NOOSA HEADS, Australia — Just a few hundred yards into our family's short hike from an oceanfront hotel to the beach at Tea Tree Bay, our 5-year-old son stopped dead in his tracks. Was Charles feeling the after-effects of the 14-hour plane ride from Los Angeles? Had he been momentarily stunned by the shell-shaped bay's simple beauty? Or was he simply too tired to walk one more step?

The answer lay elsewhere, nestled comfortably in a eucalyptus tree a few dozen feet above the hiking trail. Up there, as Charles pointed out, perched a small koala, obliviously munching away. In a few minutes, a small crowd gathered to gaze up at the marsupial.

Australia may be famous for its koalas, but it turns out they're not usually spotted outside a zoo.

We were nowhere near a zoo, in fact. We were walking through the coastal headland forest outside of Noosa Heads, the swank beach town that anchors the Noosa region in northeastern Australia. It's the kind of place where you can sip a cocktail late at night in a bar spilling over with gorgeous people, then swim early the next morning in a warm, glassy ocean filled with heavily tattooed surfers. The koala was just a surprise wildlife bonus.

UNMISTAKABLY COOL

The koala throng kept growing, and Charles was tugging on the sleeve of anyone who came up the trail — visitors from Tasmania, a collection of other Australian tourists and even a few local surfers. But there were tide pools to wander, organic farmers markets to browse, even a ginger factory and a giant pineapple to tour. We left the koala, methodically eating its shoots and leaves, behind.

My wife and I had risked subjecting ourselves to the epic plane trip from Los Angeles to Sydney — and a short connecting flight to the Sunshine Coast's Maroochydore airport several days later — with two small children (Henry, our other son, had just turned 1) for exactly this koala experience: something indigenous, exotic and, for kids and parents alike, unmistakably cool.

Whether it was playing with kangaroos in "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo or sampling local music at the rambling Eumundi Markets, our journey into this little-known pocket of Queensland rarely fell short.

STILL AFFORDABLE

Our contemplated summer vacation had been London and Paris, but with the dollar weak against the pound and euro, a two-week European trip had become prohibitive. I had visited Sydney on business and had found it irresistibly metropolitan and seemingly kid-friendly. Even though it has slipped since our visit, the American dollar remains strong there and now is worth $1.24 Australian.

The timing was right, too. We weren't going to be traveling until early September, so we would be catching the fair weather at the start of Australia's spring.

Our plan was to spend a week in Sydney, see as many museums, parks and zoos as possible, then fly 518 miles north, over Brisbane, to Maroochydore, the tiny airport serving the Sunshine Coast. From there, we would rent a car, station ourselves for a week in the beach city of Noosa Heads, our base camp for excursions to Irwin's Australia Zoo, the Ginger Factory and the Big Pineapple, a remote tropical fruit plantation turned into an irresistibly corny little theme park that does, in fact, have a faux giant pineapple you can explore.

As Sydney has become increasingly artsy and moneyed, its upper crust has set out for new getaways, and a couple Sydney acquaintances had recommended Noosa. It is to Sydney what Acapulco once was to Los Angeles: out of the ordinary but not completely out of the way.

The small peninsula, home to several Noosa resorts, faces a body of water called Laguna Bay. The narrow spit of land, Noosa Heads, is bisected by Hastings Street, a busy avenue of up-market shops, restaurants and art galleries that feels a bit like a setting for "The O.C." There are more couture shops on Hastings Street than T-shirt stands.

But everywhere else you look, Noosa is surprisingly unaffected. One of our favorite restaurants, Bistro C, had 30 wines by the glass. That unpretentiousness grows more distinct as soon as you leave the beach, which has public access. And the farther behind you leave the ocean, the more resorts give way to communes, and high-end boutiques are replaced by organic cheese shops.

The surrounding Cooloola and Glass House mountain regions, where most of this bohemian lifestyle abounds, look much like Hawai'i's Big Island: acres of sugar cane, the stalks sawing in the wind, with less dramatic plots of pineapple here and there, all set in the foothills of volcanic peaks.

A MEMORABLE ZOO

We geared outings to our young boys but nevertheless came across several stops that would suit those visiting without kids, including small wineries, ice cream shops and farmers markets.

The Australia Zoo was not our first excursion, but it proved among the most memorable.

The Crocoseum is the central attraction, the site of a daily "Crocs LIVE" show, kind of like a Shamu act starring aquatic reptiles.

The crocodile production wasn't much, but the rest of the zoo was. One of its better features was the kangaroo and wallaby enclosure, where visitors mingle with and feed the hopping animals. The zoo's koala enclosure was equally impressive.

A few miles north, just outside Woombye, stands the Big Pineapple, and you can climb inside it if you want.

The Ginger Factory is a theme park dedicated to, well, ginger. It boasted a new ride called Overboard! Adventures of a Stowaway. Patterned loosely on Disney's classic It's a Small World, the boat tour follows the Gingerbread Man as he travels from New Zealand to Venice, Italy, to Paris to Mount Rushmore trying to escape two cooks.