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.