Antoine woke us up bright and early for a drive up north for about an hour for a “surprise”. He refuses to tell me what it is. When we arrive at the port, there are three buildings, and Antoine leads me to one that says “dolphins”. A man asks us if we are there to feed dolphins, Antoine says yes.
We look down at the water, and there are four wild dolphins just hanging out, two volunteers standing next to them and talking about the dolphins.
There is a line of people standing at the edge of the water, listening to them, but not stepping more than mid-shin into the water as the volunteers won’t let you and you may scare the dolphins.
There was also a bird following people with food around.
We get in line and grab our fish, walk into the water, and take one of the fish and put it in front of the dolphins face in the water. Very gently, they move forward, grab the fish, and chomp away at it. We did this a total of four times.
After the dolphins, we drive back down for an hour and to a ferry stop, we wait a few minutes for the kite-surfing instructor. We hop into his super old SUV and over the ferry we go. We drive through some woods for awhile, while he tells us about the bush fires that have been happening around the area, we could even see the smoke. He turns onto a beach, the beach is like a highway with camp grounds. Next to the beach, we could actually see where the fire was, some things were still smoking, and we could smell the fire. We drive on Rainbow Beach for maybe an hour, before he turns into a lagoon.
We get out of the car, and he shows us all the gear. When we get closer to the water, there are holes in the sand, each hole is surrounded by little balls of sand. There are little crabs everywhere. We also saw a dead starfish.
The instructor, David, shows us how to set up the kite, and put on the harness. He makes it pretty clear that the harnesses are not made for women. We bring the kite into the water, and just test out the wind and learn how to control the kite. Antoine does fine with this, but the kite pulls me as I am just too light. We do this for maybe two hours.
While Antoine is using his body as the board to just get used to the kite, a large sting ray comes into the lagoon. David points it out, I thought it was the kite’s shadow.
Suddenly, David realizes that the tide is coming up, and the lagoon is loosing land space, and we parked on a sandy area that the water will soon surround. But he didn’t actually really explain this to us, we figured it out in about half an hour.
Antoine asks if we could use the board, as we haven’t yet. David says we have time for one or two. So he rushes Antoine on trying the board, Antoine stands up for maybe a split second. I do not get the chance to try.
We get rushed out of the water, and pack everything in the car as fast as we can. The water has not risen enough, so we make it out. So we think. Turns out, at the edge of the lagoon, there is some more water, and it is about waist deep. He tells us to get out of the car and take our stuff so it is lighter, and he attempts to go through. He does not make it. His car floods. Some other cars noticed this, and come by to help. One of them happens to have a tow line. David tells us that we will have to hitchhike the rest of the way.
We ask the couple that towed the car out of the water, and they take us in the back of their truck for about half an hour into the highway beach. Just past the campsite, this way if anyone is leaving, they will pass us. They also give us some water and some protein bars.
So we start walking. There are some stranded jellyfish on the sand, and we pick some of them up and throw them back in the ocean like they are frisbees.
We also take some seashells, we throw the ones with animals still in them back in the water as well.
One car pasts us, they ignore us.
Another car pasts us, they ignore us as well.
Another car pasts us, they wave back but ignore us.
We keep walking.
Another car drives pasts us, they mock our thumbs up sign, but turn around and pick us up. Turns out they were going all the way back to the ferry!
It was two Australian guys who are camping with “the boys” one last time as one of them has a baby due in 4 weeks and the other has their baby due in 10 weeks. They give us some tips as to what to see and which roads to take up north.
They drop us off and we take the ferry across back to our little blue car. We still have another three hour drive, after this extremely long day of walking and uncertainty. Antoine thought we were going to die.
We drive for an hour and stop at a KFC. It was once again a painful night drive, and we barely make it to the next AirBnb.