Noosa Heads

I'm so behind on my blog! I had meant to post stuff about my last day in Melbourne, and then two friends and I went on a trip through the Adelaide hills, but now I'm in Noosa Heads, Queensland, and want to write about that instead! I will make retroactive posts about other things later.

So my friend Ashley and I have been planning this trip for a while to celebrate the end of the semester. Yesterday, however, we arrived at the airport to find that we had missed the check-in time for our flight by ten minutes, which sucked. We were panicking as we did not want to go back to the hall, and no other flights went directly to the Sunshine Coast. We ended up on an (expensive) flight to Brisbane and took a shuttle to Noosa Heads, where we are staying. It was stressful, but this place is very mellow and we were so happy to just be here.

Our hostel is a nice wooden bungalow-style house with a large common area, a restaurant, and friendly people. It is also located in the middle of two acres of rainforest. Last night we got in and they gave us a free glass of wine (which we were greatful for after the day we had), and then we went to explore the town.

There is pretty much one main street here that runs parallel to the beach with nice outdoor cafes, restaurants, and shopping. We found a Mexican restaurant (our first since getting to Australia!) and greatly enjoyed ourselves. This morning, we were woken up by the din of screeching parrots and lorikeets, which was not altogether pleasant. After a trip to the supermarket for sandwich supplies, we made ourselves a picnic and rented boogie boards from the hostel (which supplies them for free) and headed to the beach.




The beach is a two minute walk away and is awesome. It is soft white sand with warm blue-green water and awesome waves, surrounded by rainforest. The boogie boarding was amazing because the waves were pretty big, but not so big that you couldn't just go swimming without getting knocked over. I have pictures, but I can't post them for another few days because we have to use internet cafes. So we pretty much lounged on the beach all day, and now we are on the internet before heading back to the hostel to just hang out.


Here I am after failing to catch a wave. I got better, though!


There are lots of birds all around, and if you aren't careful with your breakfast, the lorikeets will come and try to take it from you. Especially if you use those little single-serving thingies of jam on your bread. They LOVE those.

Tomorrow is an early day; we are getting up at 6 AM to go with a tour to Fraser Island. It is a big sand island comprised entirely of national park, with rainforests and freshwater lakes that are supposed to be really good for swimming. There is also a large population of wild dingoes, and I'm hoping we see one (don't worry, Dad, I won't try to pet any). Then we have another day of beach, then we're going to the AUSTRALIA ZOO!!! This is actually what I am most excited for. Australia Zoo was Steve Irwin's zoo, and it's supposed to be amazing. We're so excited about it!

I will continue to update this as I can and I'll add pictures as soon as possible.