Our Travel Blog

Woke up on time again, although last night was quite noisy with all the wild life around. We didn’t see any more wild life overnight, but there were some new “deposits” on the front lawn to show that there was some activity! Lyn saw some movement as we were having breakfast, she had spotted a kangaroo this time, its size was much larger than the wallabies of last night.

After breakfast we took a walk down the road in search of a geocache, yet again it defeated us, although I was a little leery of delving too far into the bush out here! As we were packing up Lyn spotted a bright yellow breasted humming beard hovering in front of an outdoor mirror admiring itself.

Today’s trip was to a gorge in Eungella National Park to see some waterfalls. We arrived at the park after fording a couple of creeks.

We then went to the Cafe for some refreshment. Lyn had a mango smoothie which was excellent, and I assume made from the locally frown mangoes. Sitting above us was a brush tail possum.

Suitably refreshed we headed off to the falls. In the parking lot we spotted Australia’s national bird the kookaburra.

We started up the trail and were soon surrounded by lush vegetation of the rain forest.

 

We reached the falls and the pool somewhat more breathless than when we started, the water looked inviting but we hadn’t brought our “swimmers”, others had and were jumping off the rocks.

Apart from the dragon fly there were some stunning iridescent blue butterflies fluttering around, but they wouldn’t settle long enough to be photographed. 

Once we made it back to the car (today was a cooler 35C / 95F day, but the humidity had risen) we headed off for our first zip lining experience. We found the entrance, but no signs of life. We walked around a bit and saw some lines coming through the forest, there didn’t seem to be much clearway between the line and the foliage and my first thought was, this is going to hurt. After a few minutes we decided that this was probably an old attraction that had closed down, so we made our way back to the car. Just as we arrived a woman called out to us, apparently she was the owner/operator and chief dogsbody’s wife. Evidently Tom (assumed husband) had a headache and was not operating the ride today. After what we had seen I wasn’t about to offer him any aspirin.

Next order of business was fuel for the car and fuel with us. Fuel stations can be a long distance apart here and I am trying to ensure the tank is kept above half full, by this stage is was a little below half. Fuel here is expensive, around $1.60 Aus / liter ($1.50 Cdn or  $4.30US / gal).

With stomachs and fuel tank satisfied we headed off to Airlie Beach. On the way we finally found a “cane train” operating on the narrow gauge railway. It had one engine at the front and two power cars at the back.

Airlie Beach is a haven foryoung backpackers, but we wanted to go and see it and also book a local cruise from here. Trying to find a cruise that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg to take you out to an island, dump you there for a few hours so that you can play ball, walk along the beach or drink yourself silly was a hard task, but one that Lyn was victorious in. More tomorrow. In the meantime I was trying to find accommodation for the night. We settled for an Ocean View apartment with balcony.

The internal body clock didn’t let us down again today. After a spartan breakfast we packed up the car and headed north. In some respects the distances between places of interest deceived us. 240km at home can often be covered in just over 2 hours, here it is more like 3-3.5 hours given the lower speed limits in places and the 2 lane roads. On the other hand, the scenery is totally different. For us at least, it is a case of it’s not all about the destination, but the journey to get there as well.

Today’s trip was up to Halliday Bay to an Airbnb, in the hope of seeing kangaroos and wallabies. So far all the wild life we have seen in their natural environment are 5 wallabies and 2 snakes, unfortunately all road kill. Hopefully that will change.

About forty five minutes into the journey we noticed a few things had subtly changed. The surprising lush greens had given way to the more parched brown of the hotter climates, signs of civilisation were few and far between. About 80% of the creeks and rivers we crossed were bone dry. Despite the dryness of the land there was no shortage of cattle grazing; Rockhampton prides itself on being the beef centre of Australia.

About another hour and a half north the brown gave way to lush greenness again, there were a number of mountains not too far away and I suspect that they have an influence on the local climate.

Grazing cattle gave way to sugar cane fields, and these fields ruled the landscape for the next couple of hours. Cane harvesting takes place between May and December, and there must be multiple crops as we saw fully grown cane over 8ft tall, small plants about 1ft tall and just about everything in between. The cane industry is so large here they even have there own narrow gauge railway system running through all the fields to collect the harvest. We saw a couple of distilleries that magically transform the cane into rum.

After about five hours, including breaks, we reached our destination. The Airbnb is a nicely furnished cabin about 2 minutes walk from the Pacific and a nice beach. On arrival we were greeted by a wallaby hopping down the road, our first live sighting! Once we had settled in we took a walk along the beach in the hope of seeing more wallabies and some kangaroos but none were to be seen. According to the locals and the tourist books the are best seen at sunrise and sunset. We are hoping for a sunset sighting, otherwise we’ll have to dig out the alarm clock!

After the walk we needed to cool down, so a swim was in order. We headed back to the beach properly attired and hit the water, making sure to remain within the netted off area to keep the nasty beasties away.

As the sun started to set we headed out for a walk to the beach in search of wallabies and kangaroos. We were not disappointed! Almost immediately we spotted a wallaby crossing the road in front of us, followed by more sightings in the field and bushes. We are assuming by their size, about 1 metre, that what we saw were wallabies and not kangaroos.

All in all another “sweet” day.

OK, maybe not quite. We went out to the local restaurant for a meal, closed on Mondays. No problem, off to the General store, they do take-food or we could by something to cook, whoops they close at 7PM and it was 7:24 when we got there. Umm, maybe 2 breakfasts today? Back at the Airbnb we found a frozen meal in the freezer… we’ll try that!

The usual wake-up time and we provided out own breakfast today! It seems most motels provide a kettle, microwave, fridge and toaster which means we can do our own thing and remove the temptation of larger, greasier more “interesting” breakfasts.

Today was planned to be one of our busiest to date. We headed off to a local heritage village. It was a little more modern than expected, based on life around 1875-1915. Again, a picture is worth a thousand words.

A family home:

The school room had some math questions on the board that would challenge any modern kid, e.g. add 3 yds  2 ft 6 in and 1 yd 1 ft 11 in

Outside were a couple more classrooms, and a game chalked on the floor that I hadn’t seen before.

On to the engine shop where there was an assortment of engines to power generators, shearing equipment and a host of other mechanical beasties.

Being a workshop there were a few cartoons around, one caught my eye.

Next to the workshop was the fire hall

There were also some ponies wandering around.

For a Sunday morning the place was deserted, we saw less than 10 visitors. Hopefully that is not typical as it would be a shame to see the place close down. We got a good work out walking around in the 35C heat (it would climb to 40C/104F later in the day!).

Next stop for the day was the Capricorn Caves. We arrived a few minutes after the scheduled tour start time and thought we may have to wait around for the next tour in an hours time. Luckily the tour hadn’t started so off we went. Again, a small crowd of only 7 people.

These caves were different to any others that we had been to in that they were dry. With Queensland’s dry climate, the only time the caves get wet is after the December rains. Again, here come the pictures.

The trees on the surface have roots that go down hundreds of metres through the cave system to find water.

The Caves also have a chapel which is used for weddings, it is also used for an event called Opera in the Caves. While we were sitting here the guide turned off all the lights, there was absolutely no light leaking in …. very eerie.

The caves are  home to some animal life:

Unfortunately we missed yesterdays guest, a large python! Also the caves are home to many thousands of bats. In fact the floor of the caves are solidified bat “poo”! We saw a colony of bats covering 10 Sq. metres of the roof, the “poo” underneath them was NOT solid. Each square metre of the colony will house 1800 bats, they huddle together for warmth. Talking of warmth, the cave was a pleasant 22C! The python was in the cave to replenish his/her food supply, they love bats.

We exited the caves via a very swingy suspension bridge

Our next stop was Mount Archer, a climb of about 1500ft to an elevated walkway and view points. Again, there was just about nobody there. 

Unfortunately it was quite hazy, so the views over Rockhampton didn’t turn out too well

I mentioned yesterday that fires are quite common in wooded areas. Below are some pictures showing the results of these fires, and also the plants ability to recover.

By now we were feeling the effects of the heat, so we decided to head back to the hotel via the tropic of Capricorn. Yesterday I said this was our first time in the tropics, I was wrong. A quick look at an atlas shows most of Cuba and the Caribbean Islands lie in the tropics.

The last picture suffered from sun glare. Tomorrow is another longish haul up the coast to our first Airbnb and hopefully some kangaroos and wallabies on the beach.

It seems that regardless of the time we go to bed, we still get up at our usual time. This morning it was a DIY breakfast courtesy of the motel. The night before, you choose your breakfast items e.g. cereal, juice, bread, jam etc. and they deliver it to your room later that evening. In the morning prepare breakfast using the toaster, microwave etc. and off you go. After breakfast we took a short walk to find a geocache and get some exercise. Not only did we find the geocache, we saw a whale and a family of dingos.

The photos above were taken outside the cultural centre close to where the geo-cache was.  Alas that is probably the closest we will get to seeing any whales this trip.

Today’s journey was just positioning trip with nothing specific to view en-route. Initially we cut a corner and avoided the main highway (appropriately called the Bruce Highway) for a number of miles. This led us through an area of sugar cane farms and homesteads that were very different to the areas we had seen so far. We eventually joined the Bruce Highway and continued on it for the remainder of our 380km trip.

We stopped at Childers for coffee, and being a week end we were entitled to a fresh cream pastry to go with it! (if you have read the NZ blog, you may see the start of a pattern which very quickly turned into the legalising of cream cakes every day!). After coffee I headed off to find a local geo-cache while Lyn gave one of the local dollar stores a visit. I quickly found the cache and went back to join Lyn in the store. I noticed some leather belts on sale for around $3.50 Cdn, we had been looking for a cheap source of belts to strap a wicker picnic hamper on the rear luggage rack of the MGB, these would be perfect. Talking of old British cars:

We saw this old Austin on the street, reminds me little of an A35 at the front.

As we continued along the Bruce we would see clouds of smoke hanging over the country side, we were not sure if they were from controlled burns or wild fires. There were certainly signs of previous fires in the trees along the side of the road. In Canada we have Fire Risk signs along the road ranging from No Risk to Extreme Risk, here the have an additional category beyond Extreme, it is Catastrophic!

Next stop was Miriam Vale for lunch, then further north along the Bruce into mountain views.

We reached our destination for the next two nights, Rockhampton, at around 1530. Although it wasn’t an overly long journey relative to our winter trips where we’ll do up to 1000 kms in a day, I still felt a little whacked at the end. This could be due to old age, driving in the Southern Hemisphere, driving on the left side of the road or all three. In fact I can add a 4th excuse for the last 10 kms. As we came into Rockhampton we crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn and were officially in the Tropics! I think that is another first for us.

Tomorrow will be visits to some caves and a heritage village.

Woke up at our normal time, way later than our hosts! I thought my cold was going to turn into a full blown cough like I had in S. Africa a year ago, but after a couple of bouts of coughing around 1AM I managed to fall asleep. When I woke up the cough was a minor annoyance, so I am keeping fingers crossed it’s going away!

We headed out mid morning towards Noosa, where there was yet another surfing beach. The temperature was already above 30C, but we have finally managed to gain control of the A/C in the car. The first couple of days we couldn’t get it to cool down too well. Talking of the car, it felt different to other cars when we first picked it up. It was very smooth under acceleration, finally I realised that there were no gear shifts. The transmission is CVT or Continuously Variable Transmission, which has an infinite number of gear ratios but no gears!!

Anyway, back to Noosa.

There were many 4×4’s around fitted out with snorkels and other off roading gear. The one below is an older Toyota

After a stop for coffee where we found out first filtered coffee, complete with unlimited refills, we headed out for Rainbow Beach, where as the name suggests, there should be sands of different colours. I think the advertising agency applied a little too much poetic licence in their descriptions.

After a lunch stop, I am getting quite partial to the flaky pastry meat pies they have here, we headed off to Hervey bay to organise some whale watching.

The land round here is quite hilly and extremely forested, below is a picture “from the passenger seat”, while this shows a straight stretch of road, there have been plenty of hilly twisty sections that would have been great in the MGB.

It’s certainly relaxing driving over here, the road surfaces are really smooth as there is no frost. The drivers are laid back, if the posted limit is 100, most will cruise along around 90, I don’t think I have seen any speeding yet!

Once we arrived at Hervey bay, we went about booking a whale watching tour. Well it seems like the whales finished their migration yesterday, and the tours have stopped running for the season. The tour guides indicate migration runs into the first week of November, I guess the whales didn’t get the memo. Some day, some place we’ll finally get to see them.

We started off with another small breakfast, which seems to be a good idea as I risked going on the scales and found I had lost 2lb since leaving home!!

After packing our bags we headed out towards the coast and Bribie Island for a bit of sightseeing and exercise, we crossed over the bridge onto the island and headed fro Red Beach. I have no idea why it is called Red Beach as there was no hint red anywhere around. There was:

But nothing red.

We backtracked to the mainland and picked up the Steve Irwin Highway; off in the distance we caught a glimpse of the Glass House Mountains. These are volcanic plugs.

We continued on towards our destination, Maroochydore, with a brief stop for lunch. We arrived at Lyn’s cousins house early afternoon and were met by Alasdair and Lynn. After a couple of hours of reminiscing by Alasdair and Lyn (there’s too many Lyn(n)s here) we were taken out for a tour of the local area.

We went back to the house for some liquid refreshment, more reminiscing and an excellent home cooked meal.

Tomorrow we head further north, now it’s time to enjoy the thunder storm that is brewing in the distance.

Maybe a day late, but I gained hero status today, more later!

After a good nights sleep we had our first “small” breakfast of the trip, a single small croissant and jam with “Canadian” coffee, all courtesy of food left by our hosts and a French press coffee maker. 

I again tried to fix Lyn’s notebook, hoping that after a good nights rest it may have healed itself, no such luck! We looked up a couple of computer places that may have power supplies and headed out. The first store we tried couldn’t help us, but sent us to a store called Jaycar. We went there, and I thought I was in Heaven! The store had a fantastic selection of electrical components. We spoke to one of the assistants who found us a power supply, but unfortunately, despite having a selection of 10 ore so computer plugs, it would not fit Lyn’s machine. I asked if the guy could test our power supply, and after a bit of fiddling with wire strippers, staples and a voltmeter we proved that the power supply was producing the requisite amount of volts when plugged into the notepad. Bad news; now we knew we had a dead notebook. The service from the staff at this store was fantastic, just a shame we didn’t have a better result

We headed out in search of Koalas. After a stern talking to last night my GPS realised the error of its ways and directed us to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary on the south side of Brisbane. We bought our tickets at the discounted Seniors rate, none of the N. American $2 off stuff, we got a full 33% off saving $12 each.

Apart from being a Koala sanctuary, there were may other species of Australian wild life there. As usual the pictures will do most of the talking.

The Koalas reminded me very much of the Pandas we saw at Chegdu, cute, cuddly and lethargic! They sleep for about 20 hours a day and eat eucalyptus leaves, which like the Panda’s bamboo is very low in nutrients.

Some Birds!

Now for some Kangaroos, you were allowed inside their area and were also allowed to interact with them. They have amazingly soft fur.

Smallest first.

A familiar sight from S. Africa last year, the Jacaranda tree, which is native to Brazil.

Sharing space with the Kangaroos were a couple of Emus.

And another Australian special

By the time we had walked around the sanctuary we were pretty beat, the temperature was 35C / 95F and I had managed to develop a cold overnight as well! We headed of to the cafe to get some lunch a recover.

Next stop was Mt. Coot-Tah to go to a look-out point to see the city.

We had planned to go into the city area for a walk along the river, but gave up on the idea due to the heat and humidity, we need a couple more days to acclimatise!

On the way back to the apartment we stopped off for some essential shopping, wine and cough drops!

Back “home”, Lyn’s computer was still not playing well so it was off to you tube to see how to disassemble it. I found a video and set to work with 3 kitchen knives, very soon the back was off. There was no smell of burning so I don’t think any smoke escaped from the components. I started checking all the cables on the motherboard, lo and behold the one connecting the power switch was so loose it came away from its socket when I touched it! Worked out how to open up the socket, reinserted the cable and locked the socket pushed the power button and………. it was as good as new, Lyn was suitability impressed and I am now her hero, at least for a couple of hours!!

Tomorrow we are off to visit relatives so there may not be a blog entry.

Not sure what to say about today! For our 42nd wedding anniversary many things did not go too well!

We went off to get breakfast, then returned to the hotel to finish packing. We had booked a shuttle van to the airport and it picked us up right on time, that was the end of the good vibes for a while.

When we arrived at Sydney Airport I discovered that all that was left of my FitBit was the strap…. the electronics element had disappeared. A quick call to the hotel set the search process in motion but unfortunately nothing was found. I have since discovered how it happened. When putting the backpack on the strap rubs against my left wrist and rotates the FitBit bracelet allowing the element to pop out.

We checked in for the flight and hit the lounge for an hour or so, then headed off to the gate. At boarding time a whole slew of people came through the gate from the wrong direction; our plane had only just arrived. The ground crew must have been on their toes as I think they had the aircraft turned around in less than 20 minutes. On board we found that there were 3 children under the age of  3 in the business class cabin of 12 seats. Luckily they quietened down as time progressed.

Just as we thought QANTAS had done a great job of mitigating the delay there was an announcement that one of the passengers had decided not fly, this meant all the bags had to be taken off and the offending passengers bags retrieved. We finally got airborne about 1 hour late. For a flight of just over 1 hour a meal service was provided throughout the aircraft, none of this Buy on Board stuff that Air Canada offers on flights over 3 hours. Very impressive!

We arrived in a very warm (30C  / 85F) Brisbane. We picked up our rental car and started to set up the GPS we had brought with us. We plugged in the address and the GPS politely informed us it couldn’t find it. Double and treble checked the address but the GPS wouldn’t play. A quick check of the car revealed it too had a GPS, unfortunately it would only tell us our LAT/LON and how many satellites it was receiving. Finally tried the phone, no problem, we were on our way.

We found our  apartment and decided our luck had changed, it was excellent! The owners had left the fridge stocked with goodies for breakfast as well as coffee and milk. Not only that, they had left us a bottle of wine for our wedding anniversary!

Once we had settled in Lyn switched her notebook on, nothing! We thought the battery had run too low so plugged in the charger. Still no life. Tried many things but no effect, it seemed as though no power was getting to the notebook, but without a voltmeter it was hard to tell In desperation I tried the well tested tongue across the power wires trick, no power. Now to try and find a replacement power supply.

We have no real plans for Brisbane, the main reason we stopped here for a couple of nights was because I hooked up with a cousin from the UK who now lives here. When I contacted him he seemed pleased with the idea of meeting up, but despite a number of e-Mails I heard no more from him.

That’s enough first world  doom and gloom for today, it’s time for dinner.

As many of you know, we are not great city explorers and (most) museums don’t interest us, so today was to be a lazy wander around the suburbs day with an ulterior motive or two.

We decided to go further afield from the hotel for breakfast as their prices were a little steep; we settled for a Chinese run pavement patio place. The food was good and the prices far more reasonable. The one thing we miss over here is the bottomless coffee concept of home at breakfast time, ah the sacrifices we make when traveling!

Back to the hotel to collect our stuff and finalise the route, then off we went to Kings Cross station where we needed to top up the Opal cards before heading out. Lyn had found a crafts store she wanted to visit, and I had been put in contact with a company that specialises in parts for the MGB. A project before next summer is to rebuild the carburetors, this company had the required kits for less than half the price I’d have to pay to get them from the USA. Conveniently their location was about two train stops from where Lyn wanted to go.

It took about 40 minutes to get there, with a 15 minute walk through a residential area at the end. One thing I have noticed here is there seem to be many ethnic areas rather then the more integrated society we are used to in Ottawa. This are was very much an Arab area with the shops selling produce to match. So far, even in the ‘burbs, we haven’t seen any new housing areas, most of the houses appear to have been built in the 50’s or 60’s. There are some apartment buildings going up, but nowhere near as fast as we are used to back home. It’ll be interesting to see if their population is growing or declining.

Once I had my goodies we trekked back to the station and headed off to out next destination. The store Lyn wanted was in a large shopping centre so we got to check that out as well. Lunch was first on the agenda so it was off to the 5* (not) food court. Lyn then spent a while in the stores while I played on the phone. Given the cheapness of data over here for the cell phones it seemed a waste not to use it.

After shopping was finished we headed back on the train for our final journey, one disadvantage for tourists using the Opal card is that any unused money cannot be refunded. This morning we were in the position of having $7 on the card but needed $9 for the trips so we had to top up. Topping up left us with $8 on the card at the end of the day. Opal will not make $8 profit off each of us, we’ll leave the cards at reception for some deserving tourists!

Back at the hotel we lounged around for a while, and then headed out to try to find a local geocache. Again we had no luck, but we couldn’t do too much searching as there were a lot of people around.

The geocache was centred around one of Sydney’s many sculptures, this one was the El Alamein Fountain designed by Robert Woodward as a memorial to the Australian Imperial Forces 9th Division and commemorates the Battle of El Alamein, Egypt, in World War II.

Around the edge of the fountain were a number of Australian Ibis, two of them appeared to be acting aggressively towards each other, but after a while we discovered one was a (large) chick, still been fed by parents.

In the background of the picture above is another sculpture, Angled Wheels of Fortune.

Tomorrow we head off to Brisbane for a couple of days.

Today’s plan was to head west to the Blue Mountains. The weather wasn’t as warm as yesterday and it was overcast. The forecast looked promising and the clouds were due give-way to some sun.

We headed down to breakfast, it was just warm enough to eat “al fresco’ so we had a repeat of yesterdays breakfast, but given the size of the sausages we cut down from 2 to 1.

Next off we made our way to Kings Cross station in search of an Opal card. The transport system here appears to be cashless with all transactions being conducted by tap cards. Surprisingly the transport company does not sell Opal cards, luckily the newsagents in the station did! One good thing about the system is that on Sunday the maximum amount debited from the cards balance is $2.70 Aus or $2.50 Cdn (aprrox. 25c US!!!) Considering it was to be a 2 hour trip each way this was fantastic value for money. Other days of the week the maximum amount debited is $15 which means you can use all the city buses and trains that you want and not spend more than $15. Pretty good value. Anyway that was the good news part.

The train was comfortable, but the track was all welded so no comforting clankedy-clank sounds as we traveled. The suburbs seemed to go on forever, but we finally broke out into the countryside and the hills, unfortunately the further west we went, the lower the cloud got. By the time we god to our destination at Katoomba we were well into the cloud. This was bad news as the plan was to take a bus and aerial tram tour around the area for its views. Given the visibility (or lack thereof) we decided not to splurge out on tickets, rather we walked around the town.

We also tried for our first Geocache of the trip, but we couldn’t it! Good news 1 Bad news 2!

We found a “bombed” tree at one of the churches, if you don’t know what a bombed tree is then e-Mail Lyn.

We stopped for lunch and as we looked out of the window we became convinced that the weather was not going to clear, so we made the decision to head back to Sydney. A disappointing trip, but at least it only cost us $2.70 each. You can’t win them all!!