Okay, I know no one was expecting a post today but….

The day started off beautifully – yeah I had to get up and going early but the sunrise was beautiful and made up for the early rising. We were on the road to Noosa at 7 a.m. and arrived there at 7:50. We had 1 hour and 10 minutes to wait for the Fraser Island pickup so we walked along the streets and window shopped and met these fellow window shoppers (there was more than one of them):

Bush Turkey

At 9 a.m. we spotted a 4-wheel drive multi-passenger vehicle and gathered up all our stuff. The driver asked for our names and then said – “oh you’re the ones booked for a 2-day camping tour. They had to cancel it but you can come on the 3-day tour for the same price.” That would have been fun except for the problem of my food allergies for 3 days – we had prepared for 2. When we asked why we hadn’t been notified of the cancellation, the driver just shrugged and said he didn’t know but that he could give us a full cash refund if we didn’t want to do the 3-day camping trip. (The company was Sunrover and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone – they had our email address so it should have been easy to get in touch for a cancellation. Also, I had re-confirmed the trip (with the owner) on Sunday and he didn’t ask for a phone number or mention that there was a chance of it being cancelled.)

I guess that we couldn’t expect the whole trip to go by without any glitches but we’d really wanted to go camping on Fraser Island overnight.

We took the refund and decided to drive down through the “Hinterland” (in Queensland, it means the land away from the coast). Our first stop was Nutworks – a Macadamia Nut factory. You can watch them cracking and sorting the nuts through an observation window and then browse through the shop. I didn’t know they flavoured macadamias with so many different seasonings – there was honey roasted, sour cream and onion, wasabi and more. They also had macadamia fudge, chocolate coated macadamias, and other candies. It was mind boggling – but John settled on some honey-roasted and some dark chocolate coated nuts.

After that, we headed on the Blackall Range Tourist Drive – through some small villages on the way to the viewing area for the Glasshouse Mountains. There is a really neat legend of how the mountains were formed.

This is Coonowrin, the son who disobeyed his father and

Beerwah, his mother.

When we got back to the condo, we decided that we still wanted to see Fraser Island but not with the same tour company so we have booked a 1 day tour with pickup right at our condo (at 5:25 a.m.!) with Fraser Island Adventure Tours for Friday. The tour was booked through the condo so there shouldn’t be any problems this time.

Tomorrow, we are going to spend the day (or most of it) at the Australia Zoo where I hope to get the chance to cuddle a koala.

Temperature: 22 C – sunny