Leaving Bargara, we continued to journey south. We were now entering ‘big stuff’ country. I give the area this name quite simply because the residents seem to like building enormous copies of fruits and vegetables for no apparent reason. This habit would continue for several hundred miles, but today we saw the first such construction, at the aptly named Big Pineapple Service Station. I’ll leave it to your imagination to work out the details of this one.

We arrived in Noosa at about 6pm, and had about two hours of daylight left – we decided to hire some bikes and explore the town until it got dark. We had a map and found a lookout which we attempted to reach, but time was against us and dusk fell when we still had about a third of the distance still to cover. The lookout was at the top of a hill and I was getting very tired by this point anyway. When the street lighting ended John decided to wait while David and I continued up the hill to see if we were getting close. We weren’t. David went on ahead, and pretty soon all I could see was his torchlight ahead, since I didn’t have a torch of my own. We still didn’t know exactly where we were, and so we descended to find John. Once back on the street lit roads, we continued to cycle around the perimeter of the town, not wanting to go back over the hill. We still hadn’t had any dinner and so it was quite a stroke of luck when a Pizza Hut suddenly appeared ahead.

After dinner we cycled back into the town, and couldn’t find the hostel. It wasn’t simply a matter of narrowing it down either – we genuinely had no idea which part of town it was in relative to where we were. Even David’s legendary navigational skills had failed us. Eventually I worked it out, and at the same time David declared he had too, but unfortunately each of our solutions involved going in different directions. When we finally found the hostel, I believe I was right, but we never quite agreed on that.