As I mentioned in the last entry, we all set off for Moreton Island on Wednesday, rising at 5am to get the car packed up. It was a lot of stuff, as it always is, and Josh was getting fed up with the amount of stuff he was having to pass up to me onto the new roof rack that I made. (Roof racks are not cheap... so I built a BIG one from scratch on Monday and Tuesday)
We got off late, and it was a bit of a dash to the terminal in 'Port of Brisbane', but Janice and Ewan were running even later so we didn't feel too bad. We all got on the ferry OK and settled in for the hour and a bit trip.
Given that the island is THAT close to the city, it's a real surprise that it is so amazingly untouched. No timber from the island is allowed to be burned, so you have to import anything you want to make a fire with, and all rubbish is (theoretically) removed from the island and dealt with on the mainland.
When you disembark from the ferry, it's straight into full on 4wd mode as the sand is soft, and depending on the tide, you may end up driving through the surf, which means that if you stop, the car is a gonner. We were staying with our mates in a place called Bulwer which is about 12km up the beach... and is marked by some wrecks. It's absolutely beautiful, the units are about 100m from the beach on the other side of a dune, and the girls were straight into the sea - Tild didn't even wait to take off her clothes!
This was one of the wrecks at 5am... when I woke up and went out to see what was what...
When everyone else got up, we went for a tour of the island. First stop was a place called 'The Desert' where we did some sand tobogganing - but the pics didn't come out very well.
We stayed for an hour or so and then went off further down the island. This was our lunch stop;
Perfect though the beach appears, Ewan makes it a habit (as we do) to collect rubbish that other people leave behind. The bag below contains rubbish from a casual stroll along 100m of beach! It beats me why people will come to an idyll like this, and leave their waste...! Don't they get it?
You can see the rack in this pic...
Just before we left this area, we spotted some Dolphins... and though you can't see them in these pics, (cos I blew it) that's what everyone is looking at.
Then we set off further south to see some crabs that skitter across the sand in little groups...
When they scurry, you can hear this kind of whispering sound... it's a bit freaky....and they're amazing. Eventually, they all bury themselves to get away from you.
...unless someone like Matilda pics them up...
Eventually we came to a bar at the southernmost tip of the island called 'The world famous Gutter bar' at Kooringal. Daile and Janice in the foreground... it's hard to get pics of these two!
I asked the landlady why it was 'world famous' and she said, 'Well it's like this, we are a small drinking village, with a fishing problem!' The sign shows how much you need to pay for an excuse... (click on the pic for a larger one). The snakes skins were found on the beach...
This was a sandy rock about 4km up from the southern tip...from left; Feeb, Daile, Anna, Josh, Jack, Tild, Moll and Ryan.
These plants are known as 'black boys'... apparently because they are black at the base, and they look like spears....or so the 'clean' version goes anyway!
This is Jack.
At the end of my stint..(I had to leave early as I had a previous commitment to teach a life drawing class)... we had a ceremonial watching of the sun going down. Given that the forecast had been for rain.. this was an unexpected pleasure... even if the bottom of the sky was obscured by cloud, and we didn't get the full orange thing going on....
Lovely!
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