The Long and Winding Road...

With great relief we trod once again upon Terra Firma, the high, rocking waves left far behind us and jumped into our camper to begin the long drive south. What you need after feeling sea sick for the best part of three days is little movement and a very still horizon, because you know you're going to start feeling boaty again, cause that's the way it works. What we did instead was to drive 20 k up an improbably windy, pants wettingly, steep mountain in order to reach the Atherton Tablelands area. The views as the sun was setting were great, although the landscape did seem to be tilting up and down somewhat. We secured a campsite for the night in a small town that could have come straight out of Deliverence and woke up the next morning to the Tablelands proper.
No idea why it's called the Tablelands, but its an area of undulating green hills, a plethora of waterfalls and some cracking wildlife. We managed to cram all the culture and beauty into one packed day of sight seeing which was helped by a circular route that took in several waterfalls and a couple of lakes. Lake Eacham was particularly pretty and we whiled away an hour or so checking out the little turtles swimming about and the massive Pelican that was practicing its taking off. These lakes and waterfalls seem to be impressively clean and clear and there were signs saying it was ok to swim and several people splashing about, enjoying a lazy Sunday, no doubt with a few stubbies (of VB Jason!). We wound our way along and came to the Milla Milla Waterfall, easily the most pituresce of the ones we saw. Its weird driving through what looks like English countryside (only better, bigger and sunnier) and coming across rainforest in the middle of it all, such a diverse place. Its a stunning area of Eastern Oz to drive through, where the drive to your destination is as good as the destinations themselves. Wildlife wise, it was good to see the turtles and there are a lot of beautiful birds flying about, all sorts of eagles, ospreys, herons, parrots, it's a bird lovers dream really. We had our beady eyes out for the tree kangeroo, but didn't spot any, a bit hard to see when you're driving.
The next day we carried on south and stopped off for a quick ly about on Mission beach. A totally gorgeous stretch of sand, far nicer than Cape Trib and other northern Queensland beaches that we'd been to, where Sam managed to buy some circa '89 Australian Geographic mags full of pics of places we'd been in Oz and in Borneo and also some proper hot (ish) chilies, seemingly hard to come by in Oz so far. The afternoon found us in Paluma National Park, another windy, steep drive, rewarded by great views of countryside and coast. One sentence doesn't really do any justice to it, but beer waits for no man as they say :)
Bypassing Townsville for no other reason than time constraints, we arrived in Ayr where we planned to book up a dive on the SS Yongala, supposedly one of the best dive sites on the planet. Unfortunately the weather for the next day was looking decidedly dodgy and not wanting to spend any more time feeling sea sick we called it off, I think Sam was slightly more pleased about this than me, when she discovered that there's a resident Bull shark at the wreck, one of the 'bad' sharks. I'd loved to have seen a Bull shark, but not at the expense of my stomach contents going over-board :) Ayr was a really wierd little town full of hicks and we were pleased to leave it later that day. We were less pleased about 1/2 hour later on to discover that I'd left my Memory card at an internet shop and had to return to the stupid place and camp there the night as the shop had shut for the night!
Continuing south, we arrived at Arlie Beach, a small town on the coast which is the gateway to the Whitsunday islands. Before we embarked on a cruise around the islands we spent an entertaining day in and around the town itself. First up was a visit to Vic Hislop's Shark expo. Vic is a complete git who spent many years killing sharks through some warped attempt at saving human lives. His laughable theories that some 'bad' types of sharks should be culled as not only were they a danger to man, but they also attacked 'family orientated animals' (I'm quoting here), such as whales, dolphins, turtles etc. There were 3-4 rooms full of Vic and his tacky pictures of dead sharks, he also had a 5 meter Great White shark frozen for you to gawp at, so we did. I deeply regretted paying the entrance fee afterwards, thankfully hunting Great Whites is now illegal as they're endangered.
Later that day we returned to our campsite, one we had chosen, because of its jumping pillow (which turned out to be a bit crap), we decided to have a game of Tennis. That's right me and Hamble played tennis and a classic Serve and Volley game it was too, if nothing else the astro-turf court exfoliated our feet and gave us some much needed pre beer exercise.
Due to our hectic schedule we had only time for an afternoon speedboat ride around the islands. They were discovered by our old friend Captain Cook, funnily enough on WhitSunday and jolly nice they are to. We made sure we got a tour to get us to Whitehaven beach, as recommended by Jason, basically the must see scenery of the islands. It's a 6k long beach whose sand is 95% silicon apparently, which means that it's stupidly fine and rather pleasingly squeaks when you walk on it. Our enchantingly dull tour guide informed us that it was actually mined and used in the construction of the Hubble telescope lens, the only interesting peice of information that day. We also enjoyed yet another day of waves and a subtle feeling of sickness, mmmmm, you'd think by now the sea would generally chill out about us sailing on it and just be calm for once.
We would love to have lounged about at the Whitsundays for a few days, but we had a plan to stick to and there was no stopping us as we pushed on further south. In fact covering about 800k over the next couple of days we zoomed down past Rockhampton and arrived at the Town of 1770. A very beautiful and peaceful little village getting it's name from a certain Captain Cook who landed there in a certain year. We had a delightful stroll around and a spot of lunch before once again taking the high road and heading for Fraser island, but that's another story...




Listening to: Ash - Free All Angels







Just Read: Richard Laymon - After Midnight Classic Trashy Horror, brilliant stuff!