'Straddie'

This weekend we went to ‘Straddie’ to celebrate Matthew’s birthday. Straddie is a big sandy island just off the coast near Brisbane. Its real name is North Stradbroke Island, but the Australians can’t resist a nice bit of word shortening, for example, you buy fish off the ‘fisho’, A chemist makes up your ‘scripts’, your annual car tax is your ‘Rego’ and if something is quite pricey its ‘Exxy’. Once you get the hang of it its quite easy….

Anyway, ‘Straddie’ used to be joined to South Stradbroke island by a narrow sand bar and, according to the tourist books, a storm in 1898 tore through the sand dune creating the two islands. What they don’t mention is that, just prior to the storm, a ship containing shed loads of dynamite had run aground on the sand bar and, rather than removing the dynamite from the ship, they blew it all up destroying the ship and most of the dunes around it making it an easy job for the storm to do its work.

We decided to head off to the island on our new posh bikes to give them a test drive. After a 45 minute trip on an ancient vehicle ferry that bent alarmingly in the middle, we arrived on the island to find that the Aussie’s love of exploding things hadn’t done any permanent damage to the beauty of the island.

The beaches are fantastically long, white and sandy and the vast majority of the dunes and vegetation at the back of the beaches were still intact and hadn’t succumbed to the high rise horror of the Gold Coast or the luxury ‘boutique’ apartments of Noosa. The hilly and forested interior of the island is pretty much untouched except for large sand mining operations on the south of the island.

Our B&B was about 20kms ride from the ferry at a pace called Point Lookout on the north eastern corner of the island. It had great views out over Shag Rock (real name!) which made up for the fact that it happened to be located on the top of the steepest hill in Queensland (this is, as yet, unconfirmed but very likely).

We arrived on Friday evening and drank wine whilst watching the sun set – ever so sophisticated …. The next morning we woke up to a symphony of bird noises and then ate our way through a monster fried breakfast on the veranda of our B&B. We asked Jan, the owner, about the birds that we had heard that sounded like monkeys, she laughed and told us that the previous day a group of holidaying Americans and thought the noises actually were monkeys – the uniqueness of Australia’s marsupial mammals obviously having bypassed them. Unfortunately they had left before we arrived, probably to look for tigers….

Breakfast on the Veranda

We spent the whole of Saturday exploring Point Lookout on foot (the thought of getting back on our bikes at this point was enough to make our bums cringe in ways we didn’t think possible). Walking round the headlands overlooking the fantastic beaches was great and we spent a good few hours strolling, enjoying the sunshine and watching a pod of dolphins playing in the waves. We then went down to the beach to have a swim and watch the surfers strut their stuff. It was only after an amble down and endless stretch of beach that we discovered that we hadn’t been quite as comprehensive with the sun cream as we thought. After legging it back to the B&B to assess the damage we discovered that rather than bronzed beach babes we were the proud owners of a fetching stripy chest and back (Sam) and Blackpool-rock-pink neck, forearms and back of knees (Matthew) – D’oh!!

A big long beach from the headland



On Sunday we set off early to cycle to Amity on the North Western tip of the island along an unused road. It had once been the only road on the island, but after the bitumen roads were built in the 60s it had been relegated to ‘4WD track’, a favourite of holidaying Aussies. The road is now no longer maintained by the council, which means that fallen trees are not moved out of the road stopping even the most dedicated 4x4er in his/her, rather chunky, tracks.

The road was fantastic, it was mainly rocky and gravely but also sandy in some places too – testing our fancy new bikes out ( and the soreness of our bums). It was superb to be somewhere so deserted. The road skirted the back of a long area of swamp behind the beach and the air was filled with the noises of bush life- a welcome change to the humming of a land cruiser….

Here is a picture of the track….



Although it made for a magical trip, the fact that we were probably the first people to go down the track in a while had its drawbacks and at one memorable moment I was pedalling along and felt something hit me. The realisation that, not only was I covered in spiders web, but that the owner of the web was resting on my ankle, obviously waiting to reek revenge for me destroying his home, hit me quite suddenly.
Very calmly I stopped my bike and screamed like a girl until Matthew deftly flicked it off my leg and stamped on it in a manly way. I did feel a bit guilty about completely ruining the spider’s day, but you can’t be too sure with these fancy Australian types.

Birthday boy with our trusty steeds



We made it back to civilisation without any other close brushes with the native fauna and spent a few hours resting in the shade before getting back on our bikes and hacking back to the ferry which managed, with a few creak and groans, to get us home.