Cooloola Great Walk — Attraction in Cooloola

The Cooloola Great Walk is an excellent multi-day hiking experience, over 5 days and 4 nights, traversing the coastline between Noosa North Shore and Rainbow Beach. Daily distances range from 15 to 21 kilometres, across open beach and sand patches, through dense gum and rain forests, along flats, and up and down mountains, through glorious sunshine and/or coastal showers. And all the while, you carry everything you need on your back - tent, sleeping gear, clothing, food, cooking equipment - and toilet paper. Each night you camp at designated camp sites, featuring a drop toilet and rainwater tank to top up the water bottles, with the 8 individual tent sites spread out so you have privacy from anyone else who may share the trail with you.

Aside from the purchase of any hiking equipment you may need (our ultrajet stove, dehydrated meals and self-inflating camping pillows were worth their weight in gold), the Cooloola Great Walk is very inexpensive to do - you book your 4 campsites on the Queensland Parks site at around $7 per person per night, and pay $1 for the Tewantin ferry to get across the Noosa river. For my wife and I, total cost was $58.

Some tips, my opinion only.

Do the Walk from Noosa to Rainbow, rather than vice versa. Some say heading south is easier (more descents than ascents), but I recommend heading north to avoid the environmental 'culture shock' factor. Heading north, you leave the hustle and bustle of the Sunshine Coast, walk for 5 days through glorious, beautiful wilderness, and emerge onto the stunning Carlo Sandblow, then descending into wonderful, relatively quiet little Rainbow Beach township, right on the beach. Heading south, you finish the track at Noosa North Shore, have to hike the last 2.4 kilometres down the sealed road to the ferry, and find yourself in busy suburbia. Bring good rain gear and plenty of garbage bags to protect gear from the wet, or hold wet gear. The climate is very good, but you need to be prepared for rain. And if things get wet, there isn't much time at the start and end of the day to dry it, particularly in the shady campsites provided. Test out those hiking shoes and your pack with long full weight practice walks beforehand. Over 6-7 hours, with 12-20 kilograms of extra load, those apparently comfy hiking boots will show their true colours, and that pack will show its real strength and fit. Bring strapping tape, bandaids, etc for blister and pack-rub repair. And watch out for leeches at Kauri campsite. Remember that 'bush distances' are longer than normal ones. You tend to average about 3km per hour under full load over the varied terrain, so it takes a long time to get anywhere. Enjoy yourself, rain, hail or shine - it's all part of the adventure. And don't forget to look up and around you at...

Undertaking the 100Km over 5 days of fairly arduous terrain can be quite a challenge... as an admittedly overweight beginner, I probably shouldn't have picked this particular walk for our first ever thru-hike - the signs and website did warn about ensuring those doing the walk have adequate fitness levels.

I nearly quit right at the beginning trying to cross the Carlo Sandblow after realising how out of shape I really was and how ridiculously heavy our packs (22+ kg) were, but somehow found the strength to persist along the rest of the trip, mainly out of sheer stubbornness and willpower.

After struggling through a few more incredibly challenging hills and undoubtedly frustrating the heck out of my much fitter wife by having to stop so frequently to catch my breath, mother nature took pity and loaned me a couple of suitably sized sticks to use as trekking poles which greatly helped me manage the many steep inclines and declines along the rest of the way.

The forests are peaceful and scenery is beautiful throughout, but I did find the highlights although great, were stretched a little thin compared to other places I've seen and researched since.

After walking down the Cooloola Sandpatch, I can definitely see why so many people recommended starting from the Rainbow Beach end, and I was glad we listened to that. Walking across it was an awesome experience and immensely less terrifying than we both were anticipating.

The ocean views walking along the peaks coming into Noosa on day 4 were phenomenal, perhaps they were the biggest highlight for me personally.

Most days it wasn't easy to find suitable places to stop for rest breaks, but perhaps it would have been much easier with a MUCH lighter pack than a beginner would carry. Once again, mother nature saved the day again, with a few suitably placed fallen logs scattered throughout the path.

The camps were a little underwhelming, very sparse and the only real water sources were tanks attached to the roof of unfortunately very smelly composting toilets, thankfully we had filtration and purification tablets.

The first two camps felt a little dangerous with widowmaker trees just waiting to drop branches (thankfully we were alone and had our pick of sites those days.) There was no real safe place to shelter if the weather turned to absolute disaster.

We met a few bush rats on the 3rd camp, but thankfully we'd known about them in advance and overkilled our food storage solutions with hard plastic containers, and they left us alone.

All in all, it's definitely a trek worth doing, even for determined beginners, but I highly recommend looking at options available online to really lighten those packs if local stores are limited, and it would really helps getting some K's and experience up on a few easier...

Just finished day 5 of the Caloola great walk. An amazing walk for the hiking enthusiast. Highly recommend. The diversity in terrain and scenery was spectacular. Campsites all had storage boxes to keep food in, tanks to replenish your water supplies and drop toilets. We did the walk North to South on my partner's recommendation as she said it would put the sun behind us on most of the walk, very happy with that decision. We also took a 14 year old young man with us and he also thought the experience was amazing. Again,...