Month: July 2018

We move further into the Queensland outback.

We tour the Cobbold Gorge.

As at the Undara lava tubes, the original owners/lessors  of the property struck a deal with the government to develop natural attractions in return for giving over large parts of their property to become parkland. Tourism is probably a safer bet than cattle raising out here.

We overnight in the tiny hamlet of Georgetown. Evening brings a flock of galahs in  the wires overhead.

On the road east next day. In some places, the highway narrows to a single lane. Approaching vehicles both move half onto the gravel.

Maria is really tickled by these signs in particular.

We stop for lunch in Croydon, another former mining centre.

Our orders of fish and chips contain enormous hunks of barramundi.

We continue to Normanton. From there to Karumba Point, on the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The road between Normanton and Point Karumba is flat as a pancake.

We see many Brolga cranes, but as soon as we stop to take a photo, they take off.

Behind the caravan park are mobs of wallabies. Some of them like coming up to the fence to study the humans inside.

Karumba Point has a wonderful, end-of-the-world feel to it.

It’s a popular thing here to gather at the shore and watch the sun go down.

We head south down the Matilda Highway to Cloncurry.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Queensland outback

In the nearly four decades since I was last here, colloquial Australian English has evolved into a broad-vowelled dialect that can be hard for outsiders to decipher. I’m reminded of an episode in one of Paul Theroux’s books in which he shares a compartment on an Indian train with a group of young locals. It takes ten minutes for him to realize that the group is actually conversing in English.

For example, we go on a mine tour in Mt. Isa. At the end, Maria asks me ‘What’s a ‘fayday’? She tells me the guide has repeatedly instructed participants not to forget our ‘faydays’ before we leave.

Eventually we learn that the word is ‘photos‘: everyone gets a photo of themselves taken at the mine entrance.

 

 

From Cairns, we make plans to head for the Queensland interior. We drive north to Port Douglas.

Port Douglas is too crowded for us. This must be peak season for visitors.  We decide to travel a bit further north to Mossman.

Before we leave PD, we sample some meat pies for lunch. One is crocodile pie and one is kangaroo pie. The crust is stamped accordingly.

Mossman is much less frenzied. We visit the Mossman Gorge.

Back at the interpretation centre, we spot this enormous spider. I ask Maria to put her hand near it for comparison. She obliges.

On the other side of a mountain range, the land changes from rain forest to fertile farmland. We pass though patches of forest with signs to look out for Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroos. We don’t see any, though.

It doesn’t take long for the terrain to become Outback-y. This is the track we take to the Kalkani Crater.

We climb to the crater’s rim

There are wallabies around the trail.

We camp in Undara Lodge. We awake to two galahs squawking overhead.

The hawk flying by at the same moment was a happy accident.

Undara is known for its lava tubes.

We carry on to the remote hamlet of Einasleigh. Lots of red dirt, like Prince Edward Island.

We have lunch and a beer at Einasleigh’s sole hotel.

Surprisingly, the young woman behind the bar is from Boston. The many people in Australia with work visas are encouraged to work at least three months in remote locations.

The draw here is the Copperfield Gorge.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Queensland interior

A guide tells us that the thousands of pensioners – ‘grey nomads’ – traveling around Australia these days are improving the economy of the outback. They actually pay money for things like guided tours and stay in nicer resorts. This in turn creates jobs for locals so everybody doesn’t pack their tents and move to Sydney or Melbourne. Nice to know that the boomer generation is good for something.

We have a good time in Cairns (which seems to be pronounced ‘Cains‘ – like the economist.) Getting here is fun, too.

(Note: because WiFi is difficult to come across in Australia – unless there’s something we’re missing – we’re a bit late in our blog entries. We’re already halfway across Queensland. To avoid confusion, we’re adding posts as WiFi becomes available. So we may be a week or two behind.)

Some of the inhabitants of our caravan park have a sense of humour.

We continue up the coast to Cairns. This is the beach at Flying Fish point.

This is typical countryside in the north of Queensland. Lots of sugarcane. Sweet!

Like most places in this part of Queensland,there are crocodiles everywhere.

Cairns boasts a flashy new aquarium.

I remember Cairns as being rougher and more frontier-like. Now it’s a very civilized place.

We visit the excellent Botanical Gardens.

In the conservatory is a beautiful selection of orchids.

Of course, most people come here for some sort of Great Barrier Reef experience. We book a snorkeling tour for the day.

Among the youthful, international crew is a professional underwater photographer. She does a good job of snapping GoPro-deprived punters like us.

The experience is very unlike our idyllic snorkels in the Togian Islands. There, the water was like glass. The sea was calm, with a temperature like bathwater. The coral was spectacular, the fish teeming. In the two locations we visit  here, the sea is much rougher than we expect. The water is kind of cloudy. And cold. We’re tossed around like corks. I’m sure there are many places in the thousand-plus kilometers of the Great Barrier Reef with amazing snorkeling; we’re happy to have had our time in the Togian Islands.

Still, it’s a grand day out.

We’re happy we went to the aquarium in Cairns, too. Like reef viewing from the comfort of dry land.

We enjoy a ride in a glass-bottom boat – our first.

This is our non-glass bottom boat.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Cairns

In our earlier travels, several times we find ourselves near famous whale-watching locales, such as Husavik, Iceland, and Hermanus, South Africa. We ask each other if we want to go watch whales and inexplicably say ‘Meh… no thanks.’

Despite being jaded cosmopolitans, we’re pretty chuffed when, on the return trip, the captain announces our boat is slowing down because there’s a whale between us and another vessel.

Our resident marine biologist – yes, our boat had one – informs us it’s a juvenile humpback whale.

Now that’s cool!

Brisbane is delightful.  I didn’t even stop here in 1979-80: at the time, Queensland was under the conservative Bjelke-Petersen regime, and Brisbane was probably the un-hippest city in Australia.

How times change. Brisbane is a thriving, forward-looking kind of place.

We visit the Queensland Art Gallery. It’s one of the best we’ve ever been to. And we’ve been to lots of galleries around the world.

I love this work, Under the Jacaranda.

I especially like the whimsical touch of the real jacaranda blossoms on the floor under the painting.

We drive up the coast to Noosa Heads. This is too overcrowded for us. We continue to less populated beaches.

Many are nearly deserted – one blessing of living in a sparsely-populated land.

We follow the advice of a man we meet in a caravan park, who suggests a few picturesque places to stay on our way north.

Rather than spend every day driving, we find a spot we like and spend a few nights there and relax during the day.

Still, driving is  fun. We observe the scenery. We listen to ABC while we drive. It’s a lot like listening to the CBC. (Except for the Australian accent, of course.)

It’s advised to swim beneath a pair of yellow and red flags due to ‘marine stingers‘.

This is enough to keep me out of the water for the duration. Their effects  range from ‘a slight prickle’ to ‘agonizing death’.

Doesn’t stop Maria, though.

This is Horseshoe Bay, near Bowen, QLD. Bowen is famous for its mangoes (!)

We find that traveling in our own vehicle, we have fewer opportunities for taking photos – just because ‘a body in motion tends to remain in motion’ and all that.

We enjoy staying in caravan parks. They’re clean and quiet. The inhabitants are usually pensioners escaping the southern winter.

Everyone is extremely friendly. We conjecture a drinking game where you have to down a shot of Bundaberg rum every time someone says ‘no worries’; we’d be legless by midmorning.

Sight or Insight of the Day – Queensland

Australia is a birdwatcher’s paradise. Everywhere we go are parakeets, kookaburras, and other avian exotica. (This clearly marks us out as tourists, that we think of parakeets and kookaburras as ‘exotic’.)

For the first time ever, we actually pay for an iPhone app: Morecombe and Stewart’s Birds of Australia.

It’s official. We are going mobile.

We pick up our van –  who we name ‘Matilda’ – in Caringbah, in the south of Sydney. This means that after not driving for eight months, I now have to pilot a right-hand drive vehicle with a manual shift on the left through the entire length of Sydney to get us north of the harbour.

Slightly nerve-wracking, but we survive.

We stay in campgrounds along the way. The blog may not get such regular updates; not every campground has WiFi (unlike nearly every cheap guesthouse in Southeast Asia.)

We get lost a few times when we stray from the motorway.

After not getting very far the first few days while we provision Matilda, we reach the Queensland border and the chill goes out of the air.

Australia is well set up for camping. The sites we’ve been to so far are a delight.

The scenery is nice, too. I enjoy long-distance driving.

Interestingly, the first time we turn on the radio, we hear a story of how ‘Bluesfest in Ottawa, Canada’ is threatened by the presence of a killdeer nest. Everything’s connected.

Happy Canada Day, everyone!

Sight or Insight of the Day – Going Mobile

Driving along outside Port Macquarie, we spot a sign: ‘Want to pet a koala?’ I can’t slam on the brakes fast enough.

We feed wallabies and kangaroos.

They are surprisingly gentle and delicate creatures

I can cross ‘pet a koala’ off my bucket list.