Are you afraid of heights?

June 6, 2010
Location: Tin Can Bay/Rainbow Beach
This morning we woke up bright and early to check out the humpback dolphins that come to the shore every morning. Not many people know about the feeding of the dolphins but in the 1950s there was a dolphin that was severely injured and stranded itself on the shore of tin can bay. The locals found the dolphin and nursed it back to health. The dolphin learned that it could receive fish from this area so when it came back after healing it brought with him a few other dolphins from his pod. Every generation learned and now about 4 or 5 dolphins are regularly seen coming up to the beach. After we saw the dolphins we went back to the motel and had breakfast. We started our journey to rainbow beach. Rainbow beach was named after the towering colored sand cliffs near the beach. Aboriginal legend states that an ancient aboriginal god threw himself into the sand cliffs in a fight over a woman, coloring them forever. The sand cliffs were made up of natural sand blows, basically areas of land where a natural disaster wiped all vegetation from the area. While we were walking over to the beach through one of the sand blows, we saw a dune that was prefect for sledding. There were two local kids up there already and they offered to let us use there boogey boards to slide down. The climb up the dune was the challenging part. The fine grains of sand made foot holds nearly impossible. I would move up five steps and then slide down two. But finally I made it to the top and man I was a lot higher then I thought I was. I finally gained the courage to go down on the board. It was a lot of fun. A face full of sand was well worth the adrenaline rush of falling down a cliff side on a board. After we were done with our adventures (I thought we were done, but I guess Glen had other plans in mind) we made out way down to the beach. Only problem was to get to the beach we had to slide down a rocky sand cliff. I was super scared but at the same time I was having a lot of fun. The cliff towered over the beach making the people look like microscopic ants. It was quite the climb for a person afraid of heights, you know the old saying don’t look down, well you had to look down to see where to step next. After we were all safe on the ground and we marveled at the cliff we just scaled we played on the beach for a while. We went for a swim then started walking up the beach towards the shops and stuff. It was probably a 2 hour walk along the beach before we finally found the actual beach access. We stayed in the little shopping square for a couple of hours then made our way back to the bus. We had a six hour drive ahead of us to Gladestone, the city we were picking up the boat to Heron Island. We got to our next motel found food then hit the sack.