We drove from Australia Zoo to a place we thought was close called Noosa. However the journey was longer than we thought (a theme that would develop on our roadtrip) and we arrived in the dark and looked around hopelessly for a campsite in the pitch black. Tiger had to get out of the van to be sick, we all lost our tempers but finally on the advice of a local ice cream salesman found a campsite by the estuary. We parked up and went off in search of food. We found a local fish and chip shop that sold us a “family pack” consisting of fish nuggets, calamari rings, one large breaded fish and a battered fish and ton of chips. Oliver was eating cold chips for days afterwards. The man in the chip shop was chatty (have yet to meet a non chatty Aussie) who recommended a few stops for us up the coast. The most memorable thing about the chip shop visit however was the man who arrived after us on a motorised skateboard wearing board shorts and some zip up ugg boots. Oliver watched incredulous as he bought some coke and zoomed off into the dark. Not sure you would get away with that in Yorkshire. On our walk home from the chip shop we walked over the river and saw a ray at the water’s edge and then we were dive bombed by huge (and I mean huge!) bats. It was quite a night. The next day we went to Noosa beach which was lovely. We parked the van right by the side of the beach with the help of a friendly traffic warden (!?!) so we could get changed in it and we sunbathed and went in the sea and it started to feel like a proper holiday. We bought healthy food from the lovely supermarket, cheaper wine from another friendly shopkeeper (with more suggested itineraries from him) and Angus bought a boogie board and an Australia baseball cap. It was all going so well! However rather than stay in this lovely place we had found, we looked at the map and saw how far it was to Cairns and thought we had better set off. We chose Tin Can Bay as our next stop because there was a promise of free dolphin feeding which had been one of Tiger’s “things I want to do”.
Jo