We picked up the van on Thursday and eventually found our way onto the highway out of Sydney. We covered a fair few kilometres the first day, spending the night in a place called Port Macquarie. In the morning we visited the town's Koala hospital. A free way to see some Koalas. Some have recovered from severe injuries such as being hit by cars or caught in forest fires but most of them have minor conditions, one of the most common being Chlamydia. Dirty stopouts!!
We travelled up the highway to Coffs Harbour, another resort town on the coast stopping off along the way at anywhere that looked interesting. Wallabies by the road side have now become a fairly common sight, I'm not sure where it was that we first saw them.
We cooked dinner in a random park then went for a couple of drinks in the evening. To save on campsites we slept in a quiet side road.
From Coff's harbour we tried and failed to find a learn to surf place that had been recommended to us. Unfortunately it's billed as an out in the middle of nowhere place and our lack of a decent map made it rather hard to find.
We continued up the Coast to Byron Bay, a lively holiday and surf town with hippie roots. We naively forgot that it was Easter weekend when they hold a festival in the town so again opted to stay in a quiet street as everything else was booked out. Not sure of the legality of doing so around Byron but we got away with it. I think loads of other people were doing the same. We spent a bit of time chilling on the beach then headed in to town for a few drinks. Byron is pretty cool at night, very chilled with a trendy bar on the ocean and lots of hippie type live music. About half way through the night the skies opened in spectacular fashion but luckily we were under cover at the time. At least it's still warm here when it rains and it lasts a few minutes not all day.
In the morning we took a walk through the rain forest up to the headland, seeing wild turkeys (stupid things, they're everywhere!) and a blue tongue lizard. We thought the later was a snake as they kind of look like one with stupid stumpy little legs stuck on the side. After steering well clear an aussie came along and told us it was only a lizard and wasn't going to kill us. After that we headed up the coast, stopping off a couple of beaches before camping at a place called Kirra beach for the night.
After having the first hot shower for a couple of days we continued up the coast, past a couple of top surf breaks, to Surfers Paradise. Surfers, as it's known is a big resort town, a bit tacky but still a cool place. We had a walk around the shops at Jenn's request but didn't dwell for too long. We spent the night at a small campsite a bit north of there in a town called Carbrook. The looks from the locals suggested they weren't too used to seeing outsiders!
From here it was just a short drive up to Brisbane, Oz's 3rd largest city. We wandered around the Queensland museum to fill in on some local history then had a look around the gardens near the city in the afternoon. Come about 2pm we finally realised that it was actually only 1pm as we were now in Queensland which doesn't do daylight saving or something like that. Brisbane is just another city, nothing that exciting to see, so we left to try and find a national park that lonely planet mentioned and had cheap camping. We'd bought a map of NSW but had no decent map of Queensland so drove about 30kms past the place before finally getting some directions. We decided it was too far to go back so stayed the night in a campsite somewhere near Australia Zoo (the late Steve "the crocodile hunter" Irwin's place). That bring things pretty much up to date. We drove on to a small town called Noosa this morning which is where I am now. Another picturesque place with some fancy villa style accom. We've just forked out a big wad of cash for a Fraser Island Safari and a Whitsunday sailing trip. We'll be heading over to Fraser from Harvey bay on Sun 30th so have some time to kill until then. We're going to spend the afternoon chilling on the beach and will be learning to surf tomorrow which should be good. Hopefully I'll be a natural!!
