We left Rainbow Beach the next day (thankfully as other than trips to Fraser Island, there wasn't much to do there!) and caught the trusty Greyhound bus to Noosa, which i instantly fell in love with!! It reminded me a little bit of the South of France (Mum and Dad - the kind of place I can see you coming on holiday too!) and very mediterranean esque (def spelt that wrong..!) with a lovely little shopping street running parallel to the beach and lots of beachside apartments and holiday resorts! We were staying a little away from the main centre at Dolphins backpackers where a couple of people we had got friendly with further up the coast were staying too so that was nice!

On Friday morning we headed to Australia Zoo - its the Steve Irwin Zoo so very hands on and you could get up close with the animals! I'm not the biggest fans of caged animals but the zoo was great! We got to feed elephants and Kangaroos - i got a little scared of the Kangaroos so quickly posed for a photo whilst feeding one and then happily stayed a good few metres away from them - but everyone else loved them! We also got to pat koalas on the bottom - i'm not sure how much they enjoyed that but they were really cute. One of the highlights of the zoo was watching 6 tiger cubs playing and jumping into a pool of water, swinging from ropes and climbing trees! was so cute :)

We had our first lie in of our trip so far on Shabbat morning and then headed to the beach! In the afternoon we walked through Noosa National Park which was stunning (although the walk did involve a little venture through a nudist beach which was an interesting experience...!) and we got to watch loads of surfers whom we vowed to be as good as after our 2 hour surf lesson the following day!

Sooo...sunday morning came and off we went to our surf lesson...ha! I can honestly inform all that both Debra and I successfully stood on our surf boards at least twice in the 2 hour lesson and after about 25 attempts! Our instructor Troy was very patient , especially with me...I blamed my lack of ability on being left handed...??!, and although I was pretty hopeless, i did manage to stand on the board on a couple of attempts though did spend most of the time in the water, rather than anywhere near my surf board! Despite the limited success, it was such fun and we're hoping to surf again in Brazil and fine tune our newly acquired skills!!

We headed to Brisbane on Sunday afternoon for a little fix of city life and ended up in the same hostel dorm room as a couple of guys that we'd met earlier along the way, along with lots of Irish guys! Spent most of Monday 'sightseeing' in Brisbane...there really isn't much to see but we managed to fill an entire day checking out the limited sites that Brizzy had to offer and Debra randomly bumped into a friend from uni too! We finally found something that we actually wanted to see at 4.30pm - The Modern Art gallery, only to find out it closed at 5.00pm so we rushed in and were very quickly ushered out by some lovely security people promptly at 5...our attempt to seek out some culture had to be postponed for another occasion! Note to anyone planning on going to Brisbane - don't expect much to be going on on a Monday evening - after happy hour and a never ending quiz in our hostel bar (we came second = no prize for the runners up), we tried to find a lively place in the city. Our search did not amount to much so after trekking around Brisbane only to find bar after bar was closed (ok...so it was like 1am but still...) we headed back to the hostel and vowed for better evenings elsewhere :)

Going to stop now and leave sherman to fill in the next section of our adventures! xx