Busy busy days here in Sunshine Beach these past few weeks. The four of us have been painstakingly focused on finding a used vehicle to buy for our upcoming trip round Oz. While we did consider creating an awesome used car buying montage, on the whole the process hasn't made for very exciting blog posts. However, the Sunshine Beach/Noosa area is incredibly beautiful, and in between car shopping we've taken many walks to the beaches and done a few treks through the National Park (which is spread out throughout the area). Wild Turkeys (Bush Turkeys) are everywhere. They're protected here but are largely hated by local residents because they've become so comfortable around people that they often wander into homes and through restaurant patios looking for handouts. We've also encountered plenty of kookaburras (yay!) and rainbow lorikeets which are beautiful but deafeningly loud. Funny thing about lorikeets - the berries they eat are fermented, so more often than not these birds are quite drunk when they're flying around and screeching at the top of their lungs.
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Arrived in Noosa after a 40 min bus ride to be enthusiastically welcomed by Emily. Taking in the scenery during the ride, we immediately noticed how tropical and lush everything is in this area. Living in the states, most people tend to imagine Australia as this desert wasteland solely inhabited by venomous insects, snakes, 20 foot crocodiles, and crazy people who think it's a good idea to live there. While a fair amount of the country fits that description, there are also huge tracts of rainforest - predominantly in Queensland - that look more like Costa Rica or Colombia. I'm sure there are still plenty of killy creatures around, but that's pretty much a given wherever you go in the world. There was no time to get a nap in - quick bus to Emily and Devin's house in Sunshine Beach, then another to Tewantin, where the house boat was anchored and awaiting our arrival. Devin, the man with the plan, managed to organize an amazing house boat trip up the Noosa River with us and a bunch of friends from his restaurant job. Mar and I were pretty excited just to see our two friends, but the thought of spending three nights on a river with a bunch of food, beer, and several apprentice chefs was icing on the cake. While the overall trip was a blast, it had its fair share of interesting moments - like when Reese (one of the young chefs) forgot to tie up the dinghy to the back of the boat and Emily had to throw on some flippers to go grab it before it floated all the way down the river. Or when Reese (again) drove the 12 ton boat straight into a clearly marked sandbar and we all had to jump out and push the boat back into deeper water before the oncoming current drove it further onto the bar...good times. Most of the restaurant staff that were able to come on the trip were aged 19-20ish, so being the oldest, most mature members of the boat crew was, well... a bit weird. Also the "kids" were all about the Death Metal music, and as much fun as Slipknot is for 72 hours, it didn't really fit the theme of the river trip so we raged a passive-aggressive music battle. We did manage to eat like kings - steaks one night, spaghetti bolognese another, plus some self-caught mud crab sauteed in butter for a midday snack. I managed to get some fly-fishing in...actually just fly-casting, as I didn't even get a nibble no matter what I tried. :( It was pretty disheartening when this old man floating by managed to reel in the biggest fish I'd seen on the trip, just as I was packing up my rod for the last time. I may or may not have weeped openly at that moment. Absolutely Exhausted.
After a miserable, sleepless, shotgun start to make a 6 am flight on the "cheap as" (as the Aussies would say) Tiger Airways (the Easy Jet of Oz), we made it to Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast only to find that the Greyhound bus we had tickets for to go to Noosa did not have any pickup station even remotely close to the airport where we landed. Luckily, the bus wasn't scheduled for another 3 hours, so we hopped in a cab to go into town. The cab driver, in both voice and appearance, was a perfect likeness of Richard Attenborough/John Hammond in Jurassic Park. Driving through the lush rainforest/tropical landscape we very well could've been on a dinosaur-filled island. Which brings up a good fun fact -- apparently there used to be a species of carnivorous kangaroo in Australia. Essentially a furry velociraptor, though probably way too dumb to open doors. Anyway, Mr. Hammond dropped us right by a shopping complex called Sunshine Plaza, a kind of indoor/outdoor mall split in half by a river traversed by footbridges. We noticed that people were using grocery store shopping carts all over this mall, so we grabbed one and loaded all of our bags in and wandered the shops. Needless to say, we looked a little bit like the Clampetts, or maybe gore-tex gypsies, given our dual instrument cases and haggard appearance. A man with his wife and baby asked us if we on the Amazing Race TV show. We found out that a local bus would take us straight from the shopping center up to Noosa where we were meeting Emily for only $7, so we scrapped our Greyhound option for the cheaper, much faster route. |
Marielle & BenWe're two people in the midst of severe quarter-life crises who decided to leave good jobs in a bad economy to travel to the other side of the world because, well, why not? Archives
April 2011
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