Places to stay: Noosa

Ah, Noosa Main Beach. This is where you'd like me describe a beautiful, deserted white sandy shore, fringed with palm trees and a gently lapping turquoise sea. Wouldn't ya? Eh?

Well it's nearly all those things, except right this minute.... except right this minute we're experiencing the tail end of Cyclone Helen..so.... Well, during the Christmas holidays anyway, it's more like Benidorm only with better food and less beer bellies. Every possible square centimetre of formerly stunning beach is crammed with semi clad, oiled up Aussies all lying prostrate before the god of skin cancer. When they aren't all squeezed together on the beach like a human tetris game, they're provoking surf rage amongst each other in the sea. Heaven help you if should just want to go swimming. Chances are you'll come out with a fin burn across the top of your head.

There is an alternative to this madness though. If you can be bothered to walk just a bit further along the boardwalk, up towards the national park, it's like stepping into another world. For some reason, the Great Unwashed seem to steer clear of this bit and yet this is the best part; it's what Noosa is all about. This is where the rainforest meets the sea. Here the beaches are less crowded because they require a bit more effort to get to. Well worn tracks will take you through the forest and along the coast where, on any given day, you might spot koalas, dolphins or even migrating whales. The other day I came face to face with a kangaroo on the path. After months of visiting the park, I hadn't known there were any in residence. One thing to remember though, always remember to look where you're going when you're trying to spot koalas up in the trees or else you might end up in the Pacific Ocean.

Behind Main Beach is Hastings Street, apparently one of the highest concentrations of restaurants in the country. Only eat there if you don't mind about quality and price. It's a right royal rip off. Go to Noosaville or Tewantin, or anywhere else that's not right next to the beach. There are some interesting shops down this street but not for nothing is it known as Fleece St by locals.

Another unique thing about Noosa is that there are only two sets of traffic lights in the whole area. Noosa Shire council has adopted the Milton Keynes approach to traffic control and constructed a squibillion roundabouts. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to use them. Aussies are great but, since they don't have to drive around roundabouts as part of their driving test, each of them is an accident waiting to happen.

The Noosa tourism area continues along down the Noosa river into Noosaville. Here restaurants, a bike path, park and public barbecues are all along the water's edge. It's pretty chilled out but can get busy at weekends and is beginning to suffer from 'hooning' late at night.
[From the Urban dictionary:
Hoon. to travel at a high velocity, preferably in a car, eg."Did you see that bloody hoon last night hooning about in his Holden?"]

If you really want to get back to nature then the Noosa Everglades make for a stunning kayak trip. Also Noosa North Shore, accessed via car ferry across the river, is a good excuse for a hoon up to Fraser Island in a 4x4 along the sand. But if you decide to camp there, remember - so has everyone else. And there are no toilets so it can get a bit whiffy. Yuk.

So my advice for visiting Noosa: Come when it's not a major public holiday, if you must go camping, do it where there are some proper dunnies, and for god's sake, beware of the bloody roundabouts.

Places to visit: A Town Called Eumundi

First impressions of Eumundi, especially on a stinking hot day, are that it's maybe just another one horse town along the railway line, on the way to somewhere more interesting in Noosa. But STOP! Take a closer look. Or alternatively, take advantage of the air conditioning inside some of the shops and cafés. It's a little gem.

We have recently moved to the outskirts of Eumundi and, by UK standards, it's more like a village. There's one main street where all the shops and cafés are and residential areas are mainly behind this street on either side. It is most famous for its markets which are held in the town centre every Wednesday and Saturday. You can buy all sorts from here, particularly clothes and jewellery and it's quite good for souvenirs to take back home to Blighty.

These markets have enabled Eumundi to develop a bohemian, arty crafty image up and down the main street. You can choose from exclusively designed art from the glassware shops or gear from The Hemp Shop (man)! And the most exciting shop to open recently is Berkelouw's bookshop which sells a vast array of over 100,000 second hand, rare and out of print books, all classified and displayed accordingly, in addition to brand new ones. It's a family owned small chain of 7 stores in Australia and one in Los Angeles. The Eumundi one has a great café attached to it - guaranteed to help you lose track of time. We recently had breakfast in there and it was yummy. And of course we had to buy a book!

The choice of where to eat is great for such a small village. In our first week here, up to our eyes in cardboard boxes and not wanting to cook or wash up, we grabbed a take away from a Thai place. It was good and we could just as easily have stayed there to eat. In fact it would have saved me from even more washing up.

Last night we went out for dinner properly in our village for the first time. We had a BEAUTIFUL meal at the Balinese looking Modern Primitive, although the food wasn't balinese and, during the day they serve tapas. It was all organic and cooked to order, and we realised after a while that the reason they weren't very busy was because they were staggering the bookings so that you got really personal service. It was great to eat in a restaurant where the staff were keen to suggest what would go well with your meal, and the flavours were awesome!

How cool is that for a village? And that's the first place we've tried. We've got all the rest of the main street to do yet!

I'll be back with any further updates on the quest to eat my way round Australia!

(19.2.08) Non food update: Eumundi now has a lovely, brand new, open air, heated swimming pool. It's not very big (25m) but I racked up half a kilometre easily enough and it's fine for keeping up your fitness. The best thing about it is that (so far) it's not very busy, during the week at least, and the kids pool is a good distance away from the grown up lane swimming one. It's basic but clean and peaceful, and we really like it so there.

Garden creatures in Australia - don't panic!

Well living in the Noosa 'hinterland', near Eumundi, for the last 2 weeks has been interesting. Being in such close proximity to snakes and lizards and stuff has had to make me adjust somewhat!

Mini lizards are cute and interesting to watch until they suddenly disappear into the waiting mouth of a snake you didn't know was lying under the back step. Fortunately, it was 'only' a green tree snake and, although we eyeballed each other suspiciously, it wasn't very interested and slithered back under the step. And at this present moment I can see what I have convinced myself to be a carpet python right outside my window. I would like it to be a carpet python because they aren't dangerous and only bite people when they have been seriously pissed off. They also, apparently, eat the young of other, more poisonous snakes and ensure your mice and rat population are in the past tense. It has fastened itself to the chain which anchors our bird feeder and pointed itself at the bird seed tray, coiled up and ready to spring. It has been in that position all night so we are speculating whether it has in fact died of starvation and rigamortis has set in. It certainly doesn't seem to mind us taking photos of it. Or maybe it's just lulling us into a false sense of security. Either way, our noisy lorikeets and flappy pigeons are notable by their absence! Shame really as yesterday a beautiful king parrot had a nosey at the bird feeder. A sort of grisly curiosity has got me intrigued as to whether a snake of that girth could actually digest a pigeon. Apparently the thing to do if you're worried about having snakes in the garden is to get a dog. The snakes will be put off by the scent.

We've also discovered what has been making the little holes in the front lawn. Not funnel web spiders, as I first worried about after watching a documentary about Fraser Island! But bandicoots! They look like a cross between a rat and a wallaby, and are about the size of rabbit - very odd. And I thought they were just a Sony invention.

(Non poisonous) Snakes and bandicoots I can cope with. Bugs and spiders I'm not very good with, especially if they are flying or running towards me. Redback spiders are ones to watch out for, although I still haven't clapped eyes on one since Diver Dave's been very pro active with the bug spray. They like to lurk about in exterior wall crevices and garden furniture. Like most things, they will only bite if they're upset and you should get immediate medical attention if you're the victim. Huntsman spiders are BLOODY scary looking (especially if you happen to notice one happily sitting on the sanitary bin next to the toilet that you are sitting on in Noosa National Park!), but they aren't aggressive. In fact one Aussie told me about their 80 year old grandmother who would pick them up and lob them out of the window if she ever found any in the house. Since they are about the size and shape of a tarantula, this is no mean feat. She obviously didn't have any fly screens though.

In the evenings we have literally been bombarded with massive suicidal beetles, jovially named Christmas beetles. They seem to bounce off your windows or head and end up breakdancing for hours while they shuffle off this mortal coil. They aren't engineered very well since they cannot upright themselves once toppled over and die if they aren't up righted straight away. What a stupid design fault. I am looking forward to whatever day of Christmas it is when these beetles cease to be.

Meanwhile, we haven't really had any problems so far with mosquitos. this may be because we have a yellow UV light out on the deck which apparently doesn't attract insects (tell that to the xmas beetles). A top tip the estate agent told me was to make sure you empty the water from the trays of any pot plant after rainfall as the stagnant water will attract the mozzies.

Unfortunately, this week Diver Dave had to dispatch a cane toad right outside our front door. Cane toads are officially a pest in Australia and you are supposed to get rid of them straight away by any means possible to try and stop them spreading, which they are doing anyway in their thousands. It's not really their fault. They can blame the farmers in the 1930s who introduced them to eradicate pests in the cane fields. This exercise failed monumentally and only served to introduce a non native species which is seriously poisonous to other, native species.

We had to consult the world wide interweb to confirm identification first though to make sure we weren't about to eliminate a cute native frog. It certainly didn't look very cute. It looked shifty. When they are croaking, these toads are bleedin obvious. They sound like mini jack hammers. But this one wasn't croaking, probably because it knew it was about to. Diver Dave identified it by its poison sacks on either side of its 'shoulders' and promptly used a rake handle. Yuk.

I will update this post with any further worrying wildlife developments!