Hi lovelies. I was on a bus passing through a small beach town called Rainbow Beach this Sunday morning. My back was sore and I felt drowsy after being on the bus for almost 16-hours. So I stared out of the window and daydreamed.
Rainbow Beach is a little gem in Sunshine Coast that I know pretty well by now. We have made several road trips to there and even camped in the nearby recreational area, Inskip Point.
I know it pretty well, but it looked different this time around. Campers were parked in almost every available spot around the city. I know that it’s the school holidays, but I also know that the local council is picky about where they allow camping. I was surprised to see that they were not being kicked out. It’s not until later that I found out why.
A 150-meter (165-yards) long sinkhole opened up on at the nearby camping area, Inskip Point on Saturday night. That’s even larger than a soccer field and it’s still growing! A large 200-meter chunk of the beach and the very popular camping site is now gone. It’s extremely close to where we camped, lived and slept for almost exactly one year ago.
Luckily, the sink hole opened up relatively slowly and everyone seems to have made it out in time. The sinkhole has swallowed a car and a caravan, but that’s pretty much it. Inskip Point is a very popular camping site and especially now during the school holidays.
It’s weird to think that it’s just minutes away from where we sat up camp one year ago. We slept in almost the same spot that were quickly evacuated two nights ago. It’s now a massive sinkhole at the same spot where we took long walks on the beach, tried our luck on fishing and just relaxed on the beach. It was our first road trip in Australia and one of our first travel experiences here. We came driving through the campsite, just to get stuck in the sand a few minutes later. We were all relatively new in Australia and didn’t even know that we were supposed to switch on the four wheel drive AND lock the wheels for it to work. We were just meters away from the beach and shared our campsite with a blue-tongue lizard. It’s a truly beautiful place and it was our home for 24 hours. It’s partly gone now.
It was 24 hours of camping, beach bumming and a quick detour to Rainbow Beach to sand-board down the massive sand dunes. I’ve thrown myself down plenty of snow slopes, but never a sand dune. I was terrified. Meanwhile, a bunch of crazy 5-year old kids (with an obvious death wish) were running down the dunes next to me.
We came back to our campsite for watching a fantastic sunset, had a traditional Australian BBQ and a few drinks around the campfire. Some of that is gone now. Inskip Point will recover after the sinkhole and there’s several other camping sites in the same area. Still, though, things are changing.