18 – South from Cairns

We had hired the car for the whole time we’re in Australia, so we packed everything into the back of the Yaris and set off.  We were heading for the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane.  It’s over 1700km to Brisbane. We’d decided that we’d travel about 5 hours a day then find somewhere to stay for a night or two.

On the first day we headed south on the main highway.  It follows the coast but is inland a bit. 

We travelled through the mountains and passed fields of sugar cane and bananas.  Every so often we would pass through a small town.  The road was very good but the speed limit is lower than the speed limit at home. We eventually decided to stop at Townsville, a reasonable sized town 350km south of Cairns.  We booked into a roadside motel for one night.  Townsville is on the coast and has a nice beach. 

We went for a walk through one of the town’s parks. It was a lovely evening, quite cool.

The next morning we set off hoping to get to Mackay.  The road was quite monotonous, no real scenery just the same trees and shrubs.  We’d both had enough travelling when we saw a sign for Airlie Beach on the Whitsunday coast, so we decided to head for there. From the main road we had to travel about 16km to the beach. 

 The area around Airlie Beach is lovely.  Lots of small beach towns. We booked into a small motel for two nights.

 The town was small but had a lovely lagoon where we spent some time sunbathing and cooling off. We went further along the coast to Shute Harbour and took a walk through the forest to Coral Beach.

 The walk through the forest is the only way to reach this secluded beach.

As we walked through the trees you could hear all sorts of rustling and noises.

We came across a four foot long monitor lizard which quickly scrambled up a tree.

The beach is covered in crushed coral which has been washed up in the high tides. The water was nice and cool but we didn’t go swimming,

the signs said to beware of crocodiles. 

The woman at reception suggested that we go to Castaway Bay a 45 minute drive but it would certainly worth it.

The last part of the drive is dirt track through the scrubland.

We saw quite a few kangaroos, both brown and grey kangaroos.  One of the bigger brown kangaroos hopped across the road just in front of us. 

We also saw a couple of dingos.  We eventually reached the beach which was quite beautiful and unspoilt. 

There was a family fishing from the seashore, but the only other sign of life were the dingo prints in the sand.

We decided to carry on south the next day.  We headed off and spent about six hours travelling before turning off the main road at Rockhampton and heading towards Yeppoon on the coast. We drove through Yeppoon and onto the next small villages before finding a nice motel at Kinka Beach. This was quite a quiet place but there were lots of places nearby.  We went to Emu Park which is a small town with a monument dedicated to Capt Cook. 

The monument is a sculpture in the shape of the rigging of a ship (looks a bit like a harp) but some of the rigging is hollow and when the wind blows it plays a tune. They call the sculpture “The Singing Ship”.

It has been sited on the headland looking out to the sea where Capt Cook sailed his ship when he discovered Australia.

The next day we decided to see some of the sights in the local area so we went to the botanic gardens and zoo in Rockhampton.  It was very hot so we didn’t stay too long before we headed off to view the caves.

These are caves just north of Rockhampton which were discovered about eighty years ago and are now a tourist attraction. There is a large cavern which is often used for weddings. It is said that the acoustics in the cavern is better than the Sydney Opera House.  Every year they host events where opera singers come and sing in the cave. 

We then went to the Heritage Village.  This is a large area where old buildings dating from the 1850’s to 1950’s from all over Queensland have been erected in the form of a village.

 All the buildings are dismantled and removed from their original sites and rebuilt at the Heritage Village. There are several piles of wood lying around the village waiting to be erected. The Heritage Village relies on volunteers, so it takes a long time to get everything done.  It was really interesting. 

is the tucker ready yet Sandy?

They have a hospital, school, fire station, sheep shearing shed, shop and several houses and barns.

Come on Skippy! We've a bush fire to put out.

There are also many carriages, cars, military vehicles and steam engines. We could have spent longer there, unfortunately it was closing time.

We decided to head south again the next day and set off for Maryborough.  The road was quite good, so we went passed Maryborough and stopped at Gympie. We weren’t too far from the Sunshine Coast so it would make the next part of the journey quite short.

Gympie is a small town. It was quite pretty.

The next morning we set off for the Sunshine Coast.  We had booked an apartment in Caloundra at the southern end of the Sunshine coast for five nights.  It was only about an hour’s drive so we decided to go onto the coast road and travel down passed all the other beaches.  We had just turned off the main road when the heavens opened and the rain started to pour down. We should have stayed on the main road.  The coast road does pass all the beaches but you can’t see the sea for the rows of trees at the side of the road. The rain was constant and the road was getting covered in water so we were glad when we reached Caloundra.

Welcome to the Sunshine Coast

17 – Cairns

We flew from Hong Kong to Brisbane where we had to transfer to the domestic airport for our connection to Cairns. The first impressions of Australia were that it was very clean and hot. On arrival at Cairns airport we passed through immigration and baggage collection then went and picked up our hire car. 

We had booked a car through Hertz. The man at the counter asked where we came from, when we said Aberdeen he said that he used to work for a company that had its head office in Aberdeen.  It was Mitchells Self Drive.  I said that was a coincidence, my mother used to work there. I gave him her name and he said “ I know Kitty, I used to speak to her every day”.  He’d worked in their Bolton and Manchester offices, small world. My mother retired when the company closed and he emigrated to Australia.

We picked up a Toyota Yaris and headed a few miles north to Trinity Beach where we had reserved a studio apartment.

 We were shown to our apartment which was stunning with windows which looked out over the Coral Sea in the South Pacific Ocean. It was gorgeous. We had booked the room for 4 days, but it was so good we decided to book it for a further 3 days.

There are lots of things to see and do around Cairns.

We spent sometimes at various beaches along the coast.  There are really nice beaches at Port Douglas and Palm Cove. 

The only problem is the jelly fish.  They call this time of year “stinger season”. All the beaches have a small netted area where it is usually okay to swim but occasionally they have to close them if the box jelly fish (can cause death) have gotten in.

We lay in the sun for a short while, then cooled off with a dip in the sea.

Inland is the rainforest. It is the oldest surviving rainforest in the world.  We only viewed a very small part of it. We took the cable car up through the canopy to Karunda, a small village in the middle of the forest.

The cable car is in three sections, so you can get out at the stations and take a walk through the wooden walkway to see the views.

Another of the stations takes you to a waterfall which should be very fast flowing at this time of year because it is monsoon season. Unfortunately the monsoon hasn’t arrived this year yet, so the waterfall was really just a trickle.

At Karunda they have various arts and crafts shops which sell a lot of Aboriginal art.  It was interesting to look at.  There are also some wildlife parks.

The butterfly park has lots of native butterflies and a laboratory where you can see the caterpillars and chrysalis which eventually turn into the various types of butterfly.

The natives are friendly but clingy.

What's that Skippy?   You need help to put out a bush fire!

The native animal park lets you have hands on contact with koalas and kangaroos as well as enclosures with crocodiles, wombats and snakes. The bird aviary was home to various parrots, cockatoos, cassowary and other birds.

Some of the birds would land on you looking for food.

A large macaw mistook my earring for food and pulled it out of my ear. Needless to say I didn’t get it back. I got a scratch to my arm and a bite to my finger instead.

We took a trip up into the Atherton Tablelands which is a mountainous area not far out of Cairns. The road twists and turns up the mountains where you can visit many lakes and waterfalls.

We took a route known as the waterfall circuit where we saw some beautiful scenery.

The highlight of our time in Cairns has to be the trip to the Great Barrier Reef.  We chose to go with Ocean Spirit, a large catamaran that sails out of Cairns Jetty to Michaelmas Cay.

Michaelmas Cay is a sand island that is a bird sanctuary situated on the outer Barrier Reef. 

We were both a bit nervous about the trip.  We would get to snorkel off the beach, but we hadn’t been too successful the last time we tried to snorkel.  As I said earlier it’s stinger season here, so we had to dress the part for snorkelling. A bit like the north sea, you have to wear a survival suit known as a stinger suit.

We were given snorkel, mask, flippers and a stinger suit. It did nothing for my figure, in fact Syd said that I wouldn’t need any extra buoyancy devices.

He’ll pay for that later! I thought I’d lost weight after our trip through Asia.

 We transferred from the catamaran to the island on a small boat and were given a short snorkelling lesson before setting off on our own.  It took a little bit of time, but we were soon swimming among the coral and fish.  It was beautiful and time passed too quickly.  We were soon being called back to the boat for lunch.  After a fabulous lunch we went out on the glass bottom boat to view the coral and get some information on the reef. We saw many different types of coral. After the reef tour we went back out to the island to snorkel again.  It was stunning. This part of the reef is the closest to the surface, so it is perfect for snorkelling. 

Most other parts would have to be viewed by scuba diving.  I really felt like I was deep under water. The fish were swimming at my eye level and the coral was just below me. The clams were huge about 30 inches long. Syd saw a four – five foot stingray swim below him, Steve Irwin sprang to his mind. A few others saw a reef shark and turtles.

We met some really nice people. Rick and Cindy from Minnesota and Vince and his family and friends from Melbourne.  

It was a gorgeous day, the weather was not too sunny, warm and calm.  It was a day that we’ll never forget. Another wonder of the world to add to the tick list.