Our Travel Blog

Cooktown was the Northernmost stop on our trip at 15⁰S, partly because of time constraints, partly because there doesn’t seem to be too much more up there and most importantly our car will not be insured if we go further!

We woke up to a grey, hot and humid day. The place we stayed at last night was great! It has only been open 4 weeks so everything was pristine. The husband was a builder and built the place himself, the wife has given up full time work to the run the place, it seems they are fully booked most nights.

After breakfast Andrew (husband) returned with a basket full of fresh, straight off the tree mangoes. They were delicious, not like the stuff they call mangoes in our stores. He also brought us a cashew apple, the fruit of the cashew nut that can be seen at the top. The fruit is very sweet when first bitten into, but with a VERY dry after taste. We didn’t try the nut as there is a poisonous layer between the husk and the nut.

We headed into town to see some of the older buildings and waterfront.

One nifty idea we saw along the water front were shelters with “coin in the slot” cook tops!

Next we went up to the top of Grassy Hill where Captain Cook visited when he got “stuck” in Cooktown. This was also the site of an old lighthouse, in WWII the site was used as a radar and radio site for early warning of Japanese attacks.

 We headed back down the hill for some groceries and petrol,  then wound our way southbound along much of the same road we traveled yesterday. All along the route were termite hills, some small some large (2m/6ft tall). These mounds were built by ………. mound building termites! See here for details

When we came up this way yesterday there was a lot of smoke in the air, it was still there today but not so bad. This was probably the cause

We stopped for lunch at the Palm River Roadhouse which was meant to have a display of old gold mining equipment. Unfortunately I think the place has seen better days. There was no sign of mining gear!

After lunch we swung a bit further south onto a new (for us) road. The scenery changed from that of mountains and rain forests to large areas of agricultural flat lands where many crops are grown; peanuts, bananas, coffee, mangoes and a few we couldn’t identify.

We reached our motel late in the afternoon to be greeted at our room by Bruce. Hopefully you can read the inscription.

The trip back is not really planned out, we have covered off all the touristy stuff we wanted to do, with the exception of whale watching! We are now picking up local information as we travel on the less touristy routes. The trip up to Cooktown covered about 3200Km.

We are now on the fringes of civilisation in Cooktown, data up here is SLOW so this will be a picture-less entry. As we are taking the inland route back to Brisbane there may not be any blogs for the next few days depending on connection speed.

Three days in a row we have got up before our normal time, I hope this isn’t habit forming! After breakfast we headed out to a craft store, Lyn was desperately trying to find a quilt store, but there wasn’t one to be found. We arrived at the store and Lyn was even more despondent when we saw it, not a good start to the day. After 60 seconds in the store her mood changed and her credit card started quivering in her purse. She had found her quilt store.

About an hour later we emerged from the store with plenty of goodies for Lyn. Next stop was up the coast to Cape Tribulation where there was a rain forest zip-line activity. The route to the Cape required a ferry crossing over one of the rivers. We checked with the ticket guy as to the routing from Cape Tribulation up to Cooktown. It turned out that a 35km section of the road was gravel with steep inclines and many tight curves. A 4WD vehicle was strongly recommended. We decided to buy a return trip on the ferry and take the easier route, rental car companies aren’t amused when you go off roading with their vehicles. At Cape Tribulation we asked about the zip-lining, unfortunately the whole package would take 2.5 hours. This, coupled with the fact we now had about 200km extra to travel to our destination would make it a very late arrival. Unfortunately the zip-lining was abandoned. We had a late lunch, and while sitting on the patio we heard quite a commotion coming from the trees, initially we saw nothing but saw that the people on the next table had spotted something. Up at the top of the tree was a colony of large bats hanging from the branches. One of the bats flew off, and I’d guess at the wingspan as being close to 3 feet.

Although we had to backtrack quiet a way, the scenery made it worthwhile. Much of the trip was right along the coast with miles of unused sandy beaches.

Once we started to head north towards Cooktown the scenery changed, there was hardly any sign of human habitation, cows were free to roam across the road causing us to stop a few times and there were “beware of kangaroo” signs every where, unfortunately there were none to be seen. We had a couple of small mountain ranges to cross with associated hairpins which was fun! We finally made it into Cooktown around 1830.

An even earlier early morning for us today. After breakfast we headed out to the marina in Cairns to join our boat out to the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)

The journey out to the reef was about 2 hours, with a brief stop at a holiday resort on Fitzroy Island. The crossing was far smoother than the one to Magnetic Island the other day, however the number of white bags in use was considerable!!!

I had signed up for a scuba trip and went off for my briefing en-route to the reef. It turned out that I was the only English speaker doing a dive today so I was paired up with a Spanish dive instructor! Paulo was a great instructor, had a MSc in marine biology, was fluent in a number languages including English, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi and Chinese. My dive time was set for 1400 so that would allow Lyn and I to get some snorkeling in together before lunch.

At the reef there was a very large pontoon that we moored up against, this was the “wet” area with aluminium seats and benches, changing rooms etc.

Time to get wet. The water was crystal clear, full of coral and tropical fish. I had a few technical issues with my underwater camera, but still got some shots in as well as some videos.

I’ll put some pictures at the end.

After our first snorkel there was a good buffet lunch available (free, as was tea and coffee throughout the trip), there was a plentiful supply of fresh prawns as well.

After lunch we did a little more snorkeling, then I left Lyn on her own as I went off to prepare for the dive. All kitted up we descended into the warm (28C) water and headed down to clear the ears. Finally I have mastered this art, I clear my ears every 18″ or so on descent whether there is any discomfort or not. I had absolutely no ear problems.

We swam around for about 30 minutes varying the depth from a couple of metres down to 10 metres. Fish of nearly every colour were all over the place and the varieties of coral were amazing. While I was doing this Lyn was either snorkeling or riding in the glass bottom boat.

All too soon it came to an end, and we headed back towards Cairns. About 15 minutes out we spotted some thick black smoke on the water. It turns out that a motorboat had caught fire, all 4 people were saved by a passing tour boat.

Pictures:

Although a number of the pictures a quite good, I had issues in taking the shots as the camera would go into snooze mode after about a minute, I didn’t realise this until later as it was difficult to see the screen in the bright sunlight. Unfortunately the cameras instructions are in pretty poor Chinglish (sorry Catriona!!) and mention none of the issues I was having. 30ft down in the Pacific was not the best place to trouble-shoot.

If you ever get the chance to go to the GBR, don’t hesitate….. JUST DO IT

Had to set the alarm this morning to be up 30 minutes earlier than usual! As it was we both woke up 1 minute before the alarm. After breakfast we went to reception and waited for our coach.

Today we were taking a train ride up to Kuranda, a trip up the mountain through the rain forest. Then back down via cable car. Again, I’ll take the easy way out and dump some pictures on you.

We were dropped off at Freshwater Station which is over 100 years old, and gets its name from the fact that this was the first point on the line that fresh water was available for the workers.

The engines used on this line have all been hand painted by local native people

On the train we met a couple of young girls on vacation from Arnproir and Carleton Place, about 25km West of Ottawa!

Next are a series of photos taken on the trip up, there were meant to be many magnificent water falls but the drought has left them pretty dry.

Part of the steepest ascent was engineered by John Robb, the workers left a piece of un-excavated rock as a monument to him. More can read here if you are interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairns-to-Kuranda_railway_line

Off in the distance we could see our transport down

At the summit we got off the train at the hot and humid village of Kuranda to be met by a Bird of Paradise

It’s a bit hard to see from the picture, but the seat is made from old railway lines.

These trees with their above ground roots always amaze me.

We heard the sounds of the didgeridoo as we walked along the street and just assumed it was a CD playing in one of the stores, in fact it was one of the locals playing the real thing.

They don’t like to destroy trees if they don’t have to!

As we expected the village was very much a tourist attraction with many of the stores selling the same articles. We did however manage to get most of our outstanding shopping done.

I was surprised to see a crashed aircraft off the side of the road! Originally it was the first aircraft to run a scheduled flight for the forerunner of what is today Australia’s national airline QANTAS, back in 1946. After been sold a number of times it was bought for use in a film where it found its final resting place.

As I said earlier our trip down would be by cable car. The total journey would be approx 8km, run by two systems. The first run was 4.5km and the second 3.5km. Below are some views.

The final shot is of a water park. One of the activities is water skiing, but there are no boats. Around the perimeter of the lake are a series of pylons supporting moving ropes. The skier hangs onto the rope and does his thing. The white objects in the water are jumps for skiers and boarders.

Tomorrow is our underwater day on the reef.

Normal wake up time, with the patient’s only sign of injury being her multi coloured eyelid(s), some bruising appears to have spread to the other eye.

We had an outdoor breakfast today.

I was expecting a quiet lazy day to day, but it didn’t turn out that way, it was one of our more physically demanding days!

We headed north along the Bruce and then took a detour off towards the coast and Mission Beach. Another MGB type road got us to Mission Beach, we carried on a few more miles to Wongaling Beach. This a unique area in that the rain forest comes right down to the ocean.

From here carried on North towards the Mamu Elevated Forest Walkway (possibly stopping for a cream pastry on the way!)

The walkway was name for the Mamu tribe of indigenous people, and is one of many World Heritage sites in the area. The walkway was constructed without the need to demolish any trees, Cyclone Larry did that back in 2004! The keepers of the site used the path of destruction to good advantage in building the walkway. At one point of the walk there is a cantilever section that goes, unsupported, out 150ft over the gorge! It’s getting late and I’m getting tired so here come the pictures.

We may have come out of mango territory, but the sugar cane continues on, the mangoes have been replaced by bananas.

The coloured bags you can see on the trees are covering the banana pods, each pod has between 100-150 bananas and weighs 40kg, those of you south of the 49th can do your own conversion this time! The bags are put on the pods when they first form, and are colour coded according to date. This aids in harvesting the fruit as the pickers know what colour bags to pick.

After a very late lunch we headed to Cairns, passing Walsh’s pyramid on the way.

In Cairns we stopped at the local tourist information office and gave our credit card a good workout by booking a train and sky rail trip tomorrow and a snorkeling and scuba trip to the Great Barrier Reef on Wednesday.

We left Townsville this morning after a (mostly) pleasant stay! We were only traveling a short distance today up to Cardwell about 200km North.

Lyn has just about fully recovered now, with the exception of her multi coloured eye. We chose a short trip today as there were a couple of places we wanted to go to before heading to Cairns, and we are both enjoying the more relaxing mode of getting into the hotel mid afternoon rather than  early evening. Before we left Townsvile we saw what appeared to be large ocean kayaks.

First order of business after checking out was to find a craft store that we missed the other day. Google listed two stores with the same name. One was a new store the other has been sold, we went to the old one the other day. Today we found the new one. Once the store had been given a thorough going over we headed out on The Bruce in search of some water falls.

We didn’t hold out too much hope as every creek and river we had passed had been bone dry, but after an exciting drive off the The Bruce up a steep twisty road we found them. The parking lot was quite full but we didn’t see any people. That changed as we headed down to the water.

After spending some time people and water watching we hit the road again in search of lunch. Horror of horrors, Australia closes down on a Sunday. All our usual sources of food, e.g. bakery, pie-shops, cafes were closed. We finished up at MacDonald’s, or Maccas as they are called over here. The Australians love to shorten many of the longer words. Truck Driver = Truckie, Registration = Reggo etc.

After our 5 star lunch we headed back up The Bruce which was now closer to the coast after being inland for a while. Our next stop was a couple of lookouts giving views across some wetlands to Hichingbroke Island.

Unfortunately the last few days have been quite hazy, so the pictures are not too clear.

We also took a back road through some replanted forests before heading to the hotel in Cardwell, yet gain a nice ocean view from our room.

 

We had a couple of small world episodes today; earlier in the afternoon we passed the “peace car” we saw up on castle hill in Townsville. Tonight at the restaurant we met a young Dutch couple who were on the same boat as us going across to Magnetic Island. The guy was memorable because he was sitting on the open deck when the wind and waves conspired to give him a good drenching!

We’ve got as far as 18 degrees south of the equator so far, tomorrow its further north to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. Hopefully the wind and wave action dies down so that the water will be clear and calm.

Despite been deprived of wine last night (doctors orders, Barry’s enforcement), Lyn continued to improve and woke up as expected this morning. The most noticeable difference in her appearance being that the bruising from her forehead has dropped down to her eyelid and socket. She has a real shiner, but for some reason doesn’t want the photo published!!

Lyn was happy enough to go exploring today so we headed off, not back to Magnetic Island, but to the local aquarium which had some wonderful live coral and sea life exhibits. Again the pictures can do the talking.

The aquarium was excellent, a majority of the fish were in a VERY large central tank probably 25ft deep. Well worth the visit.

Lyn was still fine and up for more exploring so we headed up Castle Hill, at the top was a look out with an old WWII fort, complete with graffiti.

This is the hill looking up from our hotel parking lot

This is the hotel from Castle Hill, its the tall white building just to the left of the escarpment.

This “60’s painted” car was more likely a more modern rendition referring to Brexit? Its slogan down the side is “Anarchy in the UK”

We saw this fruit tree in the area, we suspect it is a Pomelo. Anyone agree or disagree?

Buy nw the heat was building so we headed down to the town, I wanted to get a couple of things from my new favourite store Jaycar, an Electronics store of the type that is now hard to find in N. America with the possible exception of Fry’s in the US.

I went in to buy a small buzzer to fit in the MGB as a warning that I have left the lights on, and a suction holder for the cell phone, to use in the car (more on that shortly). I walked out with buzzer and a “GoPro” type camera! After leaving the aquarium I really thought I needed to be prepared for our snorkeling trip on the Great Barrier reef. Originally I planned on buying a throw away, waterproof film camera. Why buy one of those when for only 10 times the price you can buy a digital one!!!! When I got back to the car Lyn reminded me of my original objective, the phone holder!

I didn’t have the official Garmin Oz maps in the car GPS, instead I had downloaded some open source maps. The maps are fine as you drive along, but are sorely lacking when you put in a destination address. 90% of the addresses input result in no address found message, even though the GPS has auto completed the address when it has been partially input. This got to be highly frustrating, so one day I said “OK Google navigate to 75 The Strand”, Google politely replied “OK, I’ve found that” and proceeded to guide me there. So far Google has only let us down once, sort of, we navigated to a town not an address and we were taken to the town limit sign rather than the town centre. The speech recognition is fantastic. Bye bye Garmin!

Next stop was a belated lunch, which unfortunately was in a shopping centre. After lunch, the credit card was in for a further beating. Lyn had lost her watch in the accident, so that was replaced. A handbag and dress found their way onto the shopping list as did 1.5Kg of CDM (that’s just a start for the CDM!). We also found a few presents to take back as well.

Over the last 24 hours I’ve been busy doing paperwork for the insurance companies. I was surprised how cheap some of the medical costs were, particularly for a private hospital, e.g. 3 CAT scans for a total of ~$1000 and admission, assessment, diagnosis and a 4 hour stay for for observation ~$400. It appears that my retirement insurance package should cover it all at 100%. Our only real outlay was ~ $400 for repairs to the scooter, the credit card doesn’t cover vehicles with less than 4 wheels. No problem it will be taken out of Lyn’s pocket money!

I am running out of titles. Up at the usual time, after breakfast we headed off to the ferry terminal to take the boat across to Magnetic Island. There are numerous walks on the island, including one to a series of WWII forts which also goes through Koala country.

The trip across was interesting with plenty of wind and waves to throw the boat around… perfect!!

At the Magnetic Island terminal we caught a bus to the scooter rental store. All formalities complete we headed off on our high power 50cc scooters. Our first stop was the local beach.

From the beach we headed up towards the forts, I was leading and we had a couple of twisty turny hills which would be great in the MGB! I checked my mirror and Lyn had disappeared. I turned and went back along the road, and there in the leaves on the side of the road were a couple of guys and Lyn! It seems that either she or the bike did not want to take the same corner as the road did. It seems when she went off the road she departed the bike and slid through piles of soft leaves until being stopped by a large rock.

Anyway she seemed OK other than being a bit shaken up and a couple of small grazes. Of course she had to choose a spot right in front of the local open air tavern to come off the bike, so she had a good audience. One of the guys with her was an off duty paramedic so he took charge, we got her back across the road into a seat and gave her some iced water. The paramedic asked her a few questions, and it became obvious there was an issue. She had no recollection of anything for some time previous to the crash including where we were (Oz). This was a little worrying at this stage. An ambulance arrived, and a few minutes later in a blaze of lights and sirens the fire truck arrived. Queensland law requires the fire services to attend road traffic accidents.

There was no hospital on the island, so I followed the ambulance to the local clinic. Here the Dr gave her a thorough check up and was pretty sure there was no physical damage and that there was no indication of a pre accident medical event that could have caused the crash.He wasn’t too happy with the golf ball size lump on her forehead, which we think may have been caused by movement of the crash helmet when she hit the rock. He wanted to send her back to the mainland for a CT scan to make sure all was well.

Well we couldn’t just jump on the boat and go to the hospital, an ambulance crew had to come over from Townsville, complete with mobile gurney to take her back. By the time they arrived, 95% of memory had returned,Lyn was feeling much better and the swelling had subsided. As the sea was still quite rough it was decided to use a wheel chair to and from the ferry and use a normal seat on board as lying on the gurney could be a little risky with the boat moving about.  

At Townsville we went to the hospital and Lyn was assessed again, then sent for a CT scan of head, chest and neck. Head for bleeding, neck for broken and chest for any squished up organs (Doctors words not mine). Anyway all was well when the results came back.

The Dr. offered her an overnight stay, but no one really thought it was needed as her progress was great, so we headed back to the hotel. As we hadn’t eaten for 12 hours it was carryout pizza and CDM (chocolate) for the evening meal

Lyn is now fast asleep after the adrenaline rush wore off, but apart from a little soreness from the bumps and bruises all looks good.

Hopefully she won’t be too sore tomorrow. The emergency services here were fantastic, very caring, friendly, professional and nicely sarcastic at the same time!! I may change my  mind when we get the bill!!

P.S. Lyn knows I have posted the pictures of her and has no problem with that … just saying!!!

Body clock back to correct timing! This morning we headed out of the motel to the local landmark, The Big Mango! As expected there are many mangrove orchards around the area.

As an added bonus there was a geocache in the area, this time we managed to find it.

We then headed towards the town centre and stopped off at the local airfield where they had a diorama featuring the RAAF Catalina PBY-5A seaplane. Unfortunately there were no full size aircraft there. As we left the airfield we passed a large salt reclamation plant. As there is so little rain here, salt water in ponds evaporates at a greater rate than the rainfall. There are a number of ponds where salt water is pumped to and left to evaporate, the resulting salt is then skimmed off and left in large heaps for up to a year to allow what little rain there is to purify the salt further.

Our next stop was a lookout point known as Flagstaff Lookout, there was an information centre and indoor viewing area, but it got damaged by a cyclone (southern hemisphere version of a hurricane) last year and has yet to be repaired. Below are some views from the lookout.

On our way down from the lookout we stopped at Kings Bay, but decided against walking on the beach as it was getting a little too hot!

From there we headed into town which has a number of murals on its buildings.

As well as the numerous murals there were a couple of interesting looking buildings in town

We also spotted this MGB

From Bowen we headed up the coast towards Ayr for our lunch stop (note no snacks this morning). After my traditional pie for lunch we continued north to Townsville, our first large city for a few days, it has a population of 178,000 which is 50,000 more than Darwin.

We’ll be staying here for 3 nights so decided to splurge out a bit on accommodation. We have a combination condo apartment / motel room / hotel room on the 3rd floor. Not sure how to describe it, but it great and has all the amenities we need.

We had a rain shower move in from the ocean which gave us a rainbow, and an Ocean kayak-er a good reason to head to shore!

Now it’s time for a beer, I chose it for the name, no idea what it will taste like!

Our body clocks are losing reliability, we were 10 minutes late getting up, luckily not a big deal as we had nothing planned before 10AM. After breakfast we hung around in the somewhat neglected room catching up with minor things like bank accounts, credit card payments and most importantly making sure our snow removal service got their payment in time.

At the appointed hour we headed down to the marina to pick up our boat for the Whitsunday Islands. We encountered a small issue in that there were more cars than available parking spaces, luckily there was another car park we could use in an adjoining resort.

We checked in at the marina and as “grey nomads” we received a care package. Grey nomads are the equivalent of N. American Snowbirds i.e. old fogeys like us who tend to follow the warmth. We got a cloth tote bag and two oversize cookies! On board the boat was free tea and coffee, what more could we want. Looking out the window we saw some nice looking boats which I joked were the type we were going on.

As it turned out our boat was at the end of the dock, behind all the pillars, but similar to the one in the foreground.

A few pictures of the trip and the islands.

Just to make sure we behaved they sent two police officers along.

The boat was heading towards Hamilton Island where there is a six star resort and lots of rich people with houses and boats! For some odd reason, the local airport is located on the island and not the mainland.

It appears as though no private cars are allowed on the island, although there are mini tour buses and taxis. The islanders rely on golf carts

On the way across one of the crew said he’d come and give the four of us grey nomads who were aboard a personal commentary on what we were seeing. Unfortunately, ships business prevented him from doing so. On the way back, to make up for this we were all invited to the wheelhouse and had a great time talking to the captain, who also happens to be the owner of a 1963 Morris Minor! We were allowed to stay up there until after we docked. The only thing missing from the wheelhouse was the wheel. The ship could be controlled from a small lever built into the armrest of the captains chair. A couple of times previously, when we were docking I mentioned to Lyn how easy it was to maneuver these boats with their bow and side thrusters, and how difficult it would be without them. Well this boat had no such thrusters, all the maneuvering was done using differential thrust on the two engines. VERY impressive.

The boat above was a larger version of ours with twin V-10 engines giving 1500 HP and a cruising speed of 28 knots.

All in all we found the trip we wanted, and a friendly crew as well. Of course the question that hasn’t been answered is where did the islands get their name?

The Whitsunday Islands, more commonly known as ‘The Whitsundays’ is an island chain off the east coast of Queensland, Australia.

The Whitsunday Islands gained their notoriety and name in the late 1700s when Captain James Cook first sailed through the island chain on board Endeavour, a British Royal Navy Research vessel. Making his way up the coast after sailing around New Zealand he was charting the coastline and ‘discovering’ Australia for the rest of the world. After entering a large island chain, he came upon a unimpeded passage to the North, his direction of choice. While sailing through the then unnamed passage Captain Cook (who was Lieutenant at the time) proclaimed it ‘Whitsunday Passage,’ which it is still known as today. At the time, Captain Cook believed it to be Whit Sunday, a christian holiday that takes place 7 weeks after Easter. What the Captain didn’t know was that it was actually Whit Monday on the day they sailed through since the Endeavour had passed the international date line at the 180th meridian of longitude. And so the Whitsundays were discovered on a Whit Monday!

Once ashore we headed up a cliff road to look down over Airlie Beach.

In our quest not to cram too much into each day we decided to stop overnight in Bowen, about an hour up the road rather than drive up to Townsville about 3 hours away.

On the way we diverted off The Bruce to visit Cedar Creek falls, unfortunately someone had turned off the falls.

We resisted the urge to stay at the Bowen Arrow motel (think about it!) and headed for the Ocean View Motel instead.

We headed into Bowen for dinner but found little that appealed (Pizza Hut, MacDonald’s, Dominoes and a few other fast food joints) then Lyn spotted a hotel, so we tried that. We had a good meal sitting in an outside courtyard.