The countryside around Tweed Heads is quite amazing - and we'll have a better chance to explore some of it on the way back south again. Just as well, since I only manage one photograph today, and that underexposed and snapped through the car window as we do 110 up the Pacific Highway. Notes I make suggest that it's somewhere around Tweed Heads. We definitely feel we're moving in to the sub-tropical now, through cane fields, and completely different forest to that we've seen further south. We see kookaburras sat on telegraph wires, and kangaroos, and incredible mini-mountains north of Brisbane. Not for the first time, we marvel at the strangeness of this land!One of the problems of travelling in winter is that it gets dark so early, and this rather colours our Noosa Experience. We roll in to town as night falls, and through not having a decent map end up in the nicest (a technical use of the word) end of it. The only motel with any kind of space available wants 145 bucks per head, so we roll on out the other side of town as quickly as we can. Noosa, for us, is Gucci Hell, worse luck. Which is how we end up in a caravan park.
Just north of Noosa is Tewantin, and some way past the point where the streetlights end, on the road to the chain ferry to the Great Sandy N.P., is a caravan park. They have a cabin that'll sleep 6 (OK, they don't mention "comfort", but it will sleep 6). There's no restaurant, but the place has got a well-stocked shop (which we never use, as we're up and gone before it opens the next morning). And they'll put us all up for $113, including hire of bedding (which we never use).
It's ... cosy. But as we're there only just about 12 hours, it really doesn't matter at all. Slight drawback that the proprietor has a sinister air about him, and we imagine the mysterious disappearance of household pets around the time of the full moon. Ach, who cares.
On his direction, we head in to Tewantin, and have a meal at the Royal Pier hotel. Purely as a technical observation, I'm buggered if I can see a pier anywhere near it, and royalty is thin on the ground, too. It being Saturday night, it's pretty busy, but I think we're all pretty pleased with the standard of the food. I have barramundi and king prawn in chilli and coconut sauce. Mmmmm. The Royal Pier then turns out to be even finer than first glance suggests; it has as an annex its own drive-in bottle shop. We leave with a 24-pack of VB and a couple of bottles of shiraz, just to be on the safe side.
Hindsight and curiosity lead me to query the hotel's name. Google is my friend. It's not the Royal Pier at all, it's the Royal Mail. Doh!
Back at the caravan park, Pete, Chris and I take a walk down to the chain ferry, and watch the last few cars come across. It's a bit of a sultry night, and the cicadas and crickets are loud. Wandering back, everyone else decides to call it a night. I check, and it's only 9pm. Lightweights. Armed with VB, shiraz, a pile of postcards to write, and a few CDs, I make it as far as 11. Considerably more rock'n'roll.