb