Crikey!

Well, we’re on our own now, driving down the east coast of Oz, hanging out in Caravan parks and pretty much just takin’ it easy. I last left you all while I was in Cairns, I believe, just after having acquired my “sea legs”. Well, it’s now been 4 days and if I close my eyes and stand still, sometimes it still feels like we’re still on the boat. Ahh, equilibrium.

Anyways, from Cairns we motored south, and our first stop happened to be at Murdering Point Winery. No, that’s the actual name, I’m not making that up. They make “exotic fruit” wines, like mango and lychee-the lychee one is actually pretty good, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t generally like wine. So we bought a few bottles. Combine that with the rum we got in Bundaberg and I’m pretty sure we’re already over our duty-free liquor limit for bringing back to Canada. Oh, well. It’ll be worth it if we have to pay a little extra. Then we kept going down that road and stopped at a lovely little beach for lunch. We called it a night fairly early in Townsville, so we could actually cook dinner without having to use a flashlight-or a torch, as the locals call them.

The next morning we hiked up Castle Hill, which seemed a little like the Grouse Grind of Townsville. It was about 1 km up uphill with stairs built into the hill, and yes, there were people headed up and down in their workout clothes. At the top there’s a pretty good view 360 degree view of Townsville and the surrounding area. You can actually drive to the top of it, but we decided (well actually, Glen decided) that hiking up it would be better. Especially since we just spent the better part of a week sitting around. It was kinda nice to get out of the van and get some exercise. After that we stopped just south of Townsville at the Billabong Wildlife Sanctuary. I have no idea if they’re affiliated with the clothing company or not. They have all manner of Aussie wildlife there, including reptiles, koalas, and Cassowarys. But they pretty much started as a place to bring wayward crocodiles. And they have a lot of them, both salt and freshwater. We sat in on a couple of the talks, and especially like the one about the wombats and koalas. Have you ever heard that koalas are endangered? Yes? Well it’s a lie. There’s tons of them in Oz, and they have no known natural predators, save for cars and trucks. Wombats, on the other hand, are disappearing like crazy. There’s one species here that has only 128 actual animals left. That means that if I ever decided to have kids, and they wanted to take a trip like this, there’s a good chance there wouldn’t be any of that particular species of wombat left. That, my friends, is really sad. While we opted not to actually cuddle a koala, since we’d already done that in Kuranda, we got to pet one instead. They have one big, old dude named Ray Charles that you can pet and have your picture taken with, you just can’t pick him up. He’s got a pretty sad story, actually. He was found as a baby when his mother was hit by a car, then released back into the wild. Then he was attacked by a dog and blinded, so now he can’t be released back into the wild, which is why he’s at the sanctuary. Oh, one other interesting tidbit we learned. Every wildlife place pretty much has koalas you can cuddle, but apparently the government regulates how much cuddling the little guys can do. They’re literally only allowed to “work” for 20 minutes a day, 3 days a week. That’s a work week I could get behind. It has a lot to do with their diet, which consists solely of eucalyptus leaves, which have virtually no nutritional value. So they spend most of their days sleeping or eating. We also got a good look at some crocodiles, and I got a good snicker out of watching Glen as we listened to the reptile talk. Apparently they have something like 22 of the top 24 most venomous snakes in the world in Australia. Sure makes you want to head out for a bushwalk, doesn’t it?

From there we headed south-stopping at a couple fruit stands, of course-and ended up in Arlie Beach. Yesterday morning we rented some camping gear and hopped a boat out to South Molle Island in the Whitsunday group of islands, to hike the island and camp for a night on an almost private beach. The hiking was pretty tame-it was basically just a path mown through the grass at a very gradual incline up a hill-but we managed to get in about 14km of actual hiking. We pretty much covered the entire area of the island itself, and even checked out the resort on the other side. At one point, Glen asked what these weird trees were, ‘cause they looked like a tree trunk with grass growing out the top. The next info sign we saw said they were called grasstrees, so he guessed pretty close. The beach we were staying on wasn’t particularly sandy, because it was made up mostly of broken little pieces of coral that had washed up on shore. I think the Whitsundays pretty much mark the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, so that makes sense. We had a pretty good sleep that night, with the exception of listening to the wild cockatoos screeching and squawking overhead as they chased each other around. Noisy little buggers they are. Coincidentally, they island would be a wicked good place to birdwatch if you brought your binoculars, ‘cause we saw tons of different types of birds-most that we couldn’t identify.

This morning the boat picked us up and we came back to the mainland, and pretty much just wandered around Arlie Beach for the rest of the day. Actually, we did fit some laundry and grocery shopping in there (one simply cannot run out of Tim Tams, after all).

Well, I’ve no idea when this is going to get posted, so in all likelihood another chunk of writing will end up being attached to this one before I manage to get it online.

Well, shockingly, we didn’t get to an internet connection before this is going to get posted, so there’s more to add. From Arlie Beach we ended up in Yeppoon for the night, which was literally right on the beach. A really wide beach. Glen and I actually got the running shoes out and went for a little jog when we got there, because it was fairly early still, and we managed to jog back to the caravan park along the beach. It was pretty cool, I’ve gotta say.

The next morning we motored into nearby Rockhampton to check out the Dreamtime Heritage Center, which is sortof the aboriginal museum in the area. They have some excellent displays, and the tour was quite good, if a little spotty and short on actual information. You kinda got the sense that the “tour guides” were really grad students who were forced to volunteer there as part of their grad work, so they seemed a little disorganized at times. The facility itself, however, is fantastic, and the tour is not boring in any way. Near the end one of the guides played the digeridoo for us, which is a talent I will never acquire. My sister can play a little, but this guy definitely put her to shame. Sorry, Jana, but when you can do a Kookaburra call, then I’ll be impressed. Then came the highlight of the day, they showed us how to throw a boomerang, and then let us try. Glen and I actually did rather well, as compared to everyone else in our group. It’s a bit of wrist action, and you have to basically hold the boomerang vertical, which is completely counterintuitive. But it worked pretty well. Interesting fact, the returning boomerang actually has no practical significance. There’s no purpose for it, other that just as something to play with. There are countless types of boomerangs, for hunting and various other things, but the returning boomerang really doesn’t do anything other than come back if you throw it right. Now I’m starting to think all the things I thought about Australia were wrong…

From there we ended up in Agnes Water for the night, but we got there too late to try surfing-they’re pretty much the most northerly beach for surfing on the east coast. For some reason, all the caravan parks in the area were full, so we ended up at a backpacker’s hostel called “Cool Bananas”. That’s right, Slacker and Jana, it’s real. Cool Bananas is a real place! It’s a pretty nice hostel, but it ended up being a bit crowded because all the other campervanners who couldn’t find a site spent the night there as well. There’s something to be said for not having to wait an hour to cook dinner because there’s no burners left in the kitchen for you to do your cooking on. We ended up getting up fairly early and heading south anyways.

Our final destination was Brisbane, but we stopped in Maryborough for a bit on the way. Originally we were just going for the Bond Store, which was some history about sugar cane (more ranting about the sugar cane when I get a proper-sized keyboard) and the liquor industry. But then I was thumbing through Liz the GPS unit-she’s got a British accent so we named her after the Queen-and discovered that there’s a statue of Mary Poppins there! Apparently the guy that created her came from Maryborough. So naturally we had to find the statue. From Maryborough we headed to the Australia Zoo, home of the late Steve Irwin and family. It’s actually an amazing zoo for someone who doesn’t live in Oz, because it has all the native animals in it, and you can interact with a lot of them-you can pet koalas, feed kangaroos, hold snakes, and lots more. They had some animals we hadn’t seen yet, like some little hedgehog dudes and Tasmanian devils. Yes! Tasmanian devils! Which are actually quite small. Think slightly larger than a Chihuahua. They ain’t real big. But you wouldn’t want to mess with them if you saw their teeth…

In a nutshell, the zoo was awesome. And the merchandizing was pretty amazing, too. You could get Steve Irwin wrestling a crocodile keychains. Seriously, they were huge. Though something a lot of North Americans probably don’t know is that the guy was a very active conservationist, and he did a lot of amazing things in that area. Which makes a lot more sense that they basically named a zoo after him. It’s sorta nice to know that he wasn’t just the guy that wrestled crocodiles and said “crikey” a lot.

From the zoo we took a circuitous route to Bonnie and Sabz place-Liz didn’t know about the new bridge in Brisbane, so we got lost for a bit. But we did eventually find our way, and got to consume one too many beer sitting on their verandah, with our beer nestled in some lovely beer cozies they provided. This morning we took the train into the downtown area of Brisbane and wandered around on foot for a couple hours, checking out the parks and a little market we stumbled on. The ladies weren’t home when we got back so we left them a note and headed south again, and were nearly an hour away before we realized we had absconded with their tourbooks. Hopefully they’ll be okay without them until we get a chance to post them back. We didn’t make it too far-just to Coolangatta, and we don’t have many plans for the next couple days, though Glen’s currently combing through the Lonely Planet guidebook looking for surfing beaches, so you can guess what that means.

I don’t know when I’ll be posting next, but I know you’ll all be at the edge of your seats, dying of anticipation.