Today we got up early and headed to the famous Eumundi Markets, “the biggest and the best art and craft market in Australia”. I had been there a few years back and had pretty positive memories. We started well, getting ourselves some healthy shakes for breakfast.
Some of the markets were still as good as I remembered, but unfortunately large parts had also been taken over by your standard “Plastic souvenir rubbish” stores. Import for 10c and sell for 20c kind of deals. We enjoyed the good parts and skipped over the rest. On a whim we decided to have some tacos for lunch and found ourselves being served traditional Mexican quasedias by an elderly German couple in an Australian country town. Ah, Ausmany. Or is it Germstralia?
Not quite sure what to do next we stopped by the tourism office, also known as a small old house filled with brochures guarded by a kindly little old lady. She recommended a national park and a scenic drive for our route home, and we decided to also check out a local cheese monger on the way.
We headed on over to Kenilworth Dairy who are apparently makers of fine cheese and dairy. We both love cheese, so we tasted the cheese on offer… Finding out quickly that it wasn’t great. Instead of cheese we settled for some iced-chocolates, hoping that the ice-cream would be much better than the cheese. Unfortunately it wasn’t that memorable either. Never-the-less, the surroundings were really nice and we enjoyed a nice break slurping away our milkshakes.
Full of dairy, we decided to head on over to the recommended national park to walk off some calories. We took a fair number of wrong turns before we eventually got to the Mary Cairncross reserve…. which was really not that hard to find! It has a beautiful new lookout at the front and a voluntary gold-coin donation at the interactive education center at the entrance. It was obviously maintained by people with a passion for nature and for the place. We walked through the park quite slowly, primarily looking for birds. We were particularly fascinated by this guy (Video unfortunately not ours!): The Eastern Whipbird (Psophodes olivaceus).
We did spot some small recently hatched birds, and then Manja spotted this cutie in the distance.
A couple of minutes of walking later we got to a nesting ground for flying foxes and spent a while watching them play and fly about.
We really enjoyed this reserve, it’s totally worth a visit if you love nature!
On the way back to Noosa Heads we took the scenic route… literally! We took the scenic drive that the little old tourist-guide lady recommended and Manja was not disappointed. Beautiful views over the countryside! I, on the other hand, was a little busy navigating the winding roads.
As we got back we took one more stop, heading over to the Noosa Heads botanic gardens for a bit of a stroll. It turned out to be really, really lovely. We took some photos, especially of what was becoming our favourite kind of tree.
As it started to get Dark, we started to get hungry. We had scoped out a nice-looking asian restaurant on our way out of Noosa Heads and decided to stop there for dinner. Turns out this was a fantastic place! We were hungry enough to only photograph the entree…
After another day of wandering around the sites and wondering at the flora and fauna, we dropped into bed exhausted but happy.
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