Great Sandy National Park

Great Sandy National Park consists of Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world, and the Cooloola Recreation Area. Together with the mainland, Fraser Island forms a protected bay and from July to November it is very popular with humpback whales 😉 We continued along the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane.

Hervey Bay

Hervey Bay is the place from which you can visit Fraser Island or go whale watching. We secured a powered site for two nights at the Hervey Bay Caravan Park. From here we could walk to the promenade and also the harbour. Right next to the campground was also a beautiful park.

A further highlight was the beautiful Urangan Pier, a wooden jetty that runs 868 m into the sea and is a popular place for anglers. And where there is a lot of fish, pelicans are not far away 🙂

Whalewatching

Hervey Bay is the whale watching capital of Australia. From July to November a lot of humpback whales cavort in the water to take a break on the way to Antarctica. We booked a whale tour with the non-profit Pacific Whale Foundation, an organization that researches whales across the Pacific.

Our tour was accompanied by Mikaela, a biologist who provided us with background information on whale behaviour. And already after a short time we had the first whale sightings 🙂

During our tour we also came very close to Fraser Island. So we could get some impressions of the biggest sand island of the world without booking additional Fraser Island tour, which would have cost at least 110 €.

The weather was again really fantastic and on the way back we saw a spectacular sunset 🙂

Rainbow Beach

Our next stop was the “Rainbow Beach” in the Cooloola Recreation Area, where we stayed two nights at the Rainbow Beach Holiday Park. This campground is located at a small harbour, about 3 km from Rainbow Beach on the other side of the peninsula.

We explored the Rainbow Beach during a long walk along the impressive sand dunes.

Along the Sunshine Coast to Brisbane

Unbelievable – we’ve been traveling for almost 7 months now! And most of the time we spent “on the road” in one of our five campervans. But now it was time to say goodbye to our life on about 10 sqm and we finally drove along the Sunshine Coast towards Brisbane.

So the Mudjimba Beach Holiday Park was our penultimate campsite on our trip. And right in front of the park was a great kilometre long sandy beach. 

The Glasshouse Mountains were a nice change to the beautiful sandy beaches of the last weeks. From the Wild Horse Mount Lookout we had a great view.

However, we refrained from hiking on the mountains you can see on these pictures, because the trails were either closed or the mountains are sacred to the Australian natives.

The small village Toorbul with a view of Bribie Island was our last stop. Here we strolled once more along the sea before we took care of our last supplies.

In the morning we (once again) packed everything into our backpacks and made our way to Brisbane. Here we dropped of our Queen with a heavy heart.