Back In Time

‘Let’s go back to that old school storytellin’ ish’

Throughout my penultimate week in Australia, John had been asking me if there was anything I really had to do first- any places I wanted to visit, activities I wanted to do, that we could afford. On the cards were Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin’s- bless his soul- zoo), the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary and Moreton Island, the second largest sand island in the world. I couldn’t decide, and we only had Saturday and Sunday to do it as he was working every other day from like 7am to 6pm. So, on Friday night (last minute as always) we booked the ferry and bought camping permits, as well as buying enough food for the weekend and 4×4 proofing the car. Saturday morning at about 7am we got on the MiCat ferry to Moreton Island.

Be prepared

The boy scouts have it right. That is important. After spending a beautiful day and a half violently ricocheting cruising over the sand and dirt tracks on this stunning island, climbing mountainous sand dunes and swimming in freshwater lakes, we had one last stop on our map before heading back to just catch the 3.30pm ferry. And of course, this is when it ALL started to go wrong.

In most cases, road signage in Australia is very, very bad. Even more so on Moreton Island. We ended up getting slightly lost and going down roads that no one thought to put a sign on saying that they are long soft sandy roads to dead ends. We tried and failed multiple times to get up one particularly soft and sandy hill to get to ‘The Desert’ where we could go sand boarding, and when we eventually did succeed, we had half an hour before we needed to head back for the ferry and of course, the sand was not compact enough to sand board on. Not that we didn’t try. Oh, how we tried. So after finally conceding defeat and heading back to the car to get the ferry, we promptly got stuck in the huge tire tracks of a bus where we remained for approximately an hour trying to dig, push, reverse, or anything else we could think of to get out. For those of you who are maths geniuses, you may realise that half an hour – an hour = late + not getting the only ferry back that day. We finally decided that the thing to do would be to lower the tyre pressure (again) and this time, it worked. We were off! But we’d missed the rather expensive but only ferry that day that would take people and cars. All because we didn’t have a tyre pressure gauge. Be prepared.
We managed to spend an extra night camping and caught the ferry the next afternoon for free since there was space, John had to miss a day of work but we managed to contact Tom and ask him to let them know so it didn’t end too badly. Overall it was an amazing weekend.

Boneless creatures & thickshakes?

I mentioned bonless creatures in my last blog. Being an island surrounded by the sea, quite often as we strolled along on that extra day we had after John had bought us a thickshake and an ice cream, we’d bump into strange gelatinous creatures washed up on the beach. We had no idea what they were but they were gross. We did see one pretty jellyfish floating around in the shallows which was blue… I should look up what kind it was. Also during one of our strolls, a small whale jumped right up in front of us. Yes, I was very, very excited.