Tin can bay here we come.

We arrived in Tin Can Bay on the 9th of March for a week and stayed at the Kingfisher Caravan Park. The town is roughly 218km north of Brisbane and has a population of approximately 2000 people, a sleepy hollow that has very little in the way of tourist activities.  The highlight of our one week stay however was feeding the dolphins at the Barnacles point and restaurant.  The dolphins arrive at approximately 7.30 am every morning and interact with the rangers.  We were fortunate to get up close with four of these amazing creatures to feed them .

Shirley feeding the Dolphin

A Bottle nose dolphin's life span is approximately 45-50 years and grows to 3.5 to 4 meters in length.

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This fella has scars on his back brought on by another male.  Obviously fighting over the same female










The second highlight of the week was a day trip to Frazer Island which is a world heritage site and is considered to be the largest sand island in the world.  It is 120 km long and 24 km wide and has pristine beaches and lakes.  Fishing from the beach is awesome and the variety of fish is in abundance.  We had to travel to Inskip Point and met up with our 4 wheel drive coach for a short ferry trip to the bottom of Fraser Island.  The coaches are specially designed to drive on beach sand without getting bogged down and can reach speeds of up to 80 km/h.  They are quite comfortable and we were quite fortunate to have a friendly and informative driver.  We spent the whole day on the island and only stopped for a 40 minute meal break.  We visited Eli creek, Lake McKenzie and the famous Maheno shipwreck as well as the rain forest.

The photos above show Shirley on board the ferry to Frazer Island and the luxury 4 wheel drive coach.  Note the tight squeeze on the ferry and the soft white sand that we were driving on. The photos below show the rain forest, Eli creek, the Maheno shipwreck and the fresh water lake at Lake McKenzie

            
 The squeeze and I at Eli creek .

George Clooney swapped his six pack for a keg

George Clooney look alike, or so I am told.

Lake McKenzie, pure crystal clear water with pure white sand, that is good to exfoliate with and also clean gold jewellery.

On our travels that day, we were fortunate to see two dingoes.  They are wild dogs that live on Frazer Island and have been known to attack small children.

The cherry on the cake that day, was when we decided to take a scenic flight in a small plane which lasted for about 30 minutes.  The plane had a perfect take off and landing on the beach. We were able to fly over some of the lakes and ocean and the views were breath taking.

                                                     The butterfly lake from the air

Fraser Island Coastline

After having had such a wonderful time on Frazer island, we went inland for a bit and visited the small town of Gympie which we were not too impressed with, so done some shopping and visited a Gem stone store and that was basically it.  We then travelled through to Maryborough, which is a city situated on the Mary river on the way to Hervey Bay.  It is a quaint historical town with a beautiful garden called Queens park along the river edge.  Maryborough is also the birth place of the author of Mary Poppins, P.L Travers who was born there in 1899.

Photos below are all from this beautiful garden.

We also went to Rainbow Beach, done a bit more inland touring to Kin Kin, Cooran then back to Tin Can Bay.  As shown on the map the green highlighted route is what we done.  Not much inland traveling/exploring as previous, what we have noticed though is the distances are getting bigger, and a lot of these smaller places are literally dead over the weekends.

Next port of call is Hervey Bay from 16.03.2016 - 23.03.2016