I discovered a secret side of Noosa, away from the crowds and the bling

Right now, it's impossible to believe we're in the middle of the busy holiday town of Noosa, mere minutes from Hastings Street, with morning traffic on all sides of us. Sure, we can hear its hum, but only faintly. Maybe the mangroves are soaking up the noise; or maybe the whistles and squawks of the teeming local birdlife are just louder - because really, this feels more like the middle of nowhere.

We're on a hidden waterways of Noosa kayak tour, following surfer, skateboarder and wildlife lover (especially snakes) Vince Young on a paddle around Weyba Creek, which flows between the Noosa River estuary and Lake Weyba, splitting Noosa Heads and Noosaville apart.

Vince takes us through a hidden entry into a mangrove tunnel that leads to a secret lake. There, we stop paddling, and talking, and just soak up the serenity. Then it's back through the tunnel and onwards to "Cormorant Lane", where a colony of those supreme fisher-birds are nesting high in the trees.

All the while, Vince is a font of knowledge about this exquisite environment - there are more species of birds in the Noosa area than in Kakadu, he tells us - and regales us with some historic Noosa scuttlebutt to boot. It's a glorious way to spend two hours, so near yet so far from the madding crowds.

Noosa, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, is most famous for its beaches, and glamorous Hastings Street is a legend of high-end shopping, dining and holidaying in general. It's still welcoming to all, though, as it was when I lived here, back in the 1990s, for a halcyon two years. There have been many return visits since, but this time around the intention is to spurn - for a few days anyway - the Noosa of Hastings Street fame and instead take the roads less travelled.

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As our tour with Vince shows, you don't need to go very far to find one of those roads. And less than 15 minutes' drive from Weyba Creek is the entry to the wild and secluded Noosa North Shore. In my memory this was a bitterly contested place, caught in a battle between pro-development forces and conservationists. It seems the "greenies" won. There is no five-star, big-name resort here, not even a bridge to reach it from Noosa - instead, you jump on a car ferry at Tewantin, which runs every 10 minutes and delivers you in half that time into this gateway to the Cooloola, Great Sandy National Park. A sign alerting drivers to recent sightings of koalas greets us as we drive off the ferry, tootling past the Big4 Holiday Park - the one spot on the North Shore where you can get a coffee or restaurant meal - on the way to Senses Noosa North Shore, our accommodation for the next three nights.

Senses is a collection of 48 architect-designed, eco-friendly houses, built on stilts and blending into 16 hectares of native bushland. Our luxury three-bedroom, two-storey digs are plenty big enough for the two of us. The living area is a vast space with a two-storey high ceiling overlooked by our mezzanine bedroom. There's a barbecue hamper in the fridge from the Noosa Forager, stuffed with locally sourced produce, from chicken kebabs and beef sausages to salads bursting with organic goodness. Who needs those fancy Hastings Street restaurants? It feeds us for two nights.

Lunch, we have on the road. On our first day on the North Shore it's a salad sandwich on crunchy ciabatta bread that we assemble ourselves at Freshwater picnic ground. A huge goanna with legs like trunks lumbers awkwardly towards us, and rests its chin on a timber boundary surrounding our table. It watches us eat and we're not sure how safe our sandwiches are. Tour guide Luisa Di-Finizio, who's been showing us around, puts down a small windmill-like doovalacky meant to deter the creature from coming closer. Instead, the goanna licks it, then ambles off towards a tree.

It's one of many wildlife sightings that day. Luisa, the one-woman show behind Sunny Jeeps, picks us up at 9am at Senses in her pristine white Wrangler. There's not a cloud in the sky as we make the short drive to Teewah Beach - the entry, no less, to the UNESCO Great Sandy Biosphere. Tyres deflated for the soft road ahead, we begin barrelling along the Great Beach Drive - a multi-day, 380-kilometre journey from Noosa to Hervey Bay via K'gari, the world's largest sand island.

But we're just doing a small segment, our destination being Double Island Point 40 kilometres away. As we bump and spin along on this cold winter morning, Luisa says she's never seen Teewah Beach so calm; so beautiful. It's as though the sea has been draped in a net of diamonds. We watch brahminy kites circling on the breeze and stop to observe one that's landed on the beach, pecking at a carcass. Luisa says we will likely see dolphins, whales and rays, but we don't. No matter. An extraordinary wildlife encounter lies just ahead of us.

At Double Island Point, we climb out of the jeep and gawk at the view across to the coloured cliffs of Rainbow Beach and K'gari beyond; there's smoke on the horizon from the burning of sugar cane, and a series of mysterious booms from faraway explosions. But as we walk along the beach, all is upstaged by the view at our feet - thousands, surely millions of blue soldier crabs, scuttling in battalions all over the place. One could stare all day at the awesome spectacle of these tiny creatures, but there's a historic, 1884 lighthouse to hike to, at the top of the lofty Double Island Point headland.

We bump into a ranger there, a fellow from Wales who in all the world has chosen this place to live and raise a family. He tells us that a crocodile was recently spotted at nearby Inskip Point, not the first sighting of a stray croc this far south. There are kayaks way below, bobbing about on the blue, and we continue walking around the headland and down onto Teewah Beach, where Luisa is waiting for us. The former corporate executive is among the few operators licensed to run tours along the Great Beach Drive, and hers are private and fully customised. It's just us and Luisa in her cute little jeep, a far cry from typical group tours.

Josh Street grew up around Boreen Point, about a 30-minute drive north of Noosa Heads, and talks fondly about a carefree childhood as we walk on a pathway through a paperbark swamp towards the edge of Lake Cootharaba. We'll be leaving Josh here, after he's given us a comprehensive briefing, and guiding ourselves on a two-person sea-expedition kayak through the Noosa Everglades. This 60-kilometre stretch of rare and ancient ecosystem is one of only two everglades in the world, as Josh explains. The other is in Florida. "No alligators here though," I say. "No Americans either," Josh quips.

We've got just five hours on the water, in which time we'll cover about 16 clicks on a return journey. The first leg is a 3.5-kilometre paddle across Cootharaba, which is shallow - if we fall out, we'll be able to stand up - and coloured brown by the tannin from tea trees that grow on its banks. The navigation gets trickier after that; we need to find the inlet into Fig Tree Lake, then hang a left, and a slight right to stay on track. We get a bit lost and take a wrong turn but eventually find our way into The Narrows, described as the Everglades' crowning jewel.

Here, an enchanted upside-down world reveals itself. The reflections in the still, dark water - of banksias and melaleucas, eucalyptus and cabbage palms, and the tall grasses that define an everglade - are crystal clear. Only the ripples sent out by our gentle paddling mark it as a mirror image and not the real thing. And we might be all alone in the world here - there are few kayakers out today. It feels like nature is waving its magic wand just for us.

The next morning, we leave the North Shore behind - farewell to our bedroom in the treetops, to Senses' resident albino brush turkey Marilyn, and to the car ferry whose novelty has not worn off for us, especially when, crossing at the end of a big day out, the setting sun turns the river pink. It's time for the flip side of our Noosa sojourn - the one where we stay on Hastings Street, at its largest beachfront resort, Seahaven, in a two-bedroom apartment which looks out over Main Beach; the one where we browse the boutiques, dine out at fabulous restaurants, have morning coffees and croissants in Parisian-style cafes, and walk through Noosa National Park in the dawn light, past its bays and lookouts and as far as Hells Gate, spotting dolphins along the way.

Come one late afternoon, we have a date with Ricardo Wilschke, of the Noosa River Cruise Company. He's taking us on a sunset gondola ride around Noosa Sound, the reclaimed island behind Hastings Street where the other-half live in waterfront mansions. Italian opera is playing, although it doesn't completely drown out the birdsong, as we settle back with a glass of chilled champagne. We glide past those mansions and beyond them, along the Noosa River, seeing mangroves and houseboats and our treetops rookery of cormorants again, all bathed in the changing light.

By the time we arrive at Rickys River Bar and Restaurant - entering like A-list celebrities via its private jetty - the sun has just gone and the horizon is burnt orange.

Ricardo's parting words are a recommendation for the meal ahead at this institution of a Noosa restaurant. "Have the crab spaghettini and the passionfruit souffle," he shouts after us as he's climbing back onto the gondola. I take his advice on main course, happily. Our shared snacks and entrees include snapper croquettes, prawn toast with furikake, roasted Hervey Bay scallops with green gazpacho and North Queensland rock lobster roulade.

There's no room left for the souffle. You can't always have everything. Just some of the time - like when you're combining the beachy decadence of Hastings Street with Noosa's extraordinary wild beauty for the perfect six-night holiday.

The writer was a guest of Tourism Noosa