Noosa

Noosa exists in two registers simultaneously and makes no attempt to reconcile them. Hastings Street is one of the most polished restaurant and retail streets in Australia — the kind of place where the coffee is serious and the dinner reservations require planning. Two hundred metres away, through the scrub of the Noosa National Park headland, is one of the best right-hand point break systems in the Southern Hemisphere. The Points — First Point, Tea Tree, Granite — peel through a coastline that is a World Surfing Reserve and a National Park simultaneously, which means the waves will be here long after the restaurants on Hastings Street have changed their menus seventeen times. There are no surf schools on the point breaks. The etiquette is strict. This is not a beginner beach — it is a surf town that knows exactly what it is.

The yoga scene runs parallel to the surf scene and has been building for as long as both have been worth having. Studios operate at international standard on and around Hastings Street; the wellness culture extends into the hinterland where retreat centres have been running programmes for twenty years. The food is the other reason — Noosa has produced more serious restaurants per capita than anywhere in Queensland, and the farmers' markets that run on Sundays in Noosaville have been a local institution since before the term farm-to-table arrived. Most people who come for a long weekend start looking at property before they leave.