Noosa and Rainbow Beach

The Great Sandy national park is a huge sand dunes park, that has unique vegetation and wildlife. It has three parts – the Noosa section in the south, the Cooloola section in the middle and Fraser Island in the north, and we decided to visit them all.

We slept in Noosa (the town) so we could hike in the Noosa section of the park. This part of the park has a unique combination of rainforest and open mangrove forest, that grow on a large sand dune surrounded by amazing coasts from two sides. We spent half a day walking through the park, but the real attraction was only at the end. In the main car park, up on a tree, completely ignoring everyone around it, sat a large koala.

Itay, who didn't have the chance to see the koalas in Daisy Hill, got his chance now.
We took lots of photos, sat down to eat lunch, and took lots of photos again, since the koala changed position once in an hour. We also took some nice photographs of a guana, a 1.5 meters long local Australian lizard, that caught some sun in the parking lot. Of course we saw it 10 minutes after Lilya declared that she would like to see one in the wild.

We drove from there to Boreen Point, right on the shore of lake Cootharaba, saw an amazing sunset with a rainbow over the lake and set our camp there. While cooking dinner, we saw some possums that came to see if we have any leftovers for them.
We drove to Rainbow Beach, on the northern part of Cooloola section of the park, on the following day. As the name suggests, the town Rainbow beach sits near a beautiful coast with colored sands. The most beautiful point there is Carlo Sandblow – a huge sand dune above the shore. We went through the dune and found a path trough the sandstone cliff down to the beach, or ,shell we say, the highway. There are so many 4X4 vehicles on the beach, that they had to place traffic signs like speed limits along the beach. However, the beach itself is beautiful, with the colored sand, and especially the deep black sandstones.

Our time, as always on this trip, was short, so we decided not to spend the night in the lovely town and drove all the way to Harvey Bay.