Following our Frazer adventure we were keen to recover and recharge the batteries. We travelled down to the beautiful resort of Noosa.This quaint seaside town is where the rich and famous come to escape the city life of Sydney and Brisbane and you could see why!

Our hostel was situated alongside a glorious river that ran into the ocean. It was surrounded by fantastic looking houses, nice (but too expensive for us) bars and along the river was a running path with exercise stations which we would put to good use the next day. We had fish and chips by the river but strangely they were covered in breadcrumb rather than batter - this was the Australian way we were told, yet this would be the one and only time we would have it this way. That said, it was fantastic.

We had heard that the waves in Noosa were ideal for surfing and we borrowed body boards and headed down to the surf.Considering it was a windy day, the waves were a little disappointing. We still tried our best but the waves were crashing so close to shore that it was nearly impossible.At one stage when Steve did finally catch a wave (he was not as good as Jackie) the surf dumped him in seaweed and his swimming trunks were full of weed "inside" - nice, and not that possible.

The breeze made sunbathing a treat, although despite the drummed in statement of 'getting more burnt when windy' we were both surprised how red we came away.

We wished we could have stayed for longer in Noosa as we really loved the place, but we were collected by the faithful greyhound bus on our return which took us down to Surfers Paradise.

We arrived with big expectations. The lonely planet, which is rarely wrong, states "you would be forgiven to think that you had arrived in Las Vegas", well if this is what Vegas is like (which we very much doubt) then we will be giving it a miss. A major dump. The dirtiest hostel we had stayed in so far.

We met up with Jeff and Jen who we had met on the Ayers Rock tour and headed into town for a few drinks thinking it would be a buzzing place. We ate outside until the heavens opened and it absolutely pissed it down.After an hour it stopped but it must have scared the "party" away as the town was dead and the only place busy was the strip clubs. Despite Steve's recommendation of giving them a try, Jackie stood firm and we ended up going home after a few expensive beers.

We were glad to leave the following day and headed down to Byron Bay. We had heard very good things about this place and wanted to stay for a few days before finally reaching Sydney. Unfortunately, we could only get accommodation for one night and that was overpriced, but we really wanted to stay there so settled for one night only.

Steve's old friend George Gallentree lives in Brisbane and drove down with his girlfriend, Teresa, to meet us for the day. Generous George, as we now know him, took us to the lovely Byron Bay Beach House bar and peppered us with lunch and few beers.After that we drove up to the lighthouse which is extremely iconic for Byron and took a walk down to the beach. Sadly that was all we saw of Byron as we were soon to be picked up the following morning by the bus to take us to Sydney via Coff's Harbour.

We will not spend long at all writing about Coff's. It was not worth stopping at and quite a strange place - literally nothing there at all but the fortunately the following night the big red bus came and off we set on our 8 hour journey to Sydney.