Tuesday 2nd September to Friday 5th September – Maroochydore
Having arrived at the YHA the previous evening I decided to explore the town. I got the courtesy bus into the centre and explored the two shopping centres. The latter was actually really quite big and had a pleasing smell of cookies. Having had lots of issues with my ears popping and unpopping all the time I decided to visit a small salon type place where I decided it would be a good idea to let a complete stranger put tubes in my ears and set light to them (the tubes not my ears). It was a very strange experience actually especially for a non-interventionist control freak such as myself. It felt like it had some effect, I’m not sure exactly what but it was interesting.
Having explored the town, and the rather impressive beach, I went and sat in a bar in the town to wait for Stuart to finish work. Stuart was one of the English group who I met when traveling up through Noosa. He had been in Maroochydore with Martin but Martin had a disagreement with a pineapple, apparently, and headed back to Noosa. In the bar I got talking to a group of locals, actually they got talking to me and half of them were Kiwi so I guess that wasn’t a particularly accurate description of the events. Stuart went and bought some exciting food like noodles and bread and then we collected my things and took them to the hostel he was staying at. I was pleased that my dorm room was infact a twin with just the two beds, the other being occupied by a sweet Chinese girl. We decided to head back out and discovered the group were still at the bar. They began to get slightly more annoying and we headed to another pub. Well when I say pub it was a place with pokey machines and a couple of old men outside drinking with a boy who looked about twelve. Shortly after that we decided to call it a night and headed back to the hostel.
The following day Stuart went to pick more pineapples and I did the obligatory wandering around the town thing whilst purchasing ice drinks, cookies and occasionally checking my email. In the evening we joined a couple of the other guys at the hostel at a different bar which had a karaoke night on. We only actually stayed for one drink, partly as Stuart was shattered and partly as it wasn’t the most exciting place on Earth.
On the Thursday it rained, and rained hard. Hard enough infact for all the picking to be cancelled. The hostel was a workers’ hostel and I was actually the only one staying there who wasn’t working. On the Thursday the only pickers to go out were those who were picking straweberries as apparently they turn to mush and need to be picked even more quickly when it rains. My roommate was a strawberry picker unfortunately for her. Anyway, Stuart was picking pineapples, or rather he wasn’t due to the weather, so we decided to go and explore a bit further than the cafes and shops I had previously visited.
Stuart drove his van and we headed towards a waterfall outside of town itself. On the way we went through a beautifully quaint hillside town called Monteville (hmmm, I may need to check that one) and vowed to stop at one of the pubs for a drink on the way back. When we got to the part of the country park where the waterfall was it was still raining. It wasn’t torrential though so we got out of the car and headed towards the rainforest. Unfortunately prior to going into the forest there was a small lake type thing which had accumulated across the walkway. I carefully avoided this using a handrail and shimmying across whilst looking over some rather fast flowing water below. Stuart decided to brave the water, or rather not to brave the handrail, and soaked his shoes. We got a short distance into the forest and asked a guy taking photographs where the waterfall was. He informed us that it was back up near the car park so we headed back through the lake, having admired the wet trees for a little while. Back at the car park there was a kind of lookout down over some amazing scenery with two large cascading falls. It was stunning with mist and clouds adding to the magical setting. On the way back down to Maroochydore we stopped at the pub we had passed on the way up. It felt very much like the kind of pub you would find in the lake district or somewhere like that in England even down to the log fire with the wet dog trying to warm himself up by it. The drive back down was no less spectacular than on the way up with the rain and clouds adding to the atmosphere rather than detracting from it.
On Friday I spent way too much time uploading photographs and said my final farewells to the shops and centre of Maroochydore.