Vern: Our beach-to-beach jaunt continued further south down the coast to Noosa, the beach to 'be seen'. Naturally, we stayed in a shared apartment a little out of town and thus weren't seen. It was our best accommodation yet - a complete beachfront duplex with our own lounge and kitchen shared only with two young Spanish guys, a policemen and recently graduated PE teacher. We got to employ our Spanish phrases again and enjoyed their company. They were in love with Aus and quite negative about home and we empathised with how Spain's current economic troubles and immigration woes are weighing on the morale of the youth.

On our second day we set out on an 11km loop walk down the beach in front of our pad, over some cliffs, onto a remote beach, over some more cliffs, onto flashy Noosa Heads beach, into Noosa town and back along the motorway to our accommodation. We'd been walking along the remote beach for a while when we came across a man who's towel seemed to have slipped down while he was attempting a "deck change". Wait no. There isn't a bathing suit involved in this routine, I guess he's just drying off. "I think this is a NUDIST beach!" Andrea and I said at exactly the same time. The pennies dropping in unison. There weren't many people on this large isolated patch of sand but there were even less swimming trunks. Oh gosh, where is it okay to look?! A (probably homeless) nudist was hanging clothes on trees, thereby granting himself the luxury of ALL his clothes being clean after laundry day. A John McCain lookalike without any body hair nor any tan lines walked gleefully along the surf. We stared at the clouds for too long then dropped our heads and watched our feet pick up pace but alas all the willpower in the world cannot block out one's peripheral vision.
"That guy had something hanging from his err ding dong."
"You looked?"
"It was pierced and had like a woman's shell earring dangling from it."
"You LOOKED?!"
"I couldn't help it, the more you are not allowed to look, the more you HAVE to."

Luckily there WAS actually something interesting to look at in the sand. The crabs round here neatly extract little pearl-size balls of sand out of their holes and roll these away from the entrance to their little tunnel and discard them on the sand. Over and over they repeat this exercise and the result is an artwork of hundreds randomly scattered sand pixels on the flat hard wet sand canvas left by the tide. It was quite beautiful.

The following morning we tried out the no-name brand just-add-water pancake mix with wondrous results, then covered them with Nutella (the brand name stuff, you gotta know where to cut corners). Then with protruding bellies we hit the beach, a long bed of blonde sand with a rampant sea. We'd seen several beached jellyfish and I was a bit hesitant to go into the water, but it was sweltering so I took a risk and enjoyed a refreshing dip without any stings.

For dinner Andrea fried up some marinaded kangaroo steaks. They were delicious! Most comparable to beef, but a leaner and therefore healthier meat. And a 'greener' meal too as I've read recently that kangaroos stomachs work differently to cows' and sheep's so they don't excrete the greenhouse gas, methane. Australian scientists are actually experimenting with cross-breeding to create a type of cow with a kangaroo stomach. I hope it jumps. Rodeos and Bullfights would be off the charts with bouncing bulls!