We haven’t completed our month long stay in Brisbane yet so I don’t feel right about writing the Brizzy blogpost yet. That will probably come next week. But, we did recently rent a car for 3 days for some fun side trips that gave me a few good photos and some adventures that I’d like to share here. We have been enjoying city life here in Brisbane but we were eager to see some other cities, towns, parks and beaches that require a bit of driving. I hate renting cars but sometimes public transportation just can’t get you there as easily as your own car. This is actually our 6th rental car in 2026 which is our new record for most rental cars in a year. The first day we headed south towards the Gold Coast in hopes of spotting our first koala in the wild.
We started at the Coombabah Lakelands Conservation area hoping to see a host of new birds, roos, and hopefully a koala. Right away, we saw a bunch of kangaroos hanging out near the trailhead. While they are fun to watch when they are jumping around, they don’t usually do that. They mostly just sit around and eat grass, or lay around chilling. They really just remind us of spotting deer back in Washington State. It is kind of cool to see, but eventually you realize that it isn’t exciting enough to take pictures. Our real elusive prey is the koala. We have been looking at eucalyptus trees for a couple of months in Australia, trying to spot a koala in the wild.
We found one!!!!! It turns out that they aren’t that exciting to watch either. They remind me of searching for sloths in Central and South America. It is fun to spot one but they don’t really do much and the pictures are never very good. After our nature hike, we headed to the Gold Coast for lunch and to see what this popular tourist city is all about. It has a Warner Brothers theme park, and a lot of other roller coaster parks and water parks that we weren’t interested in. It had a lot of Miami-style hotels on a strip on the beach. There were many man-made canals with huge houses on them. It has fancy restaurants and a lot of shopping malls. After our lunch and a drive along the beach we decided Gold Coast was not for us, and we headed back to Brizzy. It would have been a disappointing day had we not seen the koala. We can now stop looking up all the time, because we at least ONE sighting.
The next day we started by driving north to meet some nomad friends for lunch in the Sunshine Coast. We stopped at a lookout for some quick pictures of the Glasshouse mountains. They are some interesting shaped hills in an otherwise flat landscape so they looked pretty impressive. We had a great lunch next to another wonderful Australian beach and enjoyed sharing travel stories with Susan and Blair Kerr. She also has a travel blog that I try to keep up with. After lunch we headed to a motel in the town of Noosa to drop off our bags. This is the first time that we have ever paid for accommodations in 2 places at one time. We still have our 1 month rental in Brisbane that was going empty for the night.
Our hotel wasn’t the best but we really liked the cute town of Noosa Head, and all the walks you can do in the Noosa National Park. We took a beautiful hike along the coast which was constantly interrupted by taking some amazing sunset photos. Noosa is a coastal rainforest with some amazing tropical plants, vines and trees overlooking the ocean. We would really like some more time to explore and we might return someday for an extended stay. In a continuing theme for us….. small towns are preferred over big cities.
The next morning we took the long road back to Brisbane through the scenic hills. There are a lot of waterfalls in this part of Queensland and there are many of them that allow swimming either in the pools on top or the bottom of the falls. It can get really hot here in the summer so any sort of cooling off areas are very popular. We weren’t interested in swimming today but found a waterfall with a great view of the tropical rainforest from the top. We then visited a weird Ginger factory that has turned into a small tourist park for preschoolers. Kind of interesting… but…. not really. After lunch, we took another long walk searching for birds and wildlife at the Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve. This was up more up our alley than the Ginger factory. We saw several new birds and some pademelons (small marsupials). The bird life list is now up to 825. Australia and New Zealand have really helped that list grow. After the hike we headed back to our apartment in Brisbane excited to get back to some more relaxing slow travel. I just wrote about our difficulties with slow travel but sometimes it is really nice to have a restful stay. Our full post on our Brisbane month should be coming out soon.
