North Stradbroke Island

Midweek finds us spending a few days on Straddie; one of the world’s most important ecological wetlands I read in the brochure on the way over (Everywhere in Oz has the world’s best or largest something). It’s about an hours drive from Brisbane or taking the bus, train, bus, ferry and bus, closer to three and a half hours. Much as the city was fun, it’s great to be back in a sleepy hamlet again with the sounds of the bush and waves crashing nearby. Straddie has the best land based whale watching spots to be found anywhere (I’m resisting the phrase ‘world’s best’ although I think it is) and we spent a pleasant morning looking at whales, turtles and rays going about their business in the Pacific. To boot the Island has a string of some of the best beaches I’ve seen with turquoise oceans meeting long stretches of white sand that squeaks like you’re walking over a field of mice.
The other interesting thing is that we’ve actually veered from the well trodden backpacker trail down the East Coast. Although the place isn’t dissimilar to Fraser Island, a dead cert on every backpacker itinery, it doesn’t feature as part of the tours prescribed by the Queensland hostels. So much so that we found ourselves in a unique position of being the only people carrying rucksacks boarding the ferry and are being pleasantly surprised at hearing Australian accents instead of Irish or English. You get used to the ease of following the same path here with a deluge of information on where to go, how to get there, where to stay and free pickups. When you stray a little though it’s almost a shock to actually have to do a bit of searching on the Internet on your own. We got it into our heads to come here (blame it on a quiet evening in reading Lonely Planet, nothing more trail breaking than that) and caused consternation at the desk in the Brisbane Hostel when we asked about train and ferry times to Straddie. After giving us funny looks, a few puzzled queries about where we were staying and eventually the wrong information, we went online and worked it out. God knows what would have happened if we admitted we were skipping Surfer’s Paradise and heading straight to Coolangatta, a little further south instead. (Finding a place to stay there was another morning on the computer). I’d imagine we’d probably set alarms off, the sprinklers would come on and the place would go into emergency shutdown. So if this gets reported as happening on the news, don’t worry, it’s not terrorists, just myself and Mike asking some tricky questions at the front desk.