Farewell Mystery Machine

And so we have parted ways with our beloved Wicked Van.. a saga of our trip has come to a close. When we dropped the van off in Brisbane this morning, a small part of our hearts went with it.

Since our last post, we have travelled a long ways down the coast… some 1400 km’s total. Our first day of driving was on Tuesday, where we put in 9 straight hours of travel to reach the small town (if you can call it a town) of Seventeen Seventy and Agnes Waters. We arrived around 8pm to find nothing.. there were like 50 buildings in the whole town, and EVERYTHING was closed. After driving around randomly for an hour we decided to give up and go to bed for the night; thus, we parked in a parking lot, cooked some $.25 noodles, and went to bed. We awoke in the morning with high hopes of surfing and riding mini scooters.. this had come highly recommended to us by some friends who had done it. Unfortunately, it turned out the waves were only like a foot tall, so surfing was not an option. Even better, the scooters couldn’t be ridden until later in the day, and you had to wear long pants and shoes (it was like 30 degrees out at 8am at this time). As we had already toured the whole town several times in our van (as lost as could be) we decided to get the heck out of Seventeen Seventy as fast as possible and not look back. The whole experience was not as fun as we had hoped!(thanks a lot Leah and Carolyn! ) 

And so we headed further south towards Rainbow Beach.. the gateway to Frasier Island (this is where the surfing place at Seventeen Seventy has told us to go). About halfway through this 6 hour drive we decided to call some of our Australian friends and find out if Rainbow beach was worth going to. Upon talking to them, as well as looking back on advice from fellow travellers, we decided to go to Noosa Heads instead. We arrived in Noosa at around 2:30pm and took a quick look around the town (we also went to the beach to check out the surf, which didn’t seem all that impressive at the time). We then went up and checked into a hostel for the night, and spent the rest of the afternoon semi napping and cleaning up. It seemed like it was going to be a quiet night in Noosa when we decided to go out to the on-site bar for happy hour ($7 jugs of beer and $6 Jager Bombs). It turned into a really fun night, we met some people from Sweden and hung out with them the rest of the evening! (well until the bar closed at midnight).

The next day, we decided it was time to take our shot at surfing.. We went to rent 2 boards – the shopkeeper recommendedrented we use beginner boards (they looked like giant pontoons for a float plane), so we of course turned them down and got normal boards; furthermore, we decided not to take any lessons and just go for it – how hard could surfing be? (we had spent about 1/2 an hour the night before watching people learn to surf, we figured that was enough). With that, we loaded the boards in the Mystery Machine and headed to the beach with our Swedish friends. We quickly found out surfing was not as easy as it looks! It wasn’t the standing up we had big problems with, it was more catching the waves to surf on. Apparently we both sucked at padelling with our hands, and we could never get going fast enough to catch the waves (Our technique was horribly wrong too… but we like to try to avoid mentioning that). Another thing was that padelling around on surfboards is INCREDIBLY tiring – especially after a night of drinking. We probably spent 2 hours total out on the water, and 4 hours on “rest” breaks. Of that 2 hours on the water… both of us probably spent less than a minute actually riding waves! Other than that, it was really fun (yes, it was fun even though we were horrible).

At 5pm that day we packed up our stuff, and headed off to Brisbane. As we neared the city, we began to realize this was not like any city we had been to in Australia yet… it is big! (We have  both agreed it kind of feels like Vancouver.. the same kind of stores and shops, the same dirty back alleys, and the same drunken people wandering around at all hours of the day.) Upon reaching the city limits, we didn’t really know where to go (we have classically driven around until we find a hostel – but Bris is WAY to big to do that). With that, we decided to call up a friend from Bris we have known for like 5 years (yes he is one of our video game friends [yes we know we are nerds]) and he was kind enough to direct us through the city with google maps. As it turned out, we have ended up living at his place (for the next few days anyways). His parents are really friendly and didn’t seem to care that two weird Canadian guys are living at their house – (to our moms.. yes we  are cleaning up after ourselves and doing dishes and such) We will probably stay here another few days, meet the rest of the Australian gamers we have known for a long time, then head up north towards Frasier Island to do some camping. From there.. we really have no idea what we will be doing – but we will be sure to keep everyone posted! We will update some pictures later.. we dont have the camera on us right now.

Cheers

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Surfing Big Green Waves