Tropical Adventures, part 2

Alright, everyone, I think I have left you stewing over that cliffhanger from the last post for long enough. So strap in for part two of the Oates Family Adventures!

When we left off we had made it through high seas and terror to the tiny Heron Island, which is directly on the reef. This means (1) you can walk into the sea from the beach and immediately start snorkelling on the reef, (2) "the beach" is literally the whole island, and (3) it's rather pretty:

Hello tropical island!

So how, I hear you ask, did you lose your mother on such a ridiculously tiny island? Well...

Not wanting to waste our short time there, we went for a walk to the nearest beach and Jan and I decided to go snorkelling while mom and dad went for a longer walk. So off they went. Ten minutes later, my dad reappears asking if we've seen mom. He had nipped to the loo and then carried on walking but couldn't find her anywhere. We laughed at him - how could you lose someone on this tiny island?! Go and look again, silly daddy. 40 minutes later and he still can't find mom, and has enlisted the help of the staff to perform what must be the Guinness Book of Records tiniest hunt for a human ever. It's at times like this, however, that all those "interest" stories we cover on the TV at work start creeping into you head ("Woman abducted by merman! Sharks grow legs to eat people on land! Jurassic dinosaurs found on tiny island!) and you start to get a bit nervy. Ten minutes after that, the missing mother was found sitting peacefully on another beach wondering what on earth all the fuss is about. It turns out she hadn't heard dad saying he was going to the loo and thought she had just lost sight of him round a corner. So she merrily wended her way around the whole island, before realising what must have happened. She knows only too well the amazing propensity of my father to lose anything and everything (including an incident which involved throwing both rubbish and car keys together into the local tip) and so she had sat down to wait for him, before being "rescued' by a bemused staff member. On the return journey we overhead said member of staff saying it was "the most exciting thing that had happened all week". And that is the sort of thing we cheerfully chalk up as an Oates Family Adventure.

Having located my mother, we then set about trying to calm our nerves by feeding my dad a Margarita cocktail and laughing at the look on his face. Suffice to say he is not a fan. We stopped overnight on the island and had a lovely morning, with more snorkelling time, and a guided walk by mom showing us exactly where she had gone the previous day. Here is me doing my best Ursula Andress impression - or as dad likes to call her, "Ursula Undress".

Please also note the snorkel mask I am wearing. I have indeed inherited my father's genes - I had forgotten my contact lenses, without which snorkelling is an impossibility. Although they had masks with prescription lenses at the resort, my eyesight is so very bad that in the end Jan and the man in the shop had to stick two sets of lenses together with masking tape and then tape them into the mask for me to be able to see anything. It's a really classy look, let me tell you. Jan went scuba diving and maintains it is better than the more traditional barrier reef diving sites, as it's a mere ten minute boat trip and there are way more fish to see. He saw four sharks, turtles, a giant manta ray and a groper fish as well as all the multi-coloured smaller fish.

After a much less eventful return to the mainland, we were off to our next island destination - Fraser Island (K'gari is the Aboriginal name). It is an amazing island, made entirely of sand and yet still supporting a rainforest on it and a dingo population.

Look at the fluffy wuffy ickle doggy

Dingoes are controversial on the island as they have attacked and killed people in the past, since tourists did the wrong thing and fed them, so they became unafraid. Their population was culled almost to destruction, and they suffered greatly (one dingo was found starved, with nothing but a chocolate bar wrapper in his stomach) but they bounced back and the natural balance has been restored. Just don't get out of your jeep to pet them, or - as one rather foolish chef did - go onto the beach at night in the apron you've just finished cutting meat in. Doesn't work out well.

The best thing to do on Fraser Island is drive:

Ahhhh, the open road...

This is us with our tour group for the day. With a choice of all of the stunning views, dad picked outside the toilets for this:

The next best thing to do is swim - in "champagne" if possible. This "champagne" was in fact rather smelly seawater that splashes up behind you and into the rock pool, which has a jacuzzi effect:

What do you mean, look out behind you?!

Oh.

And much fun we had, too. We also swam in a stream and a lake that consisted of rainwater. It was really really soft and pure.

Also, the shipwrecks here are quite pretty. This ship is slooowly sinking into the sand and the bit you can see is only the top deck:

We stopped overnight on Fraser Island, before heading back to the mainland and further down the coast to Noosa, which was a culture shock to say the least. After a week of being surrounded by the peace and beauty of nature (minus the odd screeching cockatoo), suddenly we were in a town full of designer shops, fancy cars and trendy parents. Yack.

We did manage to find a nice nature reserve and were rewarded with our first sighting of a koala in the wild! It was quite a spot, as we were informed only two lived in that area, and it was a pretty big area. But some intense staring at trees finally paid off:

A koala in the wild!

But then it was time to bid farewell to sunny Queensland. We had a fantastic trip, made lots of good memories and stayed in lots of wonderful places. It was great to spend some quality time with my parents and have some Antipodal Adventures with them too. But for now, it was back to the airport and down to Sydney (with some losses of passports thrown in for good measure, of course).