Noosa: Slumming it in a park....nearly!

Laura and Jojo in our room at the 'Villa Noosa'....in....Noosa, surprisingly.
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On my way up the Sunshine Coast, i took the Greyhound bus to Noosa from Byron Bay (Gold Coast). This was to break up the length of the journey to Hervey Bay, from where i would leave for my trip to Fraser Island.

I travelled with JoJo Degenhardt, who was put on the same volleyball team with myself, the boy Jon "hammer-slam" Mckechnie, and Jacquesy at the Arts Factory Lodge in Byron.

staring down the barrel of a tent shaped shotgun

We took the bus from Byron and arrived in Noosa at around 8.30pm that evening. During the bus trip i had been ringing all of the hostels that we had numbers for......ALARM BELLS......."sorry we're fully booked"......"sorry we have nothing until tomorrow night"........Uh oh!!!

So, aware of our own plight, myself and Jojo get off the bus......it is getting dark and we have no where to stay! I see a girl getting off the bus who i overheard telling someone that she had nowhere to stay either. So, i told her if she wanted to come with us she was welcome, rather than be on her own looking for a place in the dark! (what a gentleman ey!?? lol). All joking aside, asking Laura was one of the best things i did that day!(you will find out why later!)

So, the three of us get on our way, big backpacks and a two-man-tent in tow, hungry and impatient;.....just get a bed and some food, that is all we can think of!

We ask in about four more hostels, some of them i had rang already, but we were desperate....who knows, maybe the face to face approach could work!?

10.30pm arrives, still no hostel. We stop for food at a pizza/pasta place, "Spag Bol for me please, thank you very much". As we are about to leave, i approach the lady at the counter and say we have no where to stay, and whether she knows of anywhere. I even asked her (half joking but actually serious) if we could sleep in her shop!! That is how desperate we had got. At that point in time we were staring down the barrel of a tent shaped shotgun with fate dangerously close to deciding that we would have to camp out illegally in the corner of a park......where the owner of one of the hostels we asked at had assured us, "you shouldnt be disturbed there, but just make sure the police don't see you!!" OH GREAT!!

The lady in the Pasta shop pointed us to the 'Villa Noosa', it was a fair way out of town, but was our final chance to avoid becoming all too familiar with the trusty hammer, peg and guide rope. So we went back to our table and Laura rang the Villa Noosa......i was on the edge of my seat, the tension was comparable to watching England in a World Cup penalty shoot-out! Then a big smile appears on Laura's face....."She has ONE ROOM LEFT, it's for THREE people and is $90aus for the night!".......GET IN!!! BIG RELIEF, keep that tent in its bag!

And get this.....some guys sitting at the table next to us asked where we were going. We told them the Villa Noosa, and the guy gives us a lift!! That would never happen in England!

So that is why it always pays to be friendly, and without getting too philosophical, my travels have definately taught me that a smile and a friendly approach to things gets you a long way! If i hadn't asked Laura if she would like to search for a place with myself and Jojo, yes, we may have found the room at the Villa Noosa, but it would have cost $45 for each of us, rather than the $30 split between the three of us. On top of that, it just seemed like fate.....what are the chances of that, one room left in the only place with any space in the whole of Noosa, and it's for three people!! LOVE IT!!

Sorry about the length of this one, but this is where asking Laura if she'd like to come along with us got even better. The next day, we woke up early and booked ourselves into a 'Koala Beach Resort' hostel....no way were we going through that again! About an hour after we had paid $25 each for our room, we rang Greyhound to book our bus trip to Hervey Bay for our Fraser Island Trip. (We had to be in Hervey Bay by 14.25pm for a briefing on how to use our 4x4s and to be put into our groups of eleven. If we weren't there on time we would lose our $85 bond and miss our trip!!). BIG PROBLEM, the only bus going to Hervey tomorrow was fully booked! GOOD!!! This meant we would have to get the bus that evening and just forget about the room that we'd just paid for and potentially would never sleep in!

This is where Laura came in again. Her friend was coming up the east coast from Sydney and would be able to give us a lift to Hervey the next day!! Thank god for Laura!

So all was good, we checked out the beach that day (i got stung by a jelly fish!) and then we slept in the room we had paid for!!

We also went to the Noosa National Park that day and saw a koala in the wild. It climbed down a tree with us standing right next to it, ambled along the ground towards the next tree, right by our feet, and then began its ascent...Brilliant!

So, Noosa.........Happy endings.