Megamoon

Our next stop was the east cost of Australia. We flew into Brisbane and drove north up to Cape Tribulation, going on some pretty amazing adventures on the way.

The drive was looong, but the 20 days passed quickly. The first 1,100 miles (Brisbane to Cairns) were on one road: the Bruce Highway. We became very familiar with the Bruce Highway (Brucey) and its straight roads lined with sugar cane farms (largest sugar cane producing region in the world), plus the odd stretch of mango trees/banana trees. Chris did a great job of all the driving!

Points of interest on our long drives included:

• The bigger sugar cane farms, with their own mini railways (really mini-like the train rides we used to sit on as children) which carry 10-20 carriages of sugar cane to the processing factories. The railways weave their way across the Bruce highway, with associated mini crossings on the road.
• Turkey/cassowarys (emu sized turkeys) that like to wander on the roads.
• A Bush fire (streuth!)
• Many many cows
• A spider (that I named black widow) that lived in the passenger wind mirror for the entire journey,  requiring many spider invasion checks.

The landscape was pretty flat and samey until after Airlie Beach. From then up to Cape Tribulation the views became more and more spectacular with forested mountains and long stretches of road running next to turquoise sea.

The weather was very nice, the humidity we’d experienced in Malaysia disappeared (although started to appear again as we drone north) and it was a lovely 30-33C (23-26C at night).

We spent a day and a half in Brisbane. It was a nice city, not too crowded, bicycle friendly, a river flowing through it and a familiar-looking Southbank (a mini version of London’s Southbank).

We were itching to get to the coast though, so headed off to our first stop-Noosa via the scenic route: the Steve Irwin Highway.

Noosa is a great spot. It has a big beach (safe to swim in), a river estuary, an esplanade with swanky designer shops and restaurants and warm but not humid weather.

As night fell, we walked along a roadside track to get into the town, paranoid about spiders and snakes in the undergrowth. With perfect timing, a large black animal swung down on a bendy tree, right in front of our faces. Amid a few seconds of pure terror, we realised it wasn’t a giant spider and was in fact a reasonably cute giant rat (later confirmed as a possum).

From Noosa we went on a 3 day & 2 night Fraser Island tour. Fraser Island is a big, ancient and rare sand island (especially as it has an established rainforest growing in the sand).

No shoes required for the next 3 days!

There were 30 people on our tour split across four 4x4s. We all took it in turn to drive approx 200 miles off road – the majority on sandy beaches. (Note I haven’t included this mileage in the total mentioned at the start)

We saw some amazing sights on Fraser Island:

• Lake Mckenzie – an inland white silica beach around a clear fresh water lake:

• The Maheno Wreck – washed up after a cyclone on 1935 and used for secret service training missions in WW2.

• Lake Wabby – nestled behind a giant “sand-blow” (inland dunes):

• Rainbow Beach – multicoloured layered sand cliffs:

• Champagne Pools – swimming pools among the rocks which fill with foam when waves crash over them.
• A monster jellyfish:

• A live, venomous sea snake:

We also went on a 15 minute pleasure flight in a very small plane (beach take off and landing) which was very exciting!

We camped on the beach, made very poor attempts at ‘playing’ the digeriedoo and did some spectacular star watching. Fraser Island is  so remote that we could see two galaxies amongst amongst the stars!