The airbnb from the carpark. Such a pretty place!

I planned our next morning immaculately.  We have to get up at 8:30, get ready, check out and leave by 9:30 latest to make it to Bribe island for a boat tour by 10:30.  The trip would take 1 hour and 2 minutes according to Google. No worries, said I, as we left at 9:15.

Do worry, said I, as I took a wrong turn and Google advised I would now arrive at 10:55.

We drove as fast as we “legally” could and I called the boat. Please don’t leave… We are 5 minutes late, so sorry!!

The lady at the other end of the phone said she’d tell the skipper but could not guarantee he could wait for us. We continued to race.

One minute over time and we were here… What?!?

But this is a street. No dock in sight…

F**ck!
We had arrived at the office not to the dock.

After wasting another minute on google we raced to the boat and stopped on the dirt-road carpark in a cloud of dust. The boat was still there! Quick, grab the bags and run over. What? The gate is locked? Ah there is a dude walking over from the ship. We wave and he says “G’day, no need to rush. This is Bribie, the most relaxed place on earth. Give us a moment and I’ll unlock the gate for ya”.

After that slightly stressful start to the day, we had a fantastic boat trip through Pumicestone Passage, with more information being supplied that I could remember. The weather was pretty good too, though a touch cold, but we were provided blankets and we cuddled up on the top deck and “braved” the “cold” (it was maybe 20 degrees, with a touch of wind).  We had the whole deck to ourselves for 90% of the trip. It was magical, we only came down for food and drinks! We didn’t see any turtles or dolphins, but plenty of cool birds and some jellyfish on the way back.

By the time we docked again we were perfectly relaxed. We decided to head over to the local beach and have some ice-cream and check out the local museum.  The museum really wasn’t all that interesting for us, but it was free, so no harm no foul.  We did appreciate the air-conditioned reprise as it got a fair bit warmer by now!

Next we headed over to Buckleys hole conservation park, where we were going to hit Red Beach which was just down sleepy hollow drive….

In the conservation park there are also ruins of an old seawater aquarium, which is all that remains from a tourism initiative in 1962 when the bridge to bribe was first completed. It was pretty cool to see nature take back what remains from the big concrete and glass tanks which were all cross connected back in the day. The story itself is pretty cool too, the diver who had incepted the idea spent so much time trying to catch specimen that the business of running the park was neglected to the point of disrepair. Talk about passion gone awry!

We hiked to red beach and Manja managed to capture a seagull running along the beach.

Bribie is quite a pretty place with a lot o pretty beaches, Red Beach even had some cool pink flowers, and we also saw a looooot of washed up jellyfish!

After a hike to red beach we headed to our Airbnb for the night, this time in Noosa Heads. I have to say this place was awesome. If you ever travel to Noosa, ask me for the details and stay there. It was absolutely first class, and we will definitely be back there sometime.

As we arrived pretty late we took the advice of our hosts and headed to a local asian place, but it was unfortunately completely booked out. So we walked a bit further and found a Korean place which we stopped at. It reminded us of the first time we had dinner together earlier in the year when Manja was visiting Adelaide for Johan and Stefs wedding, way before we ever got together. It was a really nice evening.

When we returned we spent a bit of time writing blogs and planning out the next few nights before dropping into bed exhausted.