On Week 27 and 28 of our OzLap, from Monday 11^th – Sunday 24^th October 2021 , we bathe in the glories of all South East Queensland has to offer. There’s some splendid beach towns along this stretch from Gladstone to the border of New South Wales including sleepy little Tannum Sands, busy Bundaberg, the oh-so-stylish Noosa, low key Caloundra and glittery Gold Coast. See more of our adventures in our videos: Week 27 OzLap 1770 to Noosa and Week 28 OzLap Noosa to Byron.

Two days Tramping Tannum Sands.

We departed Yeppoon after a lovely week 26 of our OzLap and headed 2 hours down the highway to the little coastal town of Tannum Sands just south of Gladstone. This is the place to go to get away from the rather industrial Gladstone as its very quiet with just a few shops/cafes. They’ve spent a lot of money doing up the foreshore walkways that stretch from Wild Cattle Creek all the way to Boyne Island, the neighbouring town. They call this walk The Turtle Way and we ran/walked it both ways during our stay. There’s plenty of picnic tables, toilet blocks, access to a patrolled beach and a lookout as well as boardwalks over the creek and some lovely timber sculptures.

Three Golden Days in 1770 / Agnes Waters

It’s only a hop skip and jump from Tannum Sands to 1770 (75 mins) and there’s a choice of staying out at the ‘sunset’ campground on the river mouth of Bustard Bay in 1770 or you can stay halfway back towards Agnes Waters or in Agnes Waters itself where there’s access to the big, long white sand surf beach and a few more cafes and services. We chose the sunset campground at 1770 and rode our bikes the 8 kms along the cycle way into Agnes Waters for supplies and it was a great ride, albeit with a few hills! Agnes Waters has an African café, a pizza shop, 2 supermarkets, a liquor store and all the basic shops plus a few cute cafes dotted around the campground and surf beach. It also has a pretty amazing couple of walks: the Paperbark trail, which is a boardwalk through beautiful towering paperbark trees and the Red Rock walking trail which winds along the red rocky cliffs above the ocean.

1770 has a Marina with a café, a happy hour bar and a couple of food trucks – Pelican’s fish n chips and burgers plus a Shaslik/kebab van. There’s plenty of tables set out at the marina facing the sunset and you can BYO making it a good cheap night out. There’s also a bar/tavern called 1770 Beach Hotel and the Tree restaurant. It’s as odd as the name suggests but has a lovely outdoor deck where you can enjoy a drink while you wait for your dinner (ours took 90 mins to arrive)! There’s plenty of places to watch the sunset along Bustard Bay and lots of great walks up and over the headland called Round Hill to the east surf beach side.

Three things to tick on a trip to 1770 – Agnes Waters are 1. The Paperbark boardwalk and the Red Rock Walking trail just 5 mins from Agnes Waters.  2. The LARC amphibious boat tour across land and sea and sandbanks (this old Vietnam re-supply craft is a bit of a novelty but comes with some good commentary on the history of the area and some fun splashing from sandbanks into the bay). 3. The sunsets from 1770 over Bustard Bay.

Bustling Bundaberg

Bundaberg is a big bustling service town with a large scale version of every camping, fishing, hardware, outdoors, boating and electronics store you can imagine. Of course, there’s the famous Bundaberg Rum distillery and lots of sugar cane, hops and rye crops around.  There’s lots of golf courses and some pretty, outer suburbs along the coast where the Burnett River meets the sea including Burnett Heads and Mon Repos and Begarra. They are all interlinked by a cycling/walking track which has information boards about the nesting turtles and wildlife along the way.

Four stunning days walking every nook of Noosa

We’d forgotten how beautiful the beaches are in Noosa! The white sand, the clear water, the cliff top walks and the sunshine all combine to be eye-poppingly amazing! Best explored on foot (as parking and traffic a nightmare), we took to walking everywhere to soak up the views, beaches and water. We started with a big walk from the cute little village of Peregian Beach up to cosy Marcus Beach. Then we did the walk from sprawling Sunrise to the exclusive corner of Sunshine Beach where massive mansions hug the cliffs and stare out to sea. We continued up the many stairs to Paradise point and followed the cliffs around to the southern Noosa Heads and Devil’s kitchen lookout, then down along Alexander Bay, averting our eyes from the nude bathers, and up the northern Noosa Head to the infamous Hell’s Gate. From here you follow the clifftops around to Fairy pools then along Granite Bay to Dolphin Point and around to our favourite TiTree Bay Beach to swim in the oh so clear waters. From here there’s a great new (for us – it went in 2016) boardwalk called the Park Road Boardwalk. Lucky for us the Floating Land 2021 sculpture exhibition was on. This ‘art in the environment’ exhibition featured floating jellyfish, carved feathers, seashells in the trees, letterboxes and pretty painted panels all with a message about the environment they were placed in. The rest of the walk goes past the cosy Little Cove and all the way to first point and Hastings street and ends in the Noosa Spit recreation reserve/ Noosa woods. Of course we had to do a little shopping in Hastings st and sample our favourite Massimo’s Gelati (cinnamon and coffee a great combo) and enjoyed delicious bean nachos from the Mexican truck. We stayed at Sunrise beach and Sunshine Beach and enjoyed the lifesaving club for sundowners and on Sunday, the Noosa Farmers Market was a delicious treat.  

We also spent a day exploring the hinterland and drove down to Coolum to hike up the cone shaped hill for great views in every direction, then headed further west and up some pretty steep mountains to Montville a pretty village perched along the spine of the hills and offering great views from the shops and cafes over the valley. We called into Kondallilla National Park and hiked along the pretty trail with towering trees and lookouts before winding our way back to Noosa via Doonan to visit a friend.

Three things to tick on a trip to Noosa are: 1. The Coastal Walk from Sunshine Beach to Hell’s Gates to Hastings St.  2.The Sunday Farmers market for the most delicious, fresh and fulsome food ever. 3. Sundowners at the Sunshine Beach Lifesaving Club.

Cute Caloundra area: Mooloolaba, Moffat and Dicky’s Beach

About an hour’s south of Noosa is the area collectively referred to as Caloundra. This is actually a whole series of cute beachside towns – Dicky’s Beach, Shelly Beach, Moffat Beach and Kings Beach. We stayed with a friend in Moffatt beach and walked north along the waterfront to Dicky’s beach for dinner at the lifesaving club then the next morning walked  south all the way to Kings beach. This walking trail hugs the coast and takes you past some pretty cool cafes, pools, playgrounds and picnic tables.

Two days on Stradbroke enjoying the sunshine, space and sand

Stradbroke is the love island of Brisbane and is almost a suburb where people live and commute to Brisbane to work. It is accessed via a passenger ferry or vehicular barge from Cleveland. The barge is pretty expensive for a motorhome so we parked The Duke in the ferry parking lot and took the passenger ferry across and stayed at the Youth Hostel at Point Lookout. We were going to take our bikes but there’s only one very narrow road with no shoulder or bike lane that goes from Dunwich where the ferry comes in, 18km up to Amity Point the mangrove, sunset north western point and then 18 km across to Point Lookout, the surf beach North eastern side. We rode the bus from Dunwich to Point Lookout and it barrelled along so fast we were glad not to be on bikes! Point Lookout is where all the action is – if you like surfing, hikes, beaches, snorkelling, scuba diving and barefoot bowls!. This big sandy island (second largest sand island in Australia – Fraser being the biggest) is spread out and you really do need a car to get to the scattering of shops and cafes but we made the most of our 20,000 steps a day goal to walk everywhere (we walked 20km a day!). There’s sidewalks so you can walk along the road but we mostly walked along the hard packed sand at low tide. We were staying on the west side of Point Lookout at Adder rock and it was a 30 minute walk along Cylinder Beach to the Stradbroke Island Beach Hotel – a ripper of a place for sundowners! Slightly closer was the Bowls Club where we enjoyed barefoot bowls and a fairly average meal as their chef was missing the night we visited so limited choices despite their usually enticing menu! Our favourite walk was around Deadman’s headland and along the whale watching trail to Frenchman’s Beach then the #1 walk on the island: The North Gorge walk to South Gorge Beach. This is normally a loop trail but the boardwalk was damaged by storms 18 months ago and is blocked off half way so you need to do the walk in two sections. It takes you right out and over the Coral Sea where you can watch the Whales glide past from April to October. We were lucky enough to see a whale breaching in mid-October, one of the stragglers we guessed! We also saw lots of very large turtles and dolphins playing close to the cliffs. Back on shore, there’s plenty of Koalas, kangaroos and goannas which are not intimidated by humans at all! Point Lookout has a lifesaving club tucked into the far east corner where it looks over Main Beach which is a 20km long 4WD beach. There’s a couple of cute shops in this area – a health food store, bakery and a killer café-homewares store called Fever.

Three things to tick on a trip to Stradbroke Island are: 1. The North Gorge Walk  2. Barefoot bowls at the Bowling Club and 3. Coffee at fever plus sundowners at the Beach Hotel.

Big Sand and skyscrapers on Surfers Paradise – Tugun Beach

From sleepy, sandy Stradbroke with dashed through Bustling Brisbane and into sky-scraper city of Surfers. Eeek this place is so ugly! We opted for the slightly lower key area of Tugan Beach where we went for a 6km walk along the beach to Kirra Beach down near Tweed heads-Snapper rocks for lunch. We headed back to surfers to stay at a friends apartment for the night and enjoyed a lovely home cooked meal, views over the sand and a nice soft bead! Sunday we enjoyed a run along the wide flat beach at low tide, a quick swim then off to Surfers Farmer’s market for more delicious fresh food.

Byron Bay Bliss

Sunday 23^rd – Wednesday 26^th October

Byron. Oh how we love, love, love this blissful place. Especially with hardly anyone here due to Covid travel restrictions. We rolled in Sunday afternoon and headed straight out on the lighthouse walk past The Pass, Ray’s at Wategoes, Little Wategoes then up to the iconic lighthouse perching over both Clarkes beach to the west and Tallows to the East.

Read more about Byron in our Wek 29 Blog post: Byron Bliss.