40 Mile Beach, Colored Sands, Rainbow Beach and a Lighthouse

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For the past week, my wife, daughter and I took a holiday up north at the Sunshine Coast in a quaint little town called Noosaville. We did many activities including alot of beach driving and offroading - all the pictures are below.

But first a confession - we decided to leave our CR-V at the resort and instead let all the beach driving be done by a tour guide we hired who took us to see all the sights in his very impressive Toyota Landcruiser.



So let the journey begin!

We started the day with our guide picking us up in the Landcruiser and taking a short ferry across the river to Noosa North Shore.





After disembarking from the ferry, it wasn't long before we hit the entrance to 40 Mile Beach (or Teewah Beach by its other name). And once we got onto the beach it was absolutely beautiful.











We came across this highly venomous sea snake which had seen better days. Our guide discovered it was still alive and he said it appeared to have been run over by another 4WD on the beach. He attempted to pull it back into the sea but it kept getting washed up again in the surf, and it didn't appear to have enough strength to swim away on its own. Well, at least we tried to save it.



Here is our tour guide's Toyota Landcruiser. It is a very impressive machine which handled all the terrain we put it thru perfectly.



And so we continue our trek along 40 Mile Beach...

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...where we saw this majestic eagle flying along...







...and even this little Subaru Forester absolutely hammering up the beach!



This is an exit we took to enter a rainforest trail.

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This rainforest trail was totally cool, the air was so crisp and cool, and so fresh. I wished the Landcruiser had a sunroof coz it would have been great to look up into the trees above us.

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We came out of the rainforest trail on the other side and once again reentered another beach - Rainbow Beach.

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The colors to be seen along this beach was truly a spectacle, which would be why they also call it Colored Sands!

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The beach was getting rather narrow along this stretch, forcing 4WDs to drive thru the salt water.





Here's a link to a youtube video of our Landcruiser getting abit wet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqw5tFadxUA

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The following pictures show an absolutely picture perfect bit of beach - it was a sand bar at low tide. It couldn't get any better than this! Crystal blue water surrounded us on the sand bar.

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These slopes were perfect for some sliding action.





Now we proceed over to the lighthouse. It was very crowded in this section. You can see the gradient of the slope we had to climb up to the lighthouse in the Landcruiser. Trust me, it felt pretty steep.

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And once we got to the top...whoa...that view was just breathtaking!





Including the view of some of the local wildlife.









We also spotted a whole family of dolphins from up here, I counted at least 20 of them. Too hard to spot in the photos though - the zoom didn't go in far enough.