It’s a joy to be back on the road again. We leave wet, windy weather at home in Wellington, NZ and arrive to sunny warm days on the Gold Coast in Australia. Locals tell us we are lucky we missed the storms they too had last week so it seems our timing is perfect. The car, which we left in storage near the airport, starts first time and we head south to pick up the caravan which we had left at the dealer for its 1,000km service.

We spend a couple of days on our old favourite site at Tallebudgera, reminding ourselves about the caravan and making the mandatory trips to Bunnings the hardware store.

It’s 185km drive north to the southern end of Sunshine Coast and we check in at Dicky Beach – so named after the SS Dicky, a 226 iron steamboat that ran aground here in 1893. Little known fact: Dicky Beach is the only recreational beach in the world named after a shipwreck.

We are becoming a well oiled machine at setting up: stabilise the caravan, put chocks in the wheels and detach the van from the car. Level the caravan by lowering and adjusting the stabiliser legs (one on each corner) as necessary to prevent drinks sliding off the table.  Turn on the gas, plug in the 15v power cable, attach the water hose, and attach the sullage hose (which takes grey water away).

We put the annex up as we are here for a week. So then it’s pull out the awning ensuring it comes out to the right level so the anti-flap (self-explanatory) bars are easy to attach and so the annex walls can be fed down the channel that holds them in place. Thanks to advice from Dave (remember Dave and Michelle?) when we first attached the annex I have labelled all the bags and we remember how to get it all in place so it happens without any major cockups or arguments.

The weather is consistently warm at around 20-22C during the day but I find the 21C water temperature rather brisk, so swimming is at a minimum. Bike riding and beach walking make up for it, and the hunter-gatherer, ever the optimist, goes fishing.

Having researched koala cuddling opportunities in the neighbourhood we find there are two. We settle on Wildlife HQ Zoo which is, happily, right by the Big Pineapple. Australians love big fibreglass flora and fauna – we’ve already racked up the big Prawn in Ballina, and the Big Banana in Coff’s. It may have been the Big Pineapple that tipped our choice of venue, but it’s more likely we were averse to paying double to go to the Steve Irwin retail extravaganza that is Australia Zoo, when the main aim was koala not tigers or giraffes or keychains.

Wildlife HQ has a lovely bush setting and is quite small.  There are a few “exotics” such as three or four different tamarin monkeys, red panda, marmoset, lemur and capybara, but no large animals – unless you call kangaroos large.  There are lots of meerkats and koalas which are the cutest things. I have a close encounter with Keda, who is 12 years old and very cuddly. She has sharp claws, a very soft coat, and a hard bum, used for wedging herself into the tree to sleep – for an average of 18 hours a day. The other six hours are for eating. Way to go koalas.

On Wednesday we head up to Eumundi for the famous mid week market, hoping for fresh fruit and vegetables, homemade chutneys and interesting people. Yeah Nah. We park about a kilometre away as the entire population of Queensland has descended on the place.  The market area is bigger than the town itself and contains vast amounts of useless (read macrame dream catchers), useful, tasty and/or tasteless crap, miles of womenswear, yards of menswear, hats for all the family, and a fortuneteller, palm reader, medium or psychic so you can get in touch with someone who knows better than to consult these charlatans. If that’s not enough, there’s gallons of snake oil available to cure your sleeplessness, stomach disorder, eczema, arthritis, back pain, and neck pain, but not enough to cure my scepticism as to their efficacy. 

North to Maryborough from here – they have a statue of Mary Poppins.