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Published: July 10th 2006
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Rainbow Beach- Queensland (The tale of the mobile phones)
We left Brisbane June 5th to head further North and spent a few days en-route at Noosa. Noosa is a lovely setting with beautiful waterfront homes; it’s more sophisticated than most places we’ve visited (apart from Byron Bay) so as travellers it proved a bit expensive for us to stay there. This was in stark contrast to our next destination, Rainbow Beach (RB). Here we were able to rent a little beach house for $50 a night. RB is a tiny seaside village with enough facilities to self cater or eat out, the local fresh fish shop was excellent. We planned to stay 6 nights as we had lots we wanted to do but we left after 5 because strong South Easterly winds and lots of rain curtailed our plans.
The coloured sand is interesting to see and we walked up to the Sand Blow Hole- about a 5 km round trip. On the way back I drowned my mobile phone by not putting the top on the water bottle in my bag. Technology is wonderful though, the phone had goodbye on the screen before it finally faded out! As you
Beach Highway-
Does anyone know or even care that it was the Queen's b'day? can imagine I was popular, neither of our mobiles were working in the area anyway………..
Rainbow Beach is primarily a 4 wheel drivers paradise as no license is required to drive on the beach and Inskip point is the shortest ferry gateway to drive over to Fraser Island. Most people travel to Fraser via Hervey Bay. It was the Queens birthday week-end so it was very busy with 4 wheel drive cars, loaded with fishing rods and beer more fishing rods and more beer, and more beer etc. etc.
We did unwittingly take a 25 km steep, winding, adrenaline drive through bush and deep sand tracks. There was little room for passing and the locals were much faster then we were, well this was our first attempt at serious off road driving, actually John did the driving. After about 10 minutes John thought he should double check where the car-jack was in case we had a puncture. When we got to Rainbow Beach on the flat sand his mobile phone was missing out of his shorts pocket. We can only assume that this had fallen out when he got out the car earlier. This meant we had to make
Steph on the Sand Blow Hole!
Vegetation collapses and over time gives way to the development of massive dunes several calls at a phone box to stop it being used and we couldn’t phone it up to see if anyone had found it as we had no signal for either phone! Well, as you can imagine he was popular but in the meantime my phone dried out and came back to life- numbers still there etc. To lose 2 phones in 3 days ………would be really bad luck?
Wolf Rock is home to about 30 grey nurse sharks but we couldn’t get out of RB to dive it as it was too rough even though it’s only a kilometer off shore. When we were walking along the beach we were convinced we could see humpback whales breaching in the distance only to shame ourselves into realising that it was waves braking over WOLF ROCK! We had no idea it was that small, no wonder it wasn't diveable in the prevailing weather.
We were really keen to see the whales migrating North to Hervey Bay to breed but we could not do this trip either. There is no sea swimming at Fraser Island as Tiger sharks prey on the whales calf’s.
We fancied our chances of doing some sea kayaking
only to be politely told that we needed to be very fit- his way of saying we need to be younger. Then we thought we would get on a cheap day trip to Frazer Island only to be told it’s primarily for young people-back packers making a lot of noise-mostly British....
Feeling somewhat deflated, coupled with bad weather we decided not to take the car over to Fraser Island and there were also local reports of lots of 4WD getting stuck. In the local tour shop there is a pictorial wall of shame of all the 4WD’s that have been stranded or flooded on the beach……we didn’t want to join the gallery.
We left Rainbow Beach in glorious sunshine on June 12th only to have a flat battery an hour later, fortunately on a main road, the NMRA (AA/RAC UK equiv) came out to us in about an hour- we’re really glad we did not go over to Fraser that day as planned it could have been a disaster!
John now has a new mobile phone which is on a different network to mine so hopefully we will get network coverage between us.
We will go back to this area
One of our favourite Australian birds
This lovely Kookaburra was a real poser. to try and dive WOLF Rock and see the WHALES as they return Southwards.
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Chris and Nikki
Chris
Awesome picture!