Next stop on the list is the touristy Airely beach (pronounced Eli), on the coast just inside the Whitsundays islands. Just as we get excited about the idea of a sailing tour of the islands, the rain starts to pour.
The first day, the second day, the third and so on..even extending our stay for one more day doesn’t give us the chance to get out on the boat. But at least we have plenty of time for doing laundry and reading magazines. On the last day we get a little bit of sunny sky in the morning and take a walk to through the upper class residential areas and to the harbor where our boat was supposed to leave from. The water in the Whitsundays looks really good though, and it would be great to take a swim, but the temperature is really prohibitive!
Not getting any better luck with the weather in the northern Sunshine Coast, we make our way south and 40Km inland to Rockhampton, the beef capital of Australia. This is a black box! A place which has very little in common with with east coast Australia. Here we are deep in the country, where men wear cowboy hats and XXXXXL size shirts, women eat 400 gr T-bone steaks, and 5 years old boys ride young bulls at the rodeo! All of this just 40Km away from tan girls in bikini and ripped guys on surf boards. It’s a different world!
On Wednesday night the whole town gather at the Rodeo, where young guys, more or less talented, train riding bulls. It’s free for everybody and a lot of fun! Not far from the town, which sits right on the Tropic of Capricorn, there are also some beautiful caves, which we visit on our last day in this peculiar place. The bus heading south is leaving at midnight, which means: another night on the bus! We should then arrive in Hervey Bay, the perfect place for Whale watching this time of the year.
We get picked up at the bus station just in time before the rain starts pouring again. It rains, again, for days, and our plans are ruined! The whales are supposed to come here to Hervey bay to give birth, before migrating south towards the antarctic again in September. Three days here and again we run out of luck and have to move on to Noosa. Plenty of tourists here, surprised by the weather conditions, claiming “it never rains here”. Well, never a part from NOW! But we finally got some nice sun again and a beautiful beach just in front of us.
Noosa is home to the Noosa National park, one of the most visited on the coast and to some native koalas. Here you can indeed spot them in the wild, while…taking a nap! That’s all they do really…but they look cute.
The park is amazing, from the coast, along the cliffs where you can spot dolphins, if you are lucky, back down to the beach and in the thick forest again, before getting back to town for dinner on the beach!