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!