Noosa

Surfing At Noosa

5 hours south of Hervey Bay you reach a small town surrounded by tropical vegetation, crystalline beaches and towering gum trees. The place is called Noosa and today is a wealthy region of million dollar houses by the beach, large boats to accompany them and bronzed figures to accompany both of them!!! Unfortunately for a backpacker, it means that Noosa isn't the cheapest place to spend your days but I thought it was definately worth a bit of time here without it hurting my bank balance any more than this beautiful country has already - in fact my money situation has been mortally wounded since arriving in Australia - which I am sure will have some consequence later on in my travels but which i'm not quite sure what that consequence is at the present time - so it's best not to worry about it now.

The town is divided into Noosaville, Noosa Junction and the area closest to the beach and where I was staying - Noosa Heads. On the few days that I spent here I achieved two main goals. I took a long walk around the Noosa National Park - where I spotted a Turtle in one of the watery coastline bays that I passed and I also spotted - to my utter delight (because I had not seen one before, let alone in the wild) two Koala's. They are perhaps the laziest animals that have ever evolved. They basically sit in the trees and eat eucalyptus leaves which is the most inefficient plant you can eat and thus they literally have no energy for anything. The two that I observed didn't move at all except one wiggled an arm for a second which you could have easily have missed if you had blinked at the wrong moment.

The second goal was definately a more rewarding one. You have to do it if you come to the East coast of Australia and I had not yet. So off I went for my first surfing lesson. The prinipal is relatively easy. After a quick safety talk about 'rips' (you don't want to panic if you get caught in one of them) then we soon learnt the 3 steps to getting up on the board. In practice it isn't quite as easy as the 3 steps make out. Actually getting on the board is not the hard part at all, but instead it's the timing of the wave - when to start your 3 steps. The waves here were perfect and I managed to ride about 5 of them which was so rewarding when you actually do it. Don't be fooled, I wasn't coasting down a 20ft wave as it crashed over my head - it wasn't like that at all - but it was good enough for a start. Paul, who also came along didn't quite manage to get up on the board as he couldn't really get past step 1 - I watched him as he froze to the surfboard like a rabbit in the headlights and sailed all the way back to shore on his belly.

Along with the surfing lessons came the injuries. Within a 2 hour lesson I had badly bruised my finger, cut my foot and achieved a bleeding nose after smacking the board into my face. It's all the rolling about in the water when you miss time the wave - you feel like your in a washing machine. Despite all that and the fact that I didn't quite manage to 'hang 10', I still had a lot of fun attempting to.

After a couple of days in the sun - I left Paul in Noosa and travelled onwards to meet family. I had been travelling with Paul for a lot of the East Coast and it had been good fun. But, like always when you travel, you pick people up and eventually have to say goodbye - so thats what I did, and then I moved on.........