2010/11 Australia trip - Tin Can Bay and Rainbow Beach |
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Our beach shrank quickly as the tide came in, and we had to be moving on anyway. We rejoined the main road heading 
into Bundaberg. Back in 1995 we’d briefly passed through town on our way to the Bundaberg distillery but this time we wanted to see more, as it had looked to have some interesting buildings. We needed to find the Internet and Sandie wanted a fabric shop to buy some zippers. We found a place for Internet, but had no luck with a color match on the zippers. We ate at Sizzlers, another memory from 1995 and an unlikely survivor; similar restaurants in the USA like the York Steak House are long gone.
We intended camping on Fraser Island, and we had a rush to get to Hervey Bay where we’d get the ferry and all the necessary permits. We found that the ferry trip plus access permits would be $200, a bit much for a single day on the Island. I’m sure it’s a beautiful place but we doubted that it would be quiet with all the packaged tours and the yahoos roaring around the sand tracks.
We opted instead for camping in Cooloola reserve, which, like Fraser Island is part of Big Sandy national park. The lady in the visitors’ centre at Hervey Bay was kind enough to let us use her computer to book the campsite because, yes it was part of Queensland’s smart booking system again. We still got stung $25 for an additional vehicle access permit though we don’t know why.
We drove to Maryborough and then past pine plantations to Tin Can Bay. We took a sandy track through the forest to Poverty Point where we found a perfect campsite to watch the sun go down over Tin Can Bay and its mangroves, while we fought the bugs for supremacy. We had the whole place to ourselves except for a boat anchored out in the bay.
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Tin Can Bay road (0.52) |
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Thursday October 28th
These willie wagtails entertained us at breakfast, and then we were off again, finding our way through the maze of sand tracks back to the road.
Its name was Rainbow Beach Road and we just had to find out what that was all about so we drove to the little town of Rainbow Beach, a seaside resort, but a fairly new one so it doesn’t have that tired 
look of ancient seaside towns. We could see the colours in the cliffs, a little like Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight, but it was high tide so the sands themselves were covered. A fellow photographer said this was his third visit. On his first the sands had looked wonderful. On his second it was just after a cyclone had hit and all the sand had gone: just bare rock. And this time he wasn’t sure; he’d have to wait for low tide, something we didn’t really have time for.
We decided to get organized for the next few days as we’d be camping close to Brisbane on a weekend and might run into full campgrounds, so I reserved spots at Crows Nest and Girraween parks, spending a long time on the phone for those. The system was annoying but it did have its uses.