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 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.

East Coast Australia Road Trip, Part I

On the 16th of April we started our road trip on the east coast of Australia. We rented a campervan from Jucy an set of from Sydney with the plan to reach Cairns on May 9th. That means 24 days living in a car. But what is a campervan exactly? Well, it's a van that's been converted into a mini caravan. It has a small kitchen behind and then the middle part of the car can be converted into a surprisingly comfortable bed. Unfortunately we forgot to take a picture of the inside, but you may use your imagination.

Our first stop was the Blue Mountains just outside Sydney. We spent two nights in the national park exploring the nature and admiring the stunning landscapes. The Blue Mountains is actually a national park the size of Belgium. The blue colour that can be seen over the valleys is caused by all the eucalyptus trees that grow in the area. And since it's the end of autumn in Australia, even some trees had stunning autumn colours.

Next stop was the Hunter Valley wine district north of Sydney where we tasted some very good wines, especially at the Hungerford Hill winery. The landscape was beautiful too!

After that we headed up following the coast to Port Stephens. Here we actually spotted some dolphins swimming up close to the beach (not in the picture). Not far from here we also visited Tilligerry Habitat - a wildlife rescue center - and here at the nearby park we saw a very cute koala sleeping in a tree. She had been rescued earlier but was set free back into the wild, but she still sometimes liked to hang out close to Tilligerry.

Then we had a little bit longer drive ahead of us since we were heading to Byron Bay next. On our way there we stopped at a very nice beach, though, called Urunga. Here they had a long boardwalk out to the sea and to the outer beach where we had the sand all for ourselves. Very beautiful spot!

In Byron bay we walked through a beautiful natural park up to the landmark: the lighthouse. From here (and elsewhere along the coast) you can spot humpback whales during the winter months, but we were a little bit early for that. Instead we spotted a cute wallaby (kangaroo) with a baby in her pocket!