Rainbow Beach, Queensland: Where the Hemsworths go to holiday

Ssshhh. Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting Hemsworths. I took a car ferry across the Noosa River to get here; then drove my 4WD along the beach (you can come via bitumen road, but getting here by sand is way more fun). I'm close now … so close I can smell their tanning oil.

I'm at Arcobaleno in downtown Rainbow Beach, watching former pro surfer Luke Munro eat his seafood linguine. Or is that carbonara? Instagram posts reveal Munro is never far from a Hemsworth in Rainbow Beach. Tonight, it appears, Munro isn't even dining with Luke, the un-famous Hemsworth.

Hey, it's not that I'm here for the Hemsworths, okay? But I'd be lying to you if I said I'm not here for the Hemsworths. I wouldn't have heard of this sleepy little fishing/ surfing outpost otherwise. Australia's most famous siblings – Chris and Liam – and their little mate, Matt Damon, have been coming here for five years. They keep pretty low-key about it, but how low-key can you be when you have 50.5 million Instagram followers (and that's just Chris)?

That's where I come in. I've come, partly, to find them. And I've come, partly,to find out why they come here when they've got all of Australia to choose from (for no Hemsworth holiday is limited by a travel budget).

A woman at the bottle-shop tells me you can usually find them at Double Island Point, a surf-break off a grassy headland 20 minutes' south of town that you can only access along the beach. So I book a 4WD tour with Epic Ocean Adventures. Guide Luke Pettigrew tells me he's seen the Hemsworths there "plenty of times". "Locals just treat them like normal people," he tells me. "Some don't like the celebrity factor, they reckon it brings more people from Noosa. But most of us don't care."

Double Island Point is the Queensland destination Melbourne and Sydney people have dreamt about since about June 26; the sand's the same colour as a XXXX can and the water's bluer than your average lagoon. I paddle a kayak past the breakers in search of migrating whales and find four close by, and 20-or-so dolphins swimming under me off the point. But I can't find a single Hemsworth. The waves are perfect too, you'd think that would get them here. After all, this is the only Australian surf break featured in the sequel to the most iconic surf movie ever made, Endless Summer. One surfer tells me I missed Chris, he saw him last month. "He was changing out of his wettie (wetsuit)," he says. "I don't normally stare at men." (Just offshore, iconic diving spot, Wolf Rock, is rumoured to have attracted keen diver, Angelina Jolie, who arrived in Rainbow Beach via Russell Crowe's helicopter).