Before we made our way from Coffs Harbour to Port Macquarie, we had to prepare a sign. Slowly, Kerstin started to like preparing it 🙂 Done with that, we had to reach the highway. The right spot for hitchhiking is important, that’s what we already learned. We walked a bit confused and without sign, cause nobody wanted to stop for us. Until Nick, our lift from Byron Bay to Coffs Harbour turned around the corner and gave us another lift to the highway. After a few meters walking we found the perfect spot: all drivers could see us and had enough space to stop. That’s probably why after 5 minutes someone stopped: again a Nick, farmer, who was on his way from Gold Coast (where he had a small holiday apartment) to Newcastle (where his farm was) in his 50 year old truck. Again a nice drive with nice talks. He dropped us off on the highway, 5km before Port Macquarie. We held again our sign and voila, the next car stopped and gave us a lift into the city. Today it worked perfect! Unfortunately, we had to walk around 30 minutes to our camp ground. Having lots of luggage we arrived and spent the rest of the day on the beach (Town Beach).

The next day, we did the coastal walk as long as we wanted to. This one led along all beaches of Port Macquarie, always slightly above sea level in order to have a beautiful view on the seaside. After Town, Oxley and Rocky Beach we arrived at Flynns Beach and wanted to relax a bit. As we wanted to have a swim for cooling down, we were surprised: the sea is a lot cooler, and that actually in the mid of summer. We were used to the comfortable 25°C in Gold Coast and Byron Bay, so we didn’t stay very long in the water. Anyway we continued quite fast as we wanted to visit the koala hospital, which hosts sick and injured Koalas, try to help them and let them back to their natural habitat. Every afternoon there is a guided tour based on donations where some of the koalas are going to be fed. Each of the koalas gets a shot of soy milk out of a syringe due to their natural intolerance against lactose. However, they are not able to eat like that without making a mess, why the nurse always has to clean their mouth which looks pretty cute 🙂 The guide told us that the main reasons for koalas in the hospital are chlamydia and due to human being (e.g. car accidents). Unfortunately there is one, called Berry, who will have to stay in the hospital forever because he has a genetically inherited disease. Another female koala has an amputated left leg and a removed eye, but she acts as nothing would have happened and climbs up the trees. After that, the tour and almost the day was over and the next day we continued hitchhiking to Newcastle.

Kerstin ganzer Stolz / Kerstin is very proud of her sign

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Today should be our longest hitchhike, 400km from Byron Bay to Coffs Harbour. After it literally rained the whole night, also into the tent, we had a little lake in our tent (well, it was only a 32$ tent), and tried to convert it into a transportable condition in order to leave after breakfast. This time, we realized the biggest problem with hitchhiking. The search for a good spot. Byron Bay is not situated close to the highway, but 10km apart from it. After we tried to find a direct lift to the south, we changed our strategy and just wanted to get a lift to the highway. This strategy worked out pretty good, as it took only 2 minutes to find a lift to the highway, which was really weird. An Aussie and a British guy, the British now without any valid VISA in Australia and is stealing, drinking alcohol and taking drugs (his own words!). Luckily, the Australian guy was driving and the lift was only for 10min to the highway. With a good feeling now, we tried to find again a driver directly going south, but we figured out that we tried our luck on the wrong side of Byron Bay meaning that the entrance to the highway is mainly used for driving north so that our chances to get a lift south decreased. After around 30 minutes we were lucky and got a lift to the south, but only for 20km. At least (we thought), we are finally on the highway and in the right direction. Our driver from New Zealand dropped us of at a small rest area and we tried again to get finally a lift to Coffs Harbour. But, it didn’t work really well today and the slowly starting rain annoyed us a bit. But the rain should become a good point in the story. After again 45 minutes waiting, Nick picked us up. As he saw us standing in the rain, he felt bad and turned around on the highway. His plan was to go 30km before Coffs Harbour to camp in a national park and invited us to drive with him as long as we want or to directly join him camping. As we didn’t really have a plan for Coffs Harbour, this seemed to be perfect. But it was time to get all our luggage in his small car which was already packed with two surfboards, but it fitted ….

Nick was a great tourist guide and showed us due to a private appointment the city and coast of Ballina. We spent there 1.5h, but due to the increased rainfall the impression of the city wasn’t outstanding. Caused by the rain, we had to skip the camping as well, as the roads in the national park were flooded by knee deep water. That’s why we actually landed in the camping ground in Coffs Harbour, since Nick visited a friend there (and he even tried to convince him to let us stay there as well).

So we left this adventure behind us, but our passion for hitchhiking even increased due to our new friendship with Nick. The next day we explored the beaches and the botanical garden of Coffs Harbour, together with the Muttonbird Island which provides a very nice view on the coast of the city. Unfortunately, hitchhiking has a very tricky disadvantage (especially in Australia): Once you arrived at the place you want to be, you are still very inflexible and immobile, which results in very long walks even in a small town like Coffs Harbour. But well, to be honest there is not that much to see in there and it was nice anyway. In Germany we say: “the track is the goal” which is very true for hitchhiking.

Strand von Coffs Harbor / Beach in Coffs Harbor

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Back to Brizzy – Australian word for Brisbane – we directly took a train to the world famous Gold Coast. There we found a couchsurfer for 5 days: Joshua. He is as old as we and trains for his first marathon in L.A. which will be in May. Unfortunately exact one day before we arrive there, otherwise we could have cheered for him. He has a very strict training plan for that, why he gets up at 5am and goes for a run for 2-3h at 6am at the beach. First we thought “that’s too early” but it makes absolutely sense, as it is just too hot for running later the day. It’s even very typical for the Gold Coast that the beach is quite crowded at 6am. A lot of sportsmen like Josh and surfers who want to catch the best wave (and all the drunken people who couldn’t find home the other night and slept on the beach 😉 ) However, Joshua was relaxed and really nice, again a perfect couchsurfing experience!

These five days were mainly one thing, very, very relaxing! We spent three days at different beaches, because the Gold Coast is amazingly long. Joshua and his lovely mother (also couchsurfer by the way) live at the southern end of Gold Coast. A bit further south, there are beaches and bays which are mainly visited by the locals. Further north there is one beach after the other until you reach the world famous Surfers Paradise. The closer you get to it, the higher the hotels directly next to the beach get. By the way, maybe it’s time to describe another uniqueness of the Australians: If you go to Australia, you will often read about a superlative on the southern hemisphere. We already saw some of them, e.g. the longest jetty, the largest one-bow bridge (yes the Harbor Bridge in Sydney) and now the highest building of the southern hemisphere in Surfers Paradise (there are countless other examples). Of course that’s not really fair, since Australia is almost the only country on the southern hemisphere, which is not a country in development. The only real concurrent may be New Zealand (but the Kiwis are obviously more interested in breeding world famous rugby players) and maybe Brazil (but they have definitely other problems than that). In the case of the building in Surfer Paradise the contradiction is pretty funny. It might be the highest building in the southern hemisphere but it is, however, the TWENTY-SEVENTH highest building in the world…

One day was completely filled with rain, unfortunately, and that means the whole day without even a minute of a break. It was so rainy, that some roads had to be closed the next day, because of flooding. However, Surfer Paradise within rainfall has a very special flair as well. It is, however, a tourist hotspot, but we found it less intrusive than Airlie Beach. There are mainly stores for souvenirs, clothes and tours to one of the countless adventure parks around. Everything is very focused on holidays for families and adventurers/backpackers. Beside the walk through Surfers Paradise, we used the rainy day to plan our next days. We wanted to go to Sydney, but we had not so many ideas what to do in-between. That’s why we found it not very useful to rent a car, mainly because the main attraction Byron Bay is only 80km away. Additionally, we had a bit of time, so we decided to try our luck with hitchhiking. We chose four cities between Gold Coast and Sydney to make stopovers there in order to reduce the distances we had to do at the different days and maybe get back to the train if we get stuck. The cities were Byron Bay, Coffs Harbor, Port Macquarie (because of its Koala Hospital) and Newcastle…

Gold Coast

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Before we arrived in Noosa, we made a stopover in the Great Sandy National Park, with the Rainbow Beach as its main attraction. Helen and Myra from Fraser Island said, that we MUST go there, because there is sand in all colours you might imagine. A word a blow. The main beach, where we made a stop for swimming, of course, is almost only one colour. Anyway, if you go a bit south to the sand dunes, one will see many different colours, white, yellow orange, red, brown and black and all of them in different tints. Just wonderful! At some places one can see the sand as compact sandstone, which you can break and crumble to get the pure colour. Of course we didn’t miss to take some sand with us 🙂 Unfortunately we had (again) a bit bad weather, why the colours didn’t shine as much as it would be on a sunny day, but you’ll see on the pictures. After that we were on the Carlo Sandblow. There, one of the dunes of the rainbow beach goes far inland. We explored the dune and collected a bit more sand, until we walked back to our car in order to drive to Noosa to our next couchsurfers, Cynthia and Alex. Cynthia is originally from Germany and fell in love with Alex during her Work & Travel stay in Australia. After a bit of flip-flopping, she finally decided to move to Australia and they produce and sell organic, vegan coconut yoghurt and are super happy with that. Not to forget, they have a 9 month old sausage dog puppy called peanut, who wanted to play the whole time. This was quite perfect for Tobi! For the next day we planned to explore the national park in Noosa. It’s a walk along the cost with some beautiful views on beaches and cliffs (we were even able to watch some playing turtles in the water). In the afternoon we made a walk along the beach and visited the city of Noosa. The next day we had to get up very very early, because we had to return the car at 9am in Brisbane which was a 2.5 hour drive away.

Rainbow Beach

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Before we arrived in Hervey Bay (at our next couchsurfer, this time a German expat called Axel), we wanted to see the beach of Agnes Water, because Steve described it as the best one in this area. It’s definitely a nice one without many people and so we spent there some hours. After a small sandwich we wanted to leave for Hervey Bay, but we met another German couple from Munich, who were driving in the opposite direction, why we were talking about the highlights. They were on Fraser Island already and fancied about Lake McKenzie. As we were still annoyed of the tour to the Whitsundays, we actually decided to skip it (or at least not to book a tour). This decision became a bit unstable, but one thing after the other.

After chatting, we arrived at Axel’s place around 7h (driving was interrupted by a sudden rainfall and a breathtaking sunset). Entering the house, we were welcomed by a smell of freshly prepared wood. Axel internalized the Australian way of life and works half time as a bug defender in order to enjoy the rest of the week with his hobby, preparing guitars (if anyone in Australia is interested, we promised to post his website in our blog: http://www.axelbass.com). We really hoped to get some advice from Axel concerning Fraser Island. Instead of booking an overpriced tour we thought about only going to Lake McKenzie. If we would have been at Axel’s place two days earlier, we might have had the chance to participate in a private tour of Axel’s friend, but we missed that. Axel gave us the hint to take the ferry to Fraser and to hike to Lake McKenzie, which was our plan for the next day. Just for general knowledge: Fraser Island is biggest sand island of… WRONG! Not of the southern hemisphere, this time of the world!

But there was a little drawback: We found in the internet that a few hiking tracks were closed due to fire danger. But we couldn’t find out which one exactly why we wanted to ask the lady at the ferry ticket reception the next morning. The nice lady didn’t have any clue, of course (which idiot is going to hike on Fraser Island?), why she gave us her mobile to call the ranger. This one was a really smart guy! He didn’t have any clue, like the lady at the ferry reception, and only read the information from the internet (10 minutes before the ferry left). Tobi was precisely asking whether the hiking track we wanted to take is closed or not, he just answered (Typically Australian) “should be fine”. Accordingly, we bought the ferry tickets quickly and jumped onto the already moving ferry (be aware of sarcasm).

Arriving after around 50 minutes at the luxury resort “Fishermen’s Bay Resort“, we directly went to the reception asking for details of the hiking track. And what a big surprise, the hiking track was closed! The nice lady suggested us to walk anyway, but then we’ll risk to get a fine by the ranger, if we were still alive and not being roasted by the fire. All tours have already started, because the whole story at the reception took us half an hour. She advised us either to rent a car or to join one of their incredibly great programs of the resort. The car rental was closed and 180$ for half a day (!!!) seemed to be quite a lot. The woman from the fuel station couldn’t help us either, but she gave us two deciding hints. First, she told us we could ask the owner of the car rental company to give us a lift, because he has to help tourists who are stuck in the sand somewhere on the Island. The other hint was that we could just hitchhike. A word and a blow! As already mentioned, the car rental was closed (because someone was stuck in the sand, no joke 🙂 ) we asked each car at the fuel station for a lift to Lake McKenzie. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to go in this direction or the car was already full. That’s why we sit in the shade on the exit of the resort direction Lake McKenzie and waited (as we couldn’t hike, we somehow gained 5 hours, so not really a time pressure). Indeed each car stopped but either the destination or the amount of places in the car didn’t fit. But then we were lucky and Myra and Helen stopped and made our day! They wanted to go to Lake McKenzie to spend the last day of their holiday there and they had enough space for both of us. After packing Helen’s newly bought vacuum cleaner (from Aldi!!!) in the car boot, we could enter and the 11km drive to Lake McKenzie started. Being really naive, we asked one week before whether our Mini-SUV would be fine for Fraser Island. Very probably, we would have been stuck after 200m from the resort. The so called “streets” on Fraser Island consist a 100% out of sand and as a lot of people are driving there and the streets are just repaired once in a while, they look exactly like that. There are waves in the ground between 20 and 60cm and all that with only one trail. But our two drivers were really well trained in 4WD and quite thoroughly shaked we arrived at our destination very fast. In addition, we laughed a lot with the two and they even offered us to give us a lift back or even show us more around the island. But after our first look on the lake, it was over. We knew that we want to spend here the afternoon. We never saw such a clean and crystal clear water together with such a perfect sand beach. To make that even better, the lake contains sweet water and no Australian animals, a perfect place for a swim! After a little wandering along the coast, we swam in direction of the middle of the lake in order to vegetate the rest of the day in the lake and make funny pictures. Helen and Myra offered us in the evening to go to the Central Station, the starting point for the rainforest logging in earlier times. We took one ferry later than we thought in the beginning and unfortunately didn’t have enough luck to see a dingo. As there are no dogs allowed on Fraser, it is the only place where dingos are purebred. Being back at around 10.30pm at Axel, we fell exhausted to bed to drive to Noosa the next day…

Lake McKenzie, einfach genießen / Just enjoy 🙂

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From Mackay we went back to Gladstone. Actually, we thought about directly going to Hervey Bay, but on the one hand, we had some buffer and on the other hand it would have ended in a complete day in the car. That’s why we decided to make another stop in Gladstone at our couchsurfer Stephen, who wanted to host us for another night.

On the way to his place, we stopped several times along the Capricorn Coast national park, a national park comprising interesting rock formations along the coast. A part of it consists of half of an extinct volcano and that is the reason why you can see stone sediments of this volcano. Such a volcano forms by ongoing melting and hardening processes of the stone quite weird formations, mainly if in addition it is affected by erosion of the sea water.

In the evening, we were as mentioned above at Steve’s place who had two couchsurfers from Albany staying with him. The two (mother around 50 and son around 20 years) wanted to visit their father and granddad, respectively. As we’ve already been to Albany (remember: in Western Australia, where we had the breakdown), we had quite a few stories to exchange. Steve prepared again self-made burgers with fresh herbs from his garden. And this time we’ve been fast enough to pay for the shopping, at least, to return the favour.

After a long evening and an extended breakfast, we went on the next day to Hervey Bay with a stopover in Agnes Water, but this…

Ein wahlloser Strand auf der Strecke. Nicht schlecht dafür dass er komplett unbekannt ist / A random beach near the road. Not too bad for one which is completely unknown

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We found two couchsurfers for Mackay, each of them for one night. The first one was Dish. We are actually still not sure if it is his real name or a nickname. He is, anyway, a very relaxed guy around 30 years old, originally from Los Angeles and in Australia since 8 years. Until now he worked in the mines, but as this is a very hard job (4 weeks working, 1 week off) most of the miners don’t stay there very long, just long enough to save up good money. That’s why he was moving to Brisbane when we arrived starting a new job at XXXX (Australian beer brand). Even though he moved out of his house on Friday, he hosted us the night from Wednesday to Thursday!!! In the evening another friend of Dish came over and we drank beer and chatted, until they wanted to go to a bar and we went out to explore the nightlife of Mackay. In fact, only one bar was open that day and it was what you would expect from a bar in a city full of miners. Young and attractive waitresses, almost only men in their twenties with obviously too much money in their pockets. Actually we wanted to buy a beer for Dish, but before we realized what happened we drank 3 beer, 2 spirits and a shot provided by Dish.

In the meantime, Kerstin was asked to participate a wet-t-shirt-contest, but she grateful refused. As the number of beauties was not very high in the bar, two of the waitresses had to participate (at the end there were 4 girls ^^). And then it began. First the price money was collected (they said it’s for breast cancer, a likely story…). It was collected by an auction and the winner was allowed to shower the girls with ice cold water. Every bidder had to pay directly, but could be overbid directly. In the end, the most active bidder won for 120$ (after he already bid another 4-5 times, so he payed at least 250$ in total). That was almost the highlight of the contest, because the contest itself was done in around 10 minutes. The four girls danced more or less well in a little swimming pool for kids and got a shower by the guy who won the auction. After this kind of disappointing show we made our way home (at 2AM, the other two stayed until 5AM), in order to be fit the next morning and visit the two national parks around Mackay.

After we got some sleep, we packed our stuff and drove to Cape Hillsborough National Park. There is an around two hour hike with some lookouts to some parts of the Whitsundays and also some very beautiful bays. One of them is very famous for turtles and we were even able to spot some in the water. After another little walk through a mangrove forest, we drove to the actual highlight of the day, the Finch-Hatton-Gorge. It belongs to the Eungella National Park, which is mostly famous because it’s a dead sure spot for Platypus. Since we already saw some of them in Carnarvon Gorge, Dish and his friend suggested us to go to Finch-Hatton. This was an incredible good hint! The gorge is within a rain forest and the river feeds some pools, two of them open for swimming. The first one (Araluen Cascades) is only a 30 minute walk from the carpark which makes it very famous for locals and their children (we only saw a couple of tourists, so one could say it’s a bit of a secret hint). The second pool (Wheel of Fire) is another 45 minute walk away, which means less people. It’s amazingly idyllic to go for a swim surrounded by rainforest! It was even possible to jump from the cliff (which is officially forbidden of course) in the extremely cold water.

At the evening we drove to our second host in Mackay, Luke and his flat share, with another Aussie and a German backpacker couple. One night is always quite short for the best couchsurfing experience but we all made the best of it and had long chats, funny stories and just a nice evening. Among other stories, Luke told us about his experience of the Oktoberfest in Munich. He had to pay 150€/night for a spot on a campground!!! We wouldn’t have thought that we would be surprised about costs in Germany anymore, as we are now kind of used to the Australian prices…

The next morning, we went on in direction Brisbane, but this is (ah you know 🙂 )

Cape Hillsborough National Park

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Unfortunately we couldn’t find a couchsurfer for Airlie Beach, also nobody answered on our request, but ok. That’s why we started to search for a camp ground. As we had to drive through the city centre, we were really shocked and were close to turn around, because Airlie Beach is absolutely THE tourist city. There is one souvenir shop next to the other, travel agencies, hostels and not to forget tour bookings were offered everywhere. You only reach the Whitsunday Islands by booking a tour at one of the numerous providers. We really didn’t know what to do: on the one hand the Whitsundays are a big highlight of the Australian east coast, because there the famous Great Barrier Reef starts and the Whitehaven Beach situated on the main island can be found each year under the top 10 of the most beautiful beaches in the world. That’s why we wanted to see it in any case. But on the other hand, there was no chance to go there on our own, like we usually did, because actually we didn’t want to be part of an Asian travel group. After the first shock in Airlie Beach we arrived at our camp ground and asked again at the reception if there is any chance to go there without a tour. Unfortunately no. Therefore we booked a one-day-tour the next day for the day after (at Mantarays). The same day, we made our way to the Conway Observation Park hiking a short way to a lookout. The way to the lookout was quite sweat-inducing (Kerstin: “good that we already start hiking at 9h, it has only 32°C”), because the further north you go, the more tropical and humid the climate becomes. Due to the high humidity one sweats permanently! But the way was not only sweat-inducing, but we also saw some wild animals: 2 small snakes, this time probably no deadly venomous ones (so quite boring), heaps of butterflies, a pretty huge lizard (goanna) and a so called stick insects, which are the insects that can disguise as a branch. The way led over the beach, which was exceptionally no sandy beach, but full of dead and stony pieces of the reef. Arriving the lookout, we had a beautiful view over smaller islands of the Whitsunday Island group. 2 hours later, we were back in the car and we saw surprisingly that it was 40°C now. Afterwards we went to a waterfall, but due to the high amount of tourists we disappeared fairly quickly and drove to a quite nice beach. In order to cool down from the sweaty sightseeing, we went to the beach of Airlie Beach and didn’t go swimming in the sea, but in the pool situated directly next to the sea. It is a clear minus that there are deadly jellyfish in the sea during this time of the year (November-April): the fingernail big Irukandji and the box jellyfish, which is 20cm huge and has 2-3m long tentacles. In addition, there can be crocodiles in the sea during the whole year. So you have a crystal clear water in front of you, but can’t go for a swim……..

The next day we got picked up from the camp ground at the crack of the dawn and got driven to our boat (it looked a bit like an over dimensioned fishing boat). There we could wake up fairly well with another cup of coffee. After around 2 hours on the ship shortly before our first stop, we were told “put stinger suits on”. That was cue to the jellyfish, but apparently just because we were driven to the beach in a little motor boat and had to get off it in 20 cm deep water. It makes sense, maybe an angry jelly fish could have waited exactly there to kill us… Anyway, we survived this part and went up to the Hill Inlet Lookout which took around 20 minutes and allows a stunning view on the Whitehaven Beach. Once we arrived uphills, we were the only ones who were not completely flashed away from the view. It’s hard to describe, if you see the picture you might say it’s breathtaking beautiful, which is absolutely true. BUT: we were already annoyed to be part of a stupid travel group which follows their travel guide on every step he might take. He even didn’t have very many or good information about the area nor did he want to start a conversation, something which is not typical for Aussies. After we enjoyed the view (sweating in the stinger suit), we finally wanted to cool down at the Whitehaven Beach, where we were told: “Now you have one hour here” NERV!!! We just thought: “No we want to plan for ourselves and stay much longer here!!! We didn’t have a choice, however, so we went quickly for a swim in the water to make the best of the time we had. We soon spotted some animals, which like to play around in the shallow water of Whitehaven Beach. Manta rays and lemon sharks. We saw the rays from around one meter apart, the lemon shark was, however, a bit shyer why we couldn’t get closer than around ten meters. After this hour of cooling, we went back to the ship where we could eat from the buffet and drove to our next stop, the Hook Island, by the time. There some snorkelling was on the schedule. The Whitsundays count as the western part of the Great Barrier Reef and every island is surrounded by the reef. Every passenger got snorkelling gear and a noodle and we had two hours to explore the reef. Of course touching was completely forbidden, which is a very good thing, because the corals will die out because of that. The captain drove around with the small motor boat in order to look out for some turtles. He spotted one very soon, which was directly next to Tobi. Once we saw it and came back to the top, we were surrounded by 30 other members of our touring group who all wanted to see the turtle as well. WUAAAH, we just wanted to escape from this silly group of people. Besides that, the reef was really nice and colourful, a lot of small and bigger fish and another 60cm big turtle (even though all the others found that it was at least a meter). However, the masks were pretty crappy, so we had to empty them every couple of minutes and we drunk a lot of salt water why we got back on the boat a bit earlier. On the two hours way back we got some sweets, biscuits, fruits and coffee and then the tour was already over. Overall it was nice to see everything, but we’ll never become big fans of such tours which organize everything for you. We just like the adventures of self-containing. That’s why we decided to come back once we got enough money to just rent a boat and go around the islands for a week or so 🙂

Strand am Conway Conservation Park / Beach in the Conway Conservation Park

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After a quite cosily driving to the entrance of the national park and a subsequent drive over hedge and ditch (which was fun due to our SUV), we arrived late afternoon in the campground at the gorge. After a nice chat with the lady at the reception the plan for the evening was set. We wanted to hike to the lookout with a view over the gorge, to eventually enjoy the sunset. A word and a blow, after we built up our great 32$ tent, we started our hike. Indeed the hike was longer than we thought and it took us around 90 minutes to reach the rim of the gorge and the end of the hike. Shortly before we reached the end, it happened what actually shouldn’t happen in Australia. Tobi felt a hurting sting in the shank and after a targeted hit, he felt the same at his hand. In the beginning, we really weren’t sure what it was, because we just rapidly went away from its reach. As we were 90 minutes away from the ranger’s station and out of any mobile reception, it could have had an ugly outcome. But obviously it was “only” an aggressive Australian hornet. It hurt a lot and looked really bad in the beginning, but after talking to the ranger when we were back, Tobi could luckily keep the leg.

Sensitized for the Australian bush, we enjoyed the view over the gorge, but hurried back to reach the civilization before dusk. On our way back we saw an Echidna, this time a pretty active one, and a kangaroo, who lost its way somehow in the cliffs.

The next day, we got up early in order to spot a Platypus (we remember, these are the flat nosed beaver similar animals). These weird creatures are unfortunately very hard to see in wild. Most of the tourist guides sound like this: “at this spot, you can may spot a platypus during dawn or dusk in certain times of the year and certain weather conditions with lots of patience and luck.” Ok, we needed to be patient, but the lady at the reception of the camp ground assured us that it is really easy to observe one, that’s why we made the effort. It took us one hour (during breakfast), but as Kerstin was away for 5 minutes, Tobi could spot one (the picture turned out badly), but to get an impression of the creatures, here a picture from wikipedia). In the evening, we indeed could see a pack (this time with Kerstin), but due to the dusk it was hopeless to make any good pictures.

The rest of the day, we spent hiking through the gorge. As Kerstin felt a bit sick, we only did half of the way to see the 3 best attractions: Ward’s Canyon, Amphiteatre and Moss Garden. The hike was a bit monotonously (around 7km through bush), but the way included some passages through a river (Kerstin got wet feet :-/). But as we had to go the whole way back, it was getting a bit annoying. But anyway very beautiful and away of mass tourism! During 6 hours of hiking we met only 4-5 other groups we already met before at the camp ground. The three attractions were really worth it to hike so for long. But you’ll see that on the pictures.

The next morning, we tried again to take a good picture of a platypus, but this time no one appeared. So we drove to Airlie Beach, the gateway to the Whitsundays. But again, this is another story…

Die "Straße" zum Nationalpark / The "street" to the national park

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We originally chose Gladstone because we thought we might get the chance to visit the Great-Barrier-Reef from there. On the other hand, we knew before that the tours were too expensive. These cost 190$ for a 5 hours boat tour in order to spend two hours on a bird-poo-island calles Lady Musgrove (Indeed, the island consists to 100% of bird poo, which laid down over the years and solidified on the Great-Barrier-Reef 🙂 ). We just had some hope to catch a tour of a local provider or a simple ferry, but this hope was destroyed after we found out that the local tourist information and the ferry terminal had no different offers.

So we drove our way to Stephen who is very difficult to describe. The best way might be a simply “incredible nice and likeable”. He is 39 years old and made somewhat like a hobby out of couchsurfing. So, he usually has a full house of travellers (once even 17 people in one night). Additionally he is a very good cook, why he dishes up great food or barbecues together with self-brewed beer and self-burned spirits (yes spirits!). Beside that he has a very good sense of humour and just a lot of fun in his life (maybe that’s just typical Aussie). One of his stories is about a day in work, where he appeared in his full body panda suit or picking up his girlfriend from the airport in the same one. Of course, he was surrounded by children and missed his girlfriend. There are a lot of other stories, but that would blow up the post too much (one of them is about two fighting geckos in the air condition) 🙂

As we decided to give the bird-poo-island a miss, Steve suggested us to visit a beach nearby (Tannum Sands), what we did the next day. It was a very relaxed day, with a quite nice beach as its highlight, but we think we deserved that one 🙂 The actual highlight of the day was a long burger barbecue with Steve and another couple of couchsurfers (Sven and Sabrina from Germany) at the same evening. The next day we headed off to Carnarvon Gorge, which is only 500km inland of Gladstone. However, we stopped being worried about such distances a long time ago, why we had a relaxing 5 hour drive, but this, my friends, is another story to be told…

Tannum Sands Beach

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