After Brisbane we moved on to try out our first Queensland National Park camping experience. Basically all over Queensland are national park's which have area's for people to stay over night. These are not privately run like all the normal caravan parks and have no power access, but do have some basic facilities and you can book a camp site for $5 per person over the internet or phone. Anyway, so we thought it's be a great idea to give them a try and save some money.
In our clever "nice but cheap camp sites" book we decided on one called Coochin Creek. The description on how to get there was something like this: Turn E 11km of Caloundra, then onto Roys Rd for 4km, then S for 500m. Sounded (almost) pretty straight forward. 2 Hours later we finally found the camp site only to eaten by a million mosquitos within the first 2 minutes! Luckily our wide assortment of insect repellent fended them off. We noticed that we were the only people in some camp site in the middle of some forest right by a lake. And the basic facilities was a bush loo, which was a deep hole in the ground. Excellent. No shower. But hey a big lake! So there we were standing at the edge of the lake, which looked very pretty but also very muggy and brown asking ourselves: Were we already in that part of Australia where crocodiles and other vicious animals were lurking in muggy waters like this one? And were they just waiting for some unknowing stupid tourists like us?? Hmm.. We decided it'd be best not to find out!
The mysterious lake:
Finally trying out our hammock:
That night I am pretty sure there was a snake underneath our van as well. I could heard it moving on top of the surf board bag. Luke said the next morning he had heard it too. Neither of us had the guts though to go and have a closer look. :)
Next day we moved on to Australia Zoo, which is the home of the late crocodile hunter Steve Irwin and his family. By now we felt pretty skanky having had no showers and being covered in several layers of insect repellent. Ah well.
The Zoo was pretty cool. Everything was very open and most of the animals were some animals that Steve Irwin had captured when they endangered human residencies (like the crocs) or were animals that had been brought to him for their own safety when humans were endangering them. Indeed a great place and not just a zoo.
This big tortoise was being fed and the little guy thought he'd join in:
A black cockatoo:
We moved onto to Mooloolaba for a well-deserved shower in a proper caravan park. Next day we decided we hadn't quite had enough of zoo's and entertainment parks yet and went to Underwater World.
Though I'm not really a big fan of the trained seals and fish in over-crowded tanks it was nevertheless not that bad and we had a good look at what sharks looked like in real life. Pretty Frickin scary!!
A sting ray getting fed:
On the road again off to Noosa Heads, which we heard was a pretty little sea side town. And indeed it was very pretty, up-market and swanky. The camp site was right by a river and our camp site neighbours lent us their kayaks. We paddled right across the river to one of the un-inhabitat beaches and hung out there a little. The water was super warm and nice :)
This was a funny camper van we saw:
Noosa Heads:
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