Noosa and the Sunshine Coast

Hell's Gates, Noosa National Park

So this weekend Leslie, Lauryn, Nicole and I went up to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast for a few days away from the city.

Noosa is a small resort town north of Brisbane on the Sunshine Coast, less developed and more natural and local than its counterpart south of the city, the Gold Coast, which is where you find glitzy towns like Surfer's Paradise and stuff.  Noosa is much more laid back.  We did the whole thing for pretty cheap ($9 each way, plus $25 a person a night for accommodations), which was nice.  

The hinterland of the Sunshine Coast is gorgeous, and the Glass House Mountains, huge, isolated pillars of stone about 2000 feet tall, are some of the treats you see along the way from Brisbane.  We stopped and ate lunch in Nambour, a town I guess about the size of Peru.  It was cool to see a bit more rural side of Australia, deep in the heart (well, relatively) of the country.

The first night we were there we decided to go out for dinner and splurge a bit, and justified spending the money by buying groceries to cook dinner for ourselves the next night.  We went to Hastings Street, the main drag in town, and walked around a bit until we decided to go in for drinks and an appetizer at Zachary's, a gourmet pizza place. It had a bit of a low key resort town feel to it, almost like a tropical Telluride, which is what the town sort of was.   The cocktail menu was extensive, I'm not sure I've ever seen more kinds of vodka anywhere.  I had a glass of wine, but it was fun for Nicole to order a snazzy cocktail as her first legal drink. 

We then went to a cafe for dinner and more drinks.  I tried Coopers Pale Ale, hoping it would be something similar to the Pale Ales I'm used to back home.  Sadly, it wasn't.  It was pretty thin and not very bitter, just not a whole lot of flavor at all.  I've been branching out and trying some white wines (still no reds for me) because I'm sort of resigning myself to the the fact that I'm not going to get the quality of brews I'm used to in the states where the microbrew movement is 20 years old compared to Australia where its still in its infancy.  I figure if I can't have good beer, I might as well learn to enjoy something they do well here, and white wines definitely fit that bill.  The  Chardonnays I've had were great, as was the Sauvingon Blanc, but the Verdelho, (which I had never heard of, especially since I don't know wine), was a little to sweet for my liking.   The cocktails at the cafe mentioned much earlier in this monster of a paragraph were fanciful too, again fun for Nicole considering she doesn't like wine or beer.  The meal was fantastic, I had a chicken special with Tomato Risotto Cakes that was very well presented and tasted great.

The next day we went up to the National Park in Noosa Heads for some hiking.  When we got to the park there was a Koala (how fittingly Australian) perched in the eucalyptus tree right outside the park entrance.  We hiked the Tanglewood route through some deep rainforest with lush vegetation and impressive ravines and gorges.  No Koala sightings, but we did see and hear some interesting birds.  We got to the other end of the trail where it met up with the coastal route, and explored a remote beach and some rocks to one side with snails and tide pools everywhere.  The water here is really beautiful in the sense that it changes from a deep blue to a bright turquoise as it gets closer to shore. 

We then saw Hells Gates, pictured above.   We tried to take lots of pictures but like when skiing in the mountains, the scale and depth of this gorge were impossible to capture.  There wasn't a good place to take a picture of the sheer rock wall that drops at your feet.  We even saw a sea turtle swimming towards the front of it.  It was the defining experience of the trip for me.  We walked back along the Coastal Trail to finish off our hike back into town, where we ate lunch and got some magnificent ice cream from a place called Massimo's I had read about on our way there.  Massimo himself is from Italy and the ice cream is about as authentic as you get.  All in all we walked about 9 miles, on top of the 2 miles we had jogged in the morning along the river.  The next morning we played tennis, or tried to at least, before we left.  It was a pretty active trip for Nicole and I, and I'm pretty sore but it was worth it.

Check out pictures on Nicole's Flickr- links to the left, especially later today or tomorrow after we visit the Koala Sanctuary.