The Calm Before The Storm (As Well As The Storm..) - Noosa, Brisbane, Surfers Paradise And Further South

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It’s a bit of a pain Helen finished the last blog on Fraser island. We did very little in the next place we went to, Noosa - one of the big surfing towns along the sunshine coast - and therefore it makes for a rather boring start to the blog. In an attempt to make it seem slightly more interesting I may have embellished the following facts, but I can assure you that almost everything here is 100% true.

After arriving in Noosa we parked up the van and went to the local beach to get some lunch and watch surfers splash about in the freezing cold water. We didn’t see anyone properly riding the waves, but we did get to watch plenty of beginners do little more than fall face-first into the water continuously, which I think I preferred. Satisfied, we then went and did a brief walk along the pleasant beachfront area to a park where there were loads of birds, including tons more parakeets and one particularly friendly one who spent a while hopping around in front of Helen.

Whist walking back we were surprised to be greeted by a monkey in a hat. I asked the monkey “why are you wearing a hat?” To which he replied, “My name is Mr Chimps, I’m a magic monkey and I wear a magic hat - you can have 3 wishes!” Unfortunately, I managed to use up two of my wishes by saying - “I wish I could think of what I wanted” and “Damn! I wish I hadn’t said that”. But I didn’t waste my 3rd wish. I decided it’d be cool to party away the rest of the day away with Girls Aloud aboard a giant catamaran. So that’s what we did. It was a good afternoon, though the Ginger one got a bit drunk on the free booze and it all got became a bit embarrassing...

The following day we spent at Australia Zoo. We’d already been to quite a few zoos on the trip and so we wouldn’t usually be too fussed about going to another one. Still, as we’d heard great things about this particular zoo, which is famous for being owned by Steve Irwin and his family, we popped in for the day. Steve obviously isn’t with us any more, but that didn’t mean his face didn’t appear all over the park, which made the experience strange as well as a little sad. Since being in Australia we’ve come to realise that Steve was a bit of legend over here. In England he was often mocked as being ‘the bloke that pisses off animals’, but in reality he actually did a massive amount of work towards animals conservation. Though I could understand keeping all the pictures of Steve up, the pictures of his daughter were different. Despite her being alive and well, her face was all over the park no matter where you went - you could even buy dolls of her in the gift shop! It was all a little too creepy for me…

Family connections aside, the zoo was fantastic. It’s the only zoo I’ve ever been to in which all the animals looked like they had enough room to roam around and enjoy life. There was even a large open area where you could hand feed the kangaroos hopping about. We saw some good talks, a group of Tasmanian Devils and Helen got to stroke a koala.

We couldn’t dwell on the zoo too much though, as good as it was it didn’t help in my quest in Australia. For an animal to be crossed off my ‘list of animals I want to see in Australia before I leave’ it has to be seen in the wild, not in a zoo or animal park!

Let me bring you up to date with where we stand:

1) Koala
2) Cassowary - Seen at Cape Tribulation
3) Platypus - Seen in the Tablelands
4) Sea Turtle - Seen at the Great Barrier Reef
5) Kangaroo
6) Kookaburra - Seen all over the place
7) Possum
8) Wombat
9) Massive Spider - Seen far too many of…
10) Snake

As you can see, I was doing pretty well with 5 animals down after only a few weeks. But that didn’t mean I could be complacent, if I let a few weeks slip by with no new sightings I could be in trouble...

I was looking forward to our next stop, but I didn’t expect it to be very good on the animal front. Brisbane would be the first big city we’d visited in Australia and, unless wombats had learnt to drive buses or Koalas could serve burgers, I didn’t expect my number of sightings to increase.

The couple of days we spent in Brisbane were very enjoyable. We went to a couple of the museums (as they were free), went to the library to use the free Internet (so that Helen could put her blog up) and pottered around the lovely South Bank area…because doing that was free.

On our final day in the city, I had some luck. It was getting late and on the walk back to the train station we passed through a little wooded area with a boardwalk. Whilst going through we heard some noises in the trees. Following these, we must have then spent the next 30 or so minutes looking for my 6th animal sighting. At first we couldn’t see much apart from loads of mice and a brilliant owl (who we watched swoop down and catch one of the said mice) but then we got them! We found 2 possums sitting quietly in the tree and, to make it better, this time they weren’t actually just large rats this time (or bandicoots as Helen claims). 6 animals down, 4 to go!

On the way out of Brisbane, we took a bit of a detour and went to visit my parents old house, surprisingly nice as they can’t have been too old when they bought it. After going to the nearby planetarium we then visited the botanical gardens (well, the planetarium was closed) and with no further animal sightings, we headed further south and started the long journey towards Sydney.

For lunch we decided to pop off to a national park in the mountains and there we enjoyed some pasta cooked on our little portable stove (which, of course, ran out of gas half way through). We were just about to go for a walk but then it started to rain. As this rain continued, we gave up and started the 20km drive back to the campsite we wanted to stay at.

About 3 hours later we arrived somewhere to stay. For the first time on the whole trip we’d got lost. It was stupid really, we’d negotiated the suburban web of roads that make up the outskirts of Brisbane with relative ease, but a simple 20km drive had left us stumped. So stumped that by the time we did find the camp site we wanted, it’s shut for the night and we had to spend another hour or so looking for another one.

There was a reason for this apparent lack of navigational ability. No, Helen wasn’t map reading. The rain that had stopped us from going on a walk had now turned into a full on storm. To add to the storm, there was a total lack of signposts as well as low lying cloud meaning you could barely see anything. Eventually, the only way we did find a campsite was when a kind Cole’s (supermarket) employee offered to drive ahead and lead us to where we wanted to go…

That night and the next day the rain continued to chuck itself down. So much so that we decided it wasn’t worth going to the local theme parks and beaches along a 35km stretch known as the Gold Coast and instead we spent the day at Surfers Paradise, a town full of resorts and with a surprisingly low number of people surfing. Helen will assure you that ‘Surfers’ wasn’t all bad though. We went a pancake place where she devoured a large stack with all varieties of chocolate on and where I managed 6 in the ‘all you can eat’ special they had on.

Here’s a word of advice, if you’re ever in a stormy area don’t try and outrun it. Helen and I decided that rather than hang around we’d keep driving further South to get away from the weather. All that happened was that the storm followed us. Bryon Bay, the next stop, was a total wash out, with some of the local roads flooded meaning we couldn’t go to the nearby attractions. All we did manage was a trip to the Cinema to see that rubbish film ‘Duplicity’.

Having still not learnt, we tried driving further south to Coffs Harbour, only to again be followed by the storm. This time we drove through roads that must have had over a foot of water over them and when we reached the next caravan park, we gave up. After staying in our camper van for a night and being woken up periodically throughout the night by the rain hitting the roof, we paid £40 and stayed in a rather luxurious cabin for a day, in the hope we could wait the storm out.

Oh and on a better note, animal number 5 was at last seen! Pulling into the camp ground we saw several, very soggy looking, kangaroos hopping about - one of them even had a little joey in its pouch. It wasn’t exactly our first kangaroo sighting (we’d seen some in the distance before), but it was the first time we saw them up close and therefore it was the first time they could be crossed off the list.

The rain had seemed to ease and so we made the obligatory visit to the ‘big banana’, one of the main highlights of Coffs Harbour, and started the drive towards Port Macquarie.

We’d got about 2/3rds of the way when we hit a ‘road closed’ sign and a huge pool of water. The chap there told us that it would be closed for between 3 and 10 days, meaning that we had to take a detour. The suggested route was back up North to Grafton and then inland towards the Scottish Glenn Innes…. As he was saying it I was thinking.. ‘Grafton’? ‘Glenn Innes?’ ‘Aren’t they miles away?!’.

I was right, to get another 50km south, we’d have to do about 800km of driving…

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Comments

[Julie]

Hopping Bird
Your bopping bird is called a Butcher Bird. They sing beautifully and are called Butcher Birds because they hang their catch from protrusions in the tree so that they can eat them.