East Coast Australia Road Trip, Part IV

The last two nights of our road trip we spent in the Daintree National Park, and that was so beautiful it's worth a whole blog post.

On our way up we took a small detour to Shannonvale Tropical Fruit Winery, who makes their wine using fruits instead of grapes. And they were actually very good wines! And the views from the nearby hill was stunning. Here we also met a 75-year-old women who was originally from Finland but who had been living abroad since she was 15. Last year she climbed to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro! A real iron-granny!

To enter Daintree you have to cross the Daintree river with a ferry. And the way the landscape changes during that 300m ferry ride is amazing. First you are surrounded by sugar cane fields and then you are suddenly in the middle of the rainforest!

Daintree is one of the oldest rainforests in the world. And it was amazing. So versatile with a lot of different plants and animals, including some very loud flying foxes (very big bats).

And so photogenic!

We were also camping next to a nice, long and quiet beach. There were like a thousand small crabs on the beach who all made these patterns with pearls of sand. So all the darker areas on the sand you can see in the pictures are all just sandpearls.

We didn't see any crocodiles during our road trip but we did taste them in a burger and a croc-o-dog (hot dog).

And just as we were about to leave Daintree we spotted a cassowary with its' baby!

Then it was time to follow the beautiful coastal road a little bit back south. We stopped at Port Douglas for a last campervan lunch and a swim.

Exactly 4234 km later we arrived in Cairns, just as scheduled. Goodbye Jucy van! We had such a great time driving around with you! Maybe we'll see you again!

East Coast Australia Road Trip, Part III

Next up along the coast was Airlie Beach. A chic place with nice boats to look at. We especially liked to stroll down the coastal boardwalk and look at the ocean on one side and nature and modern houses on the other side. The sunset was also stunning.

Here we also spotted a Honeyeater - a bird that much resembles a humming bird. Can you spot it in the picture?

After Airlie Beach we did a quick stop at Bowen that we had heard had good snorkeling spots just off shore. Unfortunately the sea was so rough that it stirred up so much sand that the visibility was so poor that we didn't really see much interesting. We did see a big mango on the way, though!

During the summer months you can't really swim in the ocean in the northern parts of the coastline since there's very dangerous stingers (jellyfish) in the water. There's also always the risk that you meet a crocodile during your swim. Therefore a lot of towns have their own lagoons (swimming pools) where it's safe to swim. We got acquainted with quite a few of them on our way. One of them was in Townsville, where we headed next. This was quite a small one but good for chilling.

Just south of Mission Beach you find a lovely seaside town called Cardwell. The town was compleately destroyed by a cyclone in 2011, but there was no signs left of that now. Here we just stopped for an ice cream but as we were walking along the pier you can see in the picture we were lucky to see a glimpse of a sea turtle as it came up for air! Probably should have stopped for ice cream more often during the way...

Then we also stopped at Alligators Nest just outside Tully to have lunch with Olli and Becky with whom we were going to stay in Cairns. Despite the name this was a very nice place to swim and although the water in the river was a little bit chilly it was very refreshing.

On Mission Beach we mainly wandered up and down the beach looking at everything the sea had brought in. Also admiring the beautiful patterns the small crabs on the beach had made with pearls of sand.

On the north side of Mission Beach we had a look at the Babinda Boulders, a river with really interesting stone formations:

East Coast Australia Road Trip, Part II

And up the coast we continued! At this point the weather wasn't really that great since it was both windy and rainy, so we drove past the Gold Coast quite fast, just stopping to have a quick swim at the beach when the sun happened to be out. Instead we headed inlands again to the Tamborine Mountains. Here we stopped at Fortitude Brewery for some craft beer and Witches Falls winery for another go at Autralian wines. In this area there were also quite a few small but pretty waterfalls and some walking tracks through the forests.

Brisbane would have been our next stop, but since we didn't really find that much interesting to do in the city and it didn't seem campervan friendly at all, we ended up just driving through it and up to the Glasshouse Mountains instead. Here we had intended to do some trekking but since Malin was sick (again) we mostly hung out by our car. And we were not the only ones:

After spending some time inlands we kind of missed the ocean again. Noosa was a little town with a lot of trendy shops and restaurats and a very popular beach.

We spent the night outside Noosa close to a farm. Here we played some minigolf, which was a lot of fun. Especially since Malin got a hole-in-one on her first time playing.

Fraser Island is a big island of sand just next to the coast, north of Noosa. Trips there were unfortunately way over our budget so instead we headed to Carlo Sand Blow - sand dunes and kind of a wannabe Fraser island. And we actually liked it very much! It was big, filled with soft sand and nice views over the ocean. Another interesting thing here was the line of at least a hundred caterpillars of back-shelter moth (or processionary caterpillars) crossing the path to the dunes. We guess they wanted to look big to avoid being eaten by birds.

Okay, so enough nature now. Let's go and taste some Australian rum! Bundaberg is the biggest rum distillery in Australia and we joined a very interesting tour around their premises.

The taste of rum was apparantly so intoxicating that it made us forget to take pictures of our next few destinations, though. We followed the coast up stopping mainly to swim and eat at the town of 1770, Rockhampton, Sarina and Mackay. Or then maybe it was just because we were so excited about our next destination: the Eungella National Park. And why were we so excited? Because there you can see platypus in the wild! Platypus is like the weirdest yet funniest animal on earth. A mix of nearly everything. And there they were just casually swimming around in the Broken River!

In Eungella we also made a long 16km trek in the beautiful subtropical rainforest following the river, during which we saw a lot of birds, a few turtles, some more platypus and even a HUGE wild boar. Back at our campsite we were accompanied by the very common australian bush turkey.