I had a few days before my prebooked Fraser Island adventure, so Ollie and myself boarded the ever faithfull Greyhound to Rainbow Beach, a veeery small town to the south of Fraser. Attracted by it's 'colourful' name, we rocked up at Pippies Beach House, a hostel which wasn't actually on the beach. It had a pool though.
What a nice little place! We were checked into room 3 - the Princess Room, which was decorated in a lovely pastel pink and lots of fairy/princess stickers! "How delightful", I exclaimed. However beautiful the room was, we only had one night at Rainbow, so we got exploring.
After a beast-wich for lunch (seafood for me), we set off to the namesake beach. It wasn't really the best beach ever, with a large pool of brown looking water behind the foredune, which halved the useable area. There were also 4x4s booming up and down the beach to get to a prime fishing spot at the head land 3km away, so we could never relax when walking on the beach for fear of the Chelsea Tractor's roo bars picking us up.
After a time of walking, we got to a large sand dune on top of a 10ft cliff. I'd read a little bit about a place called the Carlos Sandblow, and thought it was this. It was big, at about 50m high, but nothing amazing. Never the less, we took a nearby exit point to try and get to the top and run down, as boys should do. 30mins later, we thought we might not quite be on the trail for it, but we persisted. Coming across a sign for the Sandblow, the first dune was obviously not what we were looking for. another 1km through national park territory and past a funky looking 3 wheeled motorbike/skidoo thing, we came across the most amazing sight I'd seen probably all trip.
What faced us was about 500m of sand from where the trees ended and others started on the other side. This sand stretched from the right of this mountain to the cliffs by the beach on the left, though we couldn't see the beach. It looked like a small mountain had just been scooped out and uncovered some sand. It was the biggest expanse of sand I'd ever seen, all of it smoothed out into a Pringle shape.
Going to the left towards the sea, we discovered the reason for the local name of Rainbow - kicking the sand, a layer of chalk dust was uncovered. The cliffs below were distinctly banded in 3/4 different colours, cool, but no Hunstanton beach! Back to the Sandblow, we found some prime dune jumping sites, having expended our own weight in water climbing up the sand dune. A few sweeeet airs later and sand in the eyes, we went to the far right side of the dune, where the Sandblow was swallowing up vegetation at a rate of 3m+ a year. It was so silent, so we basked in the sun and windfree area for a goooood 30mins, probably thinking about what was for dinner later.
Walking back, we met a load of people who were going to the Sandblow for the sunset and the full moon. It would have been very cold, though, so we declined in out shorts and teeshirts.
That night we watched Transformers, which is still a brilliant film and met some people from our set of rooms.
The next morning, I did my thing (walking/exploring til I can't be bothered anymore) and saw the rainbow cliffs from the beach while Ollie sunbathed. Pretty uneventful apart from climbing a sand pile at the base of the cliffs and getting scared that I'd unstabilise them and find a big piece of sandstone bearing down on me. And I rediscovered Pink Floyds brilliance.
For only a short visit, Rainbow beach was a blast; a little nugget of enjoyment that not many other people visited, which is always a good thing when swapping travelling stories with people who've been doing EXACTLY the same thing as you.
"To Hervey Bay and Fraser Island, Oliver!" I exclaimed.
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