Lamington to Noosa

Road trip in Australia. The best way to see what exists in between. Between the cities, between the bus stops, and between the mountains. Distances are amazingly large, and there is something to see everywhere. Going somewhere is a matter of choice. The hard part is to choose, and since we like being out in the nature we turned the car south towards Lamington national park.
Itay had to fly to Melbourne for few days so we were just the two of us. The road to Lamington is a steep and winding road and Lilya, who was driving, had at least almost two close encounters with wallabies that decided to cross the road. No wallabies were hurt, though, because practice or evolution had made them quite good in this game of road roulette with the coming cars. The final part of the road is a drive through a narrow road, sometimes only the width of a single car, that winds trough the thick rainforest, like a tunnel made of trees.
We slept there in a windswept campsite, high in the mountains. Actually, the word “high” gets a new meaning in Australia. After being in altitudes above 4000 meters in Peru, we had to rescale our definition of high. In Lamington, high means above 900 meters, but nevertheless, very windy and cold.
Though it was cold, we weren't too lazy to prepare dinner – fine steaks and rice. That's true. Steaks. Being a country with a huge population of cows and huge ranches, it is no wonder that in Australia, beef is one of the cheapest ingredients. Even the chicken costs more. That is why steaks and hamburgers are very popular dinners in our road trip.
We woke up to a beautiful morning full of wallabies. The smaller cousins of the kangaroo look like a big rat and a small rat that were glued together in the middle, and like rats, they like to search food in the campground. However, since wallabies are hundred fold cuter than rats, Oren spent the breakfast time chasing and photographing them and especially one mother with a cab in her pocket.
Apart from wallabies there were also wild turkeys that proved to be a real hassle. They tried to steal our food all the time and even succeeded, taking with them some of our bread.

We did a beautiful 17 km trail inside the rainforest. The trail starts with a tree top walk – a boardwalk hanged from the trees that took us through the canopy. It might not sound like much, but how many times have you looked on a tree from above? The canopy is one of the most important parts of the rainforest and lots of plants hang to the trees and climb up towards the sun. The birds also like the canopy and there is a chance to see some of the birds that it is always possible to hear in the forest.

The trail continued trough the thick rainforest until we reached a lookout at the far end of the McPherson range overlooking Tweed valley that serves as the border between New South Wells and Queensland. From there, the trail descended along a river, passing near 3 beautiful waterfalls, before climbing back up to the car park.
We drove to a town called Surfers Paradise, on the long shoreline south of Brisbane, known as the “Gold Coast”. Lilya, after learning to surf in Brazil (so she could do it in Australia) wanted to try to catch some waves there. We figured that a place called Surfers Paradise might be a good place for that. The town itself is as touristy as it gets. A mixture of Las Vegas and Eilat (much more Eilat than Vegas, though), and a lot of restaurants and bars centered along the main street. Definitely not the relaxed and laid back surfers village as the name suggests.
Anyway, paradise or not, the weather wasn't very good on the next day, so we gave up the surfing option. Instead, we drove to “Daisy Hill koala sanctuary”, which is about half an hour drive south of Brisbane.
There are a lot of zoo's in Australia, and too many of them have a “hands on” approach towards the animals, which means that you are welcome to cuddle, pet and feed the animals. Since we believe in the “eyes on” approach, we worked hard to find a place where no one cuddles the koalas.
In Daisy Hill there are more than 40 koalas that live on the trees in the rather large park. In the park they can be safe from the surrounding urban environment. There is, however, only a small chance of seeing them, since there is about one koala every 100,000 square meters. No cuddling either, unless you can climb a 20 meters eucalyptus tree for that.
In South America we discovered that Lilya has a certain gift. All she needs to do is to REALLY want to see an animal, and than we see it (remember the sloth?). Well, this time Lilya REALLY wanted to see a koala in the wild, so it was no wonder that after walking an hour and a half with our eyes in the tree tops, we got a pain in the neck...
We also saw a koala, eventually, and quite by accident. After wrongly identifying about a million tree termite nests as a koala, we tried to figure if another one of them is a koala or not when something else on another tree moved, and turned out to be the koala we were looking for. It does seem, however, that termite nests can be found everywhere you want to find an animal on the trees, weather a koala, a sloth or a monkey, and their sol purpose is to distract us.

The koala we saw was high on the tree, eating leafs and minding its own business. We took a lot of photographs, of course, but he didn't seemed to mind. This was actually the third koala we saw that day but the first two were in captivity in the visitor center (where they promised us that they will be released soon back to trees), so they don't count.
When Oren was in Australia, 8 years ago, he didn't see any koalas in the wild, so we felt pretty lucky. Koalas are really the cutest creatures, looking like big furry dolls. This one, with his large ears looked like Chiburashka. (here's a link for our non Russian speaking readers).
We drove north from Daisy Hill, picked up Itay from the airport and slept near the Glasshouse Mountains north of Brisbane. We did some walks in this volcanic shaped landscape on the next day. The mountains are actually hot spots of volcanic activity that occurred 25 million years ago. The lookouts around the mountains has great views of the peaks rising from the flat land around them.

We slept near Noosa in the Sunshine coast, which is a collection of coastal towns that popped out of a lifestyle magazine. Small bays surrounded by large homes and expansive cars, with an unusual amount of fancy restaurants that serve crabs and lobsters.