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Today Jo and I said goodbye to Steve, for the 2nd time which was incredibly sad as I do not know when I'll get to see him again - probably when I get sick of England and go live in his new basement flat.
We got the train to Brisbane and walked 20 minutes with our bags on our backs to the Wicked Campervan Depot, which near killed me let alone Jo. Wicked Campers are converted white vans with slogans on the back, sometimes rude and sometimes funny, and with crazy spray paint on the sides. Ours, by comparison to others, was fairly chilled out, thank goodness.
We headed north to a place called Caloundra and stayed the night in a campsite called Dicky Beach. The following day we headed north via Mooloolaba to Noosa. Here we found the most beautiful campsite right on the estuary, 10 minutes walk to Hastings Street (very famous place where the rich go) and the main beach there. That evening we tried out our gas burner for the first time. It was an awesome little thing, able to boil a full pan of water in 3 minutes flat, quite dangerous when in our hands. I saw a lot of pasta and noodles being cooked before the end of the month.
The following day was spent on the beach in Noosa, and exploring Hastings Street. This became one of our favourite places in Oz and we wished we stayed longer. Anyway, the following day we got up at the crack of dawn and drove to Rainbow Beach, famous for the multi coloured sands present in the cliffs and especially when seen at sunset, looks incredible. This is also the starting point for Fraser Island. We booked ourselves onto a Fraser Island trip for the following day and spent the afternoon on the beach. We found out that we were able to camp in a car park on the beach for only $4 (£2) a night, so we drove down to take a look. We pulled into the campsite with enthusiasm and before we knew it we were stuck in the sand. Our van is not especially light and we continued to sink every time the wheels turned. This was a worrying half an hour to put it lightly put after shovelling piles of sand and a lot of pushing and stressful shouting we got free. We decided it might be a good idea to camp elsewhere that night.
Saturday 14th June was out Fraser Island day. We drove to town where we caught the bus. This was no ordinary bus however. It was fully equipped to deal with any road you could possibly think of - 8 gear transmission, full extreme suspension, big tractor like wheels, 4 levels of traction control etc etc. We took the ferry across to the island and then started driving down the beach. Fraser Island is the world's largest sand island and you can drive for hours along the beach and the scenery does not change at all, it really is quite incredible. We ended up at Lake Mackenzie just before lunch - one of the top 10 places in the world to swim. It is a freshwater lake, slightly acidic so there is NO fish life or anything in the water and the water is as fresh as bottled water. It also does not get very deep, a maximum of 9 metres in the centre and you are able to swim from one side to the other. The colours were extraordinary. It was a brilliant hour, definitely one of the most beautiful places I have seen. We then had a buffet lunch in a resort on the island before driving inland to the rainforest, one of the oldest pieces of rainforest anywhere in the world. Afterwards we spent more time driving along the beach, where we stopped and saw whales migrating north and a ship wreck from WWII.
Overall it was a great day, well worth seeing if you are on the east coast of Australia. That night was another early one as we were extremely tired, and planned to get up early to travel north…into the mining, interbreeding part of the country.
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