A walk across to the lookout above the beach and up town had us stocked with the essentials – bread, tide map and a list of what to do with all the relevant wheres. Anne cooked a nice corn beef and vegies dinner and we started to talk about where to next. By the time we retired we had the next few destinations and activities for the area sorted.
Waking up the next morning called for a revision of plans because I had a throat infection and Anne was sporting a similar wog. So we got into the “home by” planning of the whole trip with an understanding of our style of travelling to date – shortish one day trips on travel legs and week-long stays in more interesting locations with sight-seeing in the car. That let us rearrange some mid-year appointments to suit our movements. We also decided not to take a trip out to Fraser Island nor to explore Tincan Bay and Hervey Bay - we hope to fit this in on the homeward leg when we are fitter.
We broke the day up with a couple of walks and a drive to the Carlo Sand Blow and Inskip Point. Locally, I saw a pair of Speckled Drongos (no not the helpful neighbours) and further afield we saw a Brahminy Kite.
Helpful sign board with all the info on Carlo Sandblow and the walk from this area to Double Island Point, just north of Noosa
The size of the people gives an idea of the vastness of Carlo Sandblow
The Carlo Sand Blow is a very large natural sand gully that has been creeping west at the rate of half a metre per year since long before Captain Cook named the feature after his deckhand. It is immense and does seem to bring out the mediation urge as there were a number of long footprint tracks that ended with a person sitting in solitary contemplation. When we were there, the local tour leader brought a group of 20 young people to watch the sunset and to learn to throw a boomerang while they waited for that to happen. We went on to Inskip Point to catch the sunset and the unloading of the last barge from Frazer Island.
The Manta Ray car barge arrives from Fraser Island - smoke in background from cane fields.
Inskip Point is a popular camping place that runs for several kilometres either side of a good road. One needs a Nature Parks Permit and a willingness to forego showers etc but it looks great. The sand tracks out to the ferry were quite deep and the sand soft at the end of a long hot day (Yeah lots of those days here!!). We hit the beach and plodded round to the point taking photos of the sunset as we went – pretty good exercise as there was a bit of climbing in and out of the shoreline furniture to ‘get effects’. There was a clear sky except for a bit of smoke in the distance that was not enough to get any extra cloud effects. The last ferry had only one vehicle on it and the light was gone by then too.
Inskip point at sunset with some of its shoreline furniture
Watching the sunset from Inskip Point
The trip into Gympie took up the rest of the day after some local walking along the beach and the Doctor had done his thing by prescribing some throat drugs. Gympie has to be the hilliest town in Australia – and they are big hills. We found a second hand bookstore that had an amazing number of the old time Westerns and lots of other ones. Anne traded some of her books for others she had not read at a very nice price so we bought a few more too. Then we headed to the local Woollies for some groceries and found that the coffee and muffins were at the end of the day rate of two muffins for $1.50 the lot!!!!
Our pack up for Bundaberg was very simple as we had not unpacked the car or erected the annex. Over the few days we had watched man with the little tractor put vans onto sites with great ease. Some of the sites just would not be accessible to an ordinary car and van outfit. So we got him to get the van out of the site and we hitched up easily on an apron with plenty of room. We were on the road by 9.00am.
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