Dull Driving Days Livened up by whales

Train line next to our camp

Couldn't not go through this town

Emerald

We’ve had a couple of relatively dull long driving days getting to the coast, swishing through towns long enough only to notice the cool name of some of them, and bush camping by the side of the road. The place we stayed at right next to the train line turned out to still be used by trains, so we had one thundering past in the evening, got a friendly toot from the driver who was probably quite surprised to see a tent light in the middle of nowhere, and then another one during the night (no toot at least). We got into Maryborough with just enough time to get to the Parks and Wildlife office to try and book into Fraser Island – its website is very frustrating as it always seems to be down, but we managed to book ourselves into the last campsite later ourselves online. We decided to treat ourselves to dinner out and found a nice pub which used to be the old Post Office.

We got up early to tried to get an earlier ferry this morning but the tides were against us, so we got to Rainbow Beach, had hours to kill so had our cereal sitting at a table on the headland looking out over the sparkling sea, watching three whales play around in the bay. They were quite close in and  stayed there for hours which was great. Then we had a swim and play on the beautiful beach, a great way to wait for the ferry, but while we were there we discovered that actually the whales weren’t playing out there, one of them was stuck. There are lots of buoys or a net out there so it must have somehow been stuck in one of those. There were film crews on the beach and rubber dinghies out there trying to help it for quite a while, and the good news as we were having lunch, again on the headland, is that it has been freed!