I couldn’t help myself. It’s a big sea of sand! You’ve gotta write on a big sea of sand.
After Bundaberg, I didn’t really have a set plan or list of places I had to visit before getting back to Brisbane. As I was driving back down South, I saw a sign for Rainbow Beach and remembered that my friend Richard had it on his list of places I ought to visit so I took the exit and made my way there. Ah, you’ve gotta love the freedom of roadtrips!
I drove up to the Great Sandy National Park Lookout point first because I thought it might be a good place to camp for the night. When I got there I found that it didn’t have any facilities, but since I was already there I decided to take the trail out to the Rainbow Coloured Sand Cliffs.
The trail starts out like any other with squiggly gum trees, basket spiders and the usual Australian shrubbery. A couple meters away from the end, you start to see some sand along the trail and then BAM. You’re faced with the biggest sea of sand you’ll probably ever see outside of an actual desert: Carlo Sand Blow Lookout. It was a bit of a ‘whoa’ moment.
Carlo Sand Blow Lookout at Rainbow Beach
When you walk towards the Rainbow Coloured Sand Cliffs and face the ocean, it too stretches out for what seems like forever. It reminded me of the first time I saw the ocean from the beaches of Vladivostok, Russia. You feel like you’ve reached the end of the earth and your mind just draws a blank. It’s fresh and you’ve come back to point O.
I walked around the sand for a while and couldn’t figure out why the place was called Rainbow Beach. I was expecting multicoloured sand on the beach and all I saw was a big sea of tan and a section of white. I saw some footsteps in the tan sand with some white sand mixed in there, but I thought it was from people walking across both beaches and dragging the colours across. When I looked closer though, I realized that the white sand hadn’t been dragged across, it was underneath the tan sand! I looked around some more and found that there was dark orange sand underneath some parts too. There are actually several different colours including grey, blue, green, red, orange, white, yellow and tan. It really is a rainbow coloured beach!
Holy petunias! That is one helluva beach, alright! Looks like your in Namibia on the skeleton coast, Anny!