Here in Queensland, today is officially the first day of winter. Looking out the window of this internet cafe, the beach is busy with folk enjoying the calm ocean and warm breeze. The temperature is 28 degrees celcius. Why on earth didn’t I pack my woolly jacket?
The three of us are hanging around in Noosa for a few days, a small town between Brisbane - where we’ve just came from - and Hervey Bay - where we’re going next. This is one of a couple of stops designed to break up our bus journeys into more managable chunks. I hate bus journeys lasting any more than a couple of hours. There’s no entertainment like you get on an airplane, I always get stuck with the seat that won’t recline and the fiddly air-con vents invariably blow slightly above my head. Still, it’s a good way to see the countryside while you’re getting from A to B and most of the routes across Australia tend to be fairly scenic.
Noosa is a nice enough town, although there appears to be a bit of a mish-mash of targetted visitors. The town is well known and trodden on the backpacker circuit, with plenty of hostels catering for budget traveller types, yet the majority of the town is expensive and geared more towards rich Australian families on their holidays. The main strip, Hastings Street, is lined with pricey boutiques and fancy little eateries. It’s an area apparently frequented by the rich and famous, though a few strolls into the town centre and along the promenade have yet to yield any Heath Ledgers or Russell Crowes. I haven’t even caught a glimpse of Kylie out doing a bit of shopping between cancer treatments. I’ll be sure to wish her well, and take a photo of her arse, should I bump into her.
Either way, it’s a nice place to chill for a couple of days. We arrived in Noosa in the early afternoon on Saturday and settled into our hostel called Koalas. Pretty much immediately we struck up conversation with a couple of people in our room: Becky from Devon and a Kiwi called Marc. We met them later on in the hostel bar after we’d eaten there and prepared ourselves for a night of serious drinking. A pretty couple of swedish girls sitting at our table joined in and the beer began to flow. The compare, I suppose you could call him, was playing a game called ‘the change game’ whereby he asks everybody to run up clutching the exact coins he calls out over his microphone. The first to get there with the correct fare - for example a one dollar coin, three 20s, two 10s and a 5 - wins a jug of beer. Thanks to some hot-footing, and enough change to sink a ship laid out on our table, we won two of those jugs. We then proceeded with a game of our own which Marc told us was called ‘boat race’ where it’s a simple race to the end of your row of the table in terms of necking pints. The first person downs one, tips the empty glass over his or her head and slams it back down on the table, which is the next person in line’s queue to start downing theirs. Whichever ‘team’ necks all their drinks first are, obviously, the winners. As I said it’s a simple game with the simple objective of getting you as steaming as could be in as short a time-frame as possible. It’s fair to say within an hour or two we were all three sheets to the wind. Midnight arrived and, as the hostel bar was closing, we all agreed in our mutual drunkeness to carry on proceedings at a nearby club. Unfortunately I’m unable to describe what followed as my level of alcoholic intake far exceeded my own limits and therefore basically I can’t remember a f**king thing.
Yesterday, after the inevitable recovery period, we trekked around Noosa National Park and saw a couple of koala bears in the wild. Today was all about catching a frisbee under our legs on the nice stretch of beach here. Tomorrow we leave for Hervey Bay - launchpad for Fraser Island.