22 May - One Perfect Day in Tin Can Bay and Rainbow Beach

I am not sure I want to tell anyone about what we did on this day.  The places we went today are really special and not overly developed.  But I will tell you if you don't tell anyone else ok.

We started the day with an early drive to Tin Can Bay – because here you can hand feed a wild dolphin.  Dolphins have been working with people back to the days before white people arrived.  The local indigenous tribe worked with dolphins to catch fish (this is quite similar to the story we read about in Eden and Merimbula where the Orcas worked with indigenous and then white people to hunt Humpback whales).  This relationship continues to today where dolphins will come in the morning to be fed.  These days this is all done under the auspices of the wildlife services and the dolphins only receive a small proportion of their daily fish intake from this feeding – something equivalent to a snack.  David and I had fed the dolphins on our last visit before the boys were born and had loved it.  We let the boys do the feeding this time and just watched the sheer delight they had in this experience.

After brekkie at the café which runs the fish feeding we drove off to Rainbow Beach with our first stop being the famous Carlo Sand Blow which overlooks the coloured cliffs that give Rainbow Beach its name.  Our boys had the best time here walking slowly up the steep slopes and then charging down the sand dunes.

 

 

 After this we had lunch at Seary’s Creek which is part of the Great Sandy National Park which is the land based part of national park that includes Fraser Island.  Seary’s Creek is a lovely fresh water sandy creek with a couple of swimming holes – we walked here but didn’t swim we were saving that for somewhere even more special.

 

The final instalment of our day was a bushwalk to our really secret place – Poona Lake.  It can be found at the back of Rainbow Beach and is a short drive and then a 2.5k walk in through the rainforest.  Poona Lake is a ‘perched’ lake – this doesn’t mean it's full of perch just that it sits up a hill.  It is a fresh water lake with a lovely sandy edge and bottom.  The walk in is lovely and a good hike up hill but it is so very very worth it when you get there.  Because it is up hill by the time we arrived we were warm and a bit sweaty so we jumped straight in for a swim.  It wasn’t too cool and we could have easily spent more time in the water.  Apart from the sheer natural beauty of this lake the other cool thing about it is that there is never anyone there.  As we walked up two people walked down, but we had the whole place to ourselves as we have every other time I have ever been here.  It is really an amazing place and showed us that it is worth going that extra kilometre or two to find a real treasure.