Brisbane - Rainbow Beach

Next day. 1^st of July. In Australia that means the end of the tax year. Good some of us backpackers are the tax return we can get. Normally you pay a couple of hundred dollars for a company to do it, but Christian had the good idea just to do it yourself with the tax office for help. I had tried a couple of days prior after Aaron had mentioned that you can do it yourself, but it failed at a connection between the tax office and the government site. New day, I'll try again.

After some breakfast we took our cars and headed to the train station. We didn't want to drive in to down town Brisbane for fear of horrendous car parking issues, so we took the cheap train instead. In Brisbane Chris guided us to the tax office. On the way we passed a paper sale guy who was producing aerobics at the same time. Interesting to see and it may have put the sales up.

We reached the tax office and it looked like they had just prepared for this situation. With a staff of personnel to help you and a lot of computers to do it on we got help immediately. Due to my try a few days ago I got in faster than the other two and had the tax office connected to my government side near immediately. To get to the point (as tax can be very boring) we half managed it after a few hours and then left as Chris has to be near Fraser Island by four in the afternoon.

Back to the cars and then we split up as I didn't want to trail straight behind them for 250km. I was going to follow the two of them up until to Rainbow Beach as I have nothing to do until Monday. Might as well see a lot of sand. They left before me but I must have somehow gone faster than them because I arrived a bit before them. Once Chris had said goodbye to go on his tour, Jana and me looked for a place to camp for the night. The place she was interested in had a comment that it was closed so we ruled that one out. In the end we got a permit from the petrol station for a camp near to Fraser and set of towards that.

It proved very sandy. Now then, I have a bit of sand driving experience with my car, so I got to a spot no problem. There where some other “proper” four wheel drives close by, so my estimate was that if we do get stuck we can get pulled out. As said, me no problem. Once Jana had a go at it with Chris Subaru Outback, it wasn't that good anymore. Got stuck really bad. No digging helped, so I went to the nearby spotted four wheel drivers (with a Land Rover). They said they had got stuck themselves that day and someone else pulled them out, and that they would help us. In the meantime the ones that had pulled them out had spotted Jana and helped take the car out. So we where surrounded by sand we weren't to sure we would get out of in the morning.

Had some dinner and went down to the beach for some nice view on to the stars before heading back and to bed.