We've been really unlucky with the weather here in Australia. It's been extremely wet, resulting in quite a lot of flooding in Queensland and this has meant we haven't been able to do everything we wanted to.
We arrived at the Mon Repos turtle hatchery just outside Bundaberg in a monsoonal storm with rain pounding down and were hoping that this may have kept some of the tourists away. Unfortunately this was not the case and we were allocated to group five. We took seats in the information centre and settled down to wait. The first group went off and returned an hour later soaked through but having seen a turtle nesting. Despite looking, as Bill Bryson puts it "like a giant blue condom" in our head-to-toe waterproofs, we were extremely glad of them, even just to get from the centre to the toilets! Slowly the other groups were called to visit the nesting turtles until it got to 10pm, when the rangers announced that the road back to Bundaberg was rapidly flooding and they were closing the centre. So, we never did get to see the turtles....next time. The drive back to the motel was interesting as there was loads of water over the roads, we only had a Hyundai Getz and Australians insist on driving their utes with a closeup view of the inside of your boot!
Fotunately there was not too much flooding on the major roads so the next morning we headed for Maryborough, the first settlement in Queensland (and the only big town between Bundaberg & Brisbane so we hoped it had a cinema if the rain started again!). We went off on a self-guided walking tour of Maryborough, given to us by the slightly over-zealous owner of the caravan site we were staying in (NOT camping, too wet for that). There are several colonial buildings in Maryborough, which also has a claim to fame as the place where the author of Mary Poppins was born. The next day looked slightly less wet so we went in search of somewhere to walk. Unfortunately everywhere was so saturated with water we either couldn't walk there or were attacked by mosquitos so we beat a hasty retreat to our lovely cabin in the caravan park and drank tea and slept the day away!
The next day we saw some blue sky and were so excited we drove to Noosa, a lovely seaside resort on the Sunshine (ha, ha some kind of joke??) Coast. We had a lovely walk round Noosa National Park and the sun appeared! We also saw our first snake which disappeared into the bushes pronto when it heard us coming along the path. It was fairly sizeable and we were later told that it was "probably just a python".
From Noosa we headed along the Sunshine Coast trying to find somewhere to stay. This area is pretty built up and we ended up driving into the Northern suburbs of Brisbane where weariness made us take up the most dated, dirty and dodgy motel room yet! The bed had a radio in the headboard, the tv could only cope with 2 channels and there were the same tiles in the bathroom as Sarah's parents had in the original bathroom of the old house! We left pretty early the next day and headed to D'Aguila National Park, only 10km from the centre of Brisbane but feels very rural. We drove high into the mountains and stopped for a walk only to get covered with leeches.....yes you've guessed it, a result of the recent heavy rain. We backtracked to the car and drove back down the mountain where we managed to find a nice walk minus any leeches, but with 3 huge goannas (much better).
We are now in Brisbane and have returned the plucky little Getz to Europcar. We had a wander round the city, walked in the botanical gardens, had a swim in the lagoon at the city beach and rode down the river on a City Cat. We are now off in search of a kangeroo steak for dinner (or failing that then just plain old beef steak) before heading off to Christchurch, New Zealand tomorrow!
