Tourist tour to Moreton Island !

Photo: Picture taken from the top of the sand hill. The smaller boat is our guiding tour boat, the big one is the ferry which departs from Brisbane and which brings the 4x4 jeeps on the island. If you want you can drive around the island on the beach with your 4x4.

Photo: snorkelling tour around the ship wrecks of Moretone Island.

Hi, this morning I embarked a small boat with another 40 people, to have a tourist day trip to Moreton Island. The island is about the size of Flanders, and harvest a wealth of nature and huge sand dunes, lovely beaches, a desert and a blue lagoon. Unfortunately we will only have a trip around the coast today.

We take off at about 9:00 o'clock and over a coffee and a breakfast I have a nice chat with one of the boatsmen, who has lived in Sweden for one year. The island is about 30 kilometer off from the mainland, so it takes a while before we get there. Today I have taken off my watch, I do not keep track of the time.

The first thing we do is getting on a wet suite, and have a snorkelling session in the sea around some six ship wrecks. There are put there on purpose by the government for creating a tourist attraction, and to build a kind of artificial coral reef. In fact it is a marvellous snorkelling tour. We see hundreds of tropical fishes. Because of the tide we drift through the ship wrecks and are then picked up again by the boat.

We have a lovely lunch on the boat with all sorts of sea food: REAL crab, yummie !!!, prawns, etc...

Then we continue to the top smaller end of the island, and in the meanwhile we see some kind of young whale mammals. When we return back to Tangalooma peer, we also see turtles of about 1.5 meter big. We also meet a couple of dolphins. Arriving at the shore, we can have an hour off at the beach. I take the opportunity to climb one of the very steep sand hills. It takes about 20 minutes to get to the top ! They must be some 40 meters high or something. From the top you can really take good pictures of the ship wrecks and the people who try to reach the top but do not have the condition to do that, especially the bodybuilding type of men onboard: whoeha :-)