On Saturday 15th March, we headed back from our week's sojourn in the Blue Mountains. On the last day there, Sue had been bitten/stung on her foot by an unidentified insect and we had a few worried hours where we contemplated calling an ambulance, as her leg swelled up. We spoke to the reception of the camp site and they gave a typical Aussie response: a shrug of the shoulders and 'She'll be right - you'd be dead by now if it was anything serious'. Fortunately it went down without any more medical intervention than some anti-histamine, but it was still painful as she hobbled up to Blackeath station for the train back to Sydney. We still don't know what it was that bit/stung her, but there was only a single puncture mark on her foot (which is still visible now), so we suspect that it wasn't a spider.
From Sydney, we jumped on a flight to the Sunshine Coast with Jet Star. Alongside the Hello World travel agency, they are one of two Aussie corporations that we will most definitely not miss. Anyone considering using either of them, should watch out for some of the most misleading advertising / terms and conditions that you will ever find!
But onto more positive things. From the Sunshine Coast, we had decided to book a car for 11 days to allow us more freedom for the journey up the coast to Cairns. Our first stop driving north, was Noosa a pleasant town, with some beautiful stretches of beach and an area of national park, with some great cliff top walks.
I took a swim on Sunshine Beach, which was less a swim than a battle to stand against the huge waves that pounded in off the Pacific. Life guards watched like hawks from the shore and I took the hint that going in past waist deep was probably not sensible. This would be the last beach swim that I would take in Australia, because further north there are dangerous box jelly fish at this time of year that can deliver fatal stings (how many poisonous/life threatening creatures are there exactly in Australia? We've lost count!)
Deciding that surfing here was probably best as a spectator sport, we took a long walk along the beach and up a steep path that led to the Noosa Heads. From here, we got magnificent views for miles down the coast and watched as the sun set over the ocean.
As we headed out of Noosa, the road felt more and more remote and tropical. There was very little traffic and the road stretched on for miles in the distance through forest and bush. I put the car on cruise control, as the local police are apparently zealous and ingenious in equal measure when it comes to speeding and I was anxious to avoid any unnecessary contributions to the Australian Treasury. At around midday, we passed the town of Gympie. We briefly considered stopping for lunch, but decided it was not somewhere we would want to get tied up for long.
Instead, we continued on to Maryborough, which looked like a tiny spot on the map, but turned out to be quite a large historical market town. It's wide streets were lined with impressively regal Victorian era buildings that shimmered and sweltered in the heat. As we turned a corner though, we stumbled on its main claim to fame: a big statue of Mary Poppins - the author was apparently born and raised here!
After a very poor lunch in a Maryborough pub (even Mary Poppins would have found it tough making this medicine go down), we headed on past the line of the Tropic of Capricorn to our stop for the evening of Agnes Water and the Town of 1770. The area is famous for 2 connected facts: firstly this is the southernmost part of the Great Barrier Reef and secondly was the first landing point in Queensland for Captain Cook (presumably because any further north, his ship would have grounded on the reef) in the year 1770.
We holed up here for a couple of nights and on the following day, I went off for a day's snorkelling to the nearest of the reefs at Lady Musgrave Island - a 90 minute boat trip away. Sadly, Sue didn't feel able to manage a whole day out at sea, so I did it on my own, but at least we had booked ourselves into a decent hotel for the 2 nights.
My boat trip wasn't quite as personal as I would have liked, with about 50 people on board a huge boat that roared out to sea in the direction of the reef, but it was an enjoyable day nonetheless. Lady Musgrave Island is a tiny coral cay, probably no more than an acre in size. It is covered by piscina trees that form an interesting, apparently symbiotic, relationship with a variety of roosting sea birds: the trees provide shelter and shade for the birds, whilst the birds provide fertiliser for the trees. I say apparently, because in years of drought, the tree's leaves dry out and become sticky: inevitably then attaching to the birds feathers and preventing them first from flying and finally paralysing them altogether. Last year was very dry and we saw the corpses of numerous birds, unwittingly now providing food for their shelterers. I think it was Milton Friedman who said 'there's no such thing as a free lunch', but I thought he was an economist rather than a botanist!
Although tiny in size, the island is surrounded by a coral wall that is almost exposed at low tide thereby forming a beautiful lagoon to surround the island. As we approached, we could see waves breaking a few hundred metres from the shore and the sea colour changing from dark to azure blue. We spent an hour exploring the island and then had a good couple of hours snorkelling a large area of reef. The marine life wasn't quite as abundant as I was hoping, but I was lucky to swim right over a family of turtles and quite a range of different types of fish with a kaleidoscope of colours, including angel, clown, parrot and butterfly. I swam for hundreds of metres around a wall of coral and at points it was shallow enough to have reached out and touched. There was significant signs of bleaching at points, but at the same time large clusters of healthy, beautifully coloured coral.
Lady Musgrave Island - a coral cay
A barramundi fish, swimming close to the boat
On Wednesday 18th March we continued the journey northwards for a long drive day - about 10 hours of driving all-told. We had decided to break up the coastal scenery, by heading inland just before getting to the industrial city of Mackay for a couple of days in the Eungella National Park. This seemd like a good idea, because we seemed to spend much of the day passing through continuous sugar cane plantation, which paused only briefly in Bundaberg, because this is where they turn the sugar cane into rum!In the late afternoon, we turned off the main road and, for a while, we seemed to be engulfed on all sides by sugar cane, occasionally crossing small railway lines built to get the crop to market from these remote locations. But the road started to climb gradually so that we could get some perspective and the rolling hills softened the landscape. In the distance we could now see the looming range of the Eungella National Park, one of the largest areas of tropical rainforest in Australia. But also in the distance now, were some pretty menacing storm clouds and we were in a race to get to our destination before nightfall and/or the storm hit.
As dusk started to approach we reached the end of the coastal plain and we started to climb steeply, switchbacking up the mountainside through thick forest. As we ascended, the cloud seemed to descend to meet us, gradually taking away the views back over the sugar cane fields stretching for miles towards the ocean. At times we looked nervously up and down at sheer rock faces, worrying that this looked like prime terrain for rock falls. Fortunately the storm held off until after we arrived at our hotel, though it was pitch black by this time, with not a street light to be seen.
Over the next 36 hours, though, we found out why they call rainforest rainforest - because it rains a lot! Indeed for the duration of our stay here it didn't stop raining, often torrentially and accompanied by howling winds, bending the trees backwards at impossible angles. Our hotel for the next 2 nights was an historic old building and hadn't long reopened after a typhoon had ripped the roof clean off in late 2012. We were upgraded to a supposedly luxurious cabin, but this turned out to be dingy and damp and we couldn't do much but sit and watch the rain drive down, the thick cloud blocking any views, whilst hoping that the new roof would stay attached!
One of the big draws for this area is the presence of duck billed platypus in the rivers. We decided that a potential sighting was worth a soaking and in a brief respite, we made a break for a promising spot by the river, with a viewing platform covered by a canopy of trees. Within 10 minutes of arriving, we got our reward, spotting not just a platypus, but also a family of turtles and an azure kingfisher that darted to and fro across the river, very nearly stealing the show. But the platypus had it, keeping us entranced for ages, disappearing under the water for minutes at a time, then just when we had given up on him breaking to the surface again as if to check whether we were still there. What had been a miserable day, suddenly became memorable.
A turtle and azure kingfisher in the same riverside location at Eungella
After Eungella, we had one more long drive day. We had decided to blast as far as we could (more than 400 miles) to get to Mission Beach and within striking distance from there to Cairns. This would allow us to spend 3 nights and 2 full days in one place: a wonderful looking lodge run by an English couple, with 4 rooms surrounded by beautiful tropical gardens where a family of rare cassowary birds were regular visitors.But first we had to get there and our drive was punctuated by torrential downpours - some so heavy that we had to stop the car because the wipers couldn't clear the windscreen quickly enough. The further north we went, the heavier the rain seemed to get. This surprised us, because we had heard a few weeks before about serious drought in much of Queensland: this was well and truly over now it seemed.
As we got closer to our destination, the situation started to get more serious. At the town of Tully, shortly before our turn off from the main highway, the road was starting to flood and we found our exit blocked as the road disappeared underwater. As far as we knew, there were only 2 roads in to Mission Beach, so we continued the 20 kms north for the alternative. We were now starting to worry, as the daylight faded and the rain continued to pour down. At the second road, we fared well for a few minutes, until we saw splashing ahead. We slowed and watched as a huge 4wd came slowly through a deep puddle towards us. He wound his window down as we got level, looked us up and down and in typical sarcastic Aussie drawl said 'I wouldn't try and get through there in THAT if I were you' and drove off. THAT, of course, being our poor little hire car!
We turned round and back at the main road called our hosts for the evening. They gave us some directions for an alternative route not even marked on our map. It took us on single track road though with sugar-cane fields on either side, but at least on slightly higher ground. I drove with great trepidation in the near darkness with floodwaters starting to lap at the edge of the road at points. Sue was in a state of some distress when we eventually arrived, but we had arrived safely and now could kick back and relax for a couple of days - there could be far worse places to get stuck then this if it carried on raining!
We decided not to be too ambitious with our couple of days here, so barely left our accommodation: just enjoying the setting, the full-on breakfasts, swimming in the 'jungle pool', reading and writing and talking to our fellow guests (an English women who was there all the time we were, had had the distinction of operating the hawk-eye system at Wimbledon during the London Olympics and caused the wrath of Andy Murray when she couldn't work out how to turn the screen off during rallies!). We also kept an eye out for the occasional visit of a cassowary, but sadly this never coincided with our camera being nearby - if you google them, you will see how striking they are and also why we treated them with a lot of respect!
Our oasis at Mission Beach for 3 days...
After 3 nights here, the rain had stopped for long enough to let the floodwaters subside and we made a break for Cairns. The Holiday Inn was running a 3 day special and as this coincided with my birthday, we decided to go more up-market than our norm. Cairns has a mixed reputation, with some finding it rather bland and only useful as a base for diving on the Barrier Reef. We quite enjoyed it though, despite arriving in the heaviest rainfall here in more than 2 years. Although there is no beach here, the sea-front is quite lively with people walking up and down at sunset and they have built an artificial beach and lagoon at one end. As we walked past the lagoon on our first evening, a mass aqua-aerobics session was underway, with hundreds of scantily clad tourists jumping up and down in the water to the strains of YMCA by Village People - priceless!
On our final day in the area, we drove a big loop of the Atherton Tablelands, a forested plateau full of dramatic waterfalls and remote villages in the Cairns hinterland. In the evening, in honour of entering my fiftieth year, we treated ourselves to dinner in a sea-food restaurant. It was probably one of the first decent meals that we have had in our 4 months in Australia, that wasn't either Thai, or cooked by one of our friends/family!
One of many dramatic waterfalls on the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns
The famous 'hippie market' in the Atherton Tableland town of Kuranda...
Roll over Beethoven - a young boy tinkles the ivories for the shoppers at Kuranda market
Which leads us back to Darwin, our entry and exit point from Australia, with the best part of 4 months in between. Darwin is not one of our favourite places, so we just stopped for one night ahead of our flight out to Bali on the morning of 28th March.
Although we had both been to Australia before, it is easy to forget what a vast country Australia is and how harsh and unforgiving most of it is. The aboriginals adapted to this environment over tens of thousands of years, but the white settlers needed to hard to survive here and even today it must be difficult to thrive away from the main cities.On this trip, with a decent amount of time, we've managed to see a lot of the eastern half and get under the skin of the country much more than we have managed on previous trips: we've travelled on the ground through the dramatic 'Red Centre'; seen breathtaking scenery, from the sea and cliffs of the Great Ocean Road to the forests of Tasmania and the mountains of the Great Dividing Range; been enchanted (and occasionally frightened) by the unique wildlife here, which we have been hugely fortunate to see in the wild and in their natural settings (kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, possums, bandicoots, echidnas, koalas, kookaburras, parrots, platypus to name a few) and spent some time in Australian cities including Sydney and Melbourne.
Just as importantly, we got to spend some quality time with some of our friends that live here and Sue's family in Melbourne and Canberra. It's a long way here and back (particularly when you do it by road!), so we had to make every moment count.
It was 16 years since our last trip to Australia and it has undoubtedly enriched itself in that time in many ways, including economically, socially and culturally. Although thee remains a special relationship between Australia and the UK (particularly when it comes to beating England at cricket, which I was unfortunate enough to have to witness), the umbilical cord with 'mother England' has been well and truly cut and, if anything Australia takes it's lead now more from the US and Asia.
Economically, success has been fuelled by a global commodities boom, plentiful land, a growing population, free capital and a strengthening relationship with the tiger economies of Asia (nearly a third of Aussie exports go to China, who has voraciously sucked up their resources, as fast as they can be dug out of the ground).
Can this continue? On the one hand, it's singular reliances seem fragile, on the other, why shouldn't it continue, predicated as it is on growing global populations and as the east plays catch-up with the west in their standards of living and quality of infrastructure.
The big elephant in the room though, is whether the earth can sustain these burgeoning populations and lifestyles and this, we think, is where Australia is most vulnerable. It is already seeing the impacts of climate change, with record high temperatures (we experienced 44 degrees in Melbourne and in the centre and it's not fun), forest fires that increasingly encroach on towns and cities, drought, flooding, typhoons and degradation of natural environments. This, it seems, will only intensify and represent an increasingly severe challenge to Australian society.
Anyway, sadly our Australian adventure is now over. It has been a hugely exciting, if sometimes challenging time and we will take many memories with us. As you read this, we are now ensconced on the Indonesian Island of Bali, the 16th country of our journey. In our next post, we will tell you about the start of our journey back into Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment