This is the life!: Heading further North

Tuesday 10th September

Since leaving Agnes Water on Friday 30^th August, we have travelled quite a few hundred kms. The country side has been very flat, dry and brown, green in some places and a lot of sugar cane growing. The mountains in the distance made a lovely backdrop. We drove an easy 130kms and stayed at Boyne River Rest Area at Benaraby for two nights. Benaraby only has a petrol station. The toilets weren’t the cleanest, with some dreadfully obscene graffiti on the walls. People also seem to think a bin is only for decoration and throw their female items on the floor…Not nice at all. I often wonder if this is how they behave at home!?! However, they are Rest Areas and not all of them are fabulous, so we just take the good with the bad and don’t take them for granted. It’s quite amazing how some towns welcome travellers with open arms, providing fabulous free Rest Areas with amenities such as sparkling clean toilets, cold showers, free hot showers or a gold coin donation, clean electric BBQ’s, sheltered picnic tables, playgrounds, dump points for your loo, overnight security lighting and even water you can hook your van up to. Some have all of these, some have a few and some have nothing at all.

Other towns don’t welcome any travellers at all, unless they stay at their caravan parks. Not everyone wants to or can afford a caravan park; most are $30 - $50 per night (this goes up in peak season) and not all include power and or water. It’s not that travellers are against them, but lots of people we have spoken to and ourselves included, don’t need or want the facilities they provide, such as playgrounds, jumping castles, pools, games rooms etc and certainly don’t like being squashed in like sardines. Being self-sufficient means you can spend money on fuel instead of accommodation.

So it really is such a shame when towns don’t want you anywhere but caravan parks, because so many people who are touring this brilliant country spend a great deal of money in the towns; petrol, groceries, chemist, souvenirs, pubs, takeaways etc, so with that kind of mentality, they really are doing the town a disservice. Money spent equals jobs for the community etc. And it doesn’t take much to add up to a considerable amount, especially when there are quite a few vans. Most places we have stopped at end up with at least 20 plus caravans and backpackers, and the time limit can be anywhere from 20hrs to 72 hrs. If we only used caravan parks, our trip would be over in 6 months! There will be times we will have to use one, but it certainly won’t be something we are happy to do. There is a lot of discussion about this on the forums and camping magazines too, and it is a hot topic amongst us travellers and a fabulous way to learn where to stay and where not to stay.

Boyne River Rest Area

This metal horse is outside the property opposite the Rest Area

Crocodile warning!

On the Saturday we locked up the van, and the people camped next to us said they would do ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ and we drove the 20kms into Tannum Sands. There is a loop from the Rest Area taking you to Tannum Sands, into Gladstone and back again. We were expecting it to be a sleepy backwater town, but were pleasantly surprised. It is a large town right on the beach and has a lot of residents, housing estates and shops. The beach is nice, lots of sheltered picnic areas with electric BBQ’S, murals, showers, and even the speed humps were in the shape of huge turtles! Out on the horizon, many freight ships were all lined up to come into the port. Quite a sight to see so many of them sitting way out there as if they are on a road.

Tannum Sands with freight ships lined up on the horizon. A bit hard to see in the photo.

We enjoyed our two day stopover and then drove on to Calliope River 23kms away, near Gladstone. This is a huge free camping area right on the Calliope River. Unfortunately the south side is closed due to the floods making a mess and causing a lot of damage. The North side is grassy and the area is looked after, along with clean toilets, but the water is not for drinking. The river isn’t accessible from the north side, but you can walk over the very old bridge that used to be a part of the Bruce Highway. It is quite damaged though, and you can’t drive over it. The river itself was nice to look at, but not for swimming; it wasn’t really flowing and there was quite a bit of algae. There are birds everywhere here in the bush called Curlews and they make the most dreadful and eerie high pitched noise at night. They sound just like the dinosaurs from the movie Jurassic Park, and when you hear them you just want to run and hide. A lot of people are really freaked out by their noise. We joke now when we hear them, saying, “The dinosaurs are coming”! We hear them everywhere we go now.

Camped at Calliope River

We had a nice relaxing 3 nights at Calliope River. I had my hair cut by a fellow traveller who is a hairdresser. Her husband is a mechanic, and they make money while travelling. Only cost me $20 and I was happy with it. Mark cooked us a delicious roast lamb in the Weber, which gave us enough meat for another 2 meals. We left on Wednesday morning and continued north. We’d been told about a Rest Area at Clairview and also Carmila Beach. We pulled up at Clairview and it wasn’t very nice at all. It is a long narrow strip about 2kms long, but the council have done back burning along there. The beach also looked horrible, as the tide was out, exposing all the mudflats and rocks, along with a not so nice smell. While at Clairview, we got talking to two young blokes sitting at the picnic table. They were from Batemans Bay and doing a bit of travelling. Well, it turns out that they knew a couple we had met, Wayne & Sharon, while camping at Moruya on the NSW coast, who also live at Batemans Bay! We’d had a really fabulous week with them, but somehow I had lost their phone number, and we were disappointed as we would have liked to catch up with them. One of the blokes actually works for Wayne! Talk about a small world! Who would have thought, all the way out in the middle of nowhere, we meet these two guys who just happen to know the same people we had made friends with 3 years ago! We rang Wayne that afternoon and he was delighted to hear from us, he said they had only been talking about us a couple of months ago. Sharon rang later and we had a chat and a laugh about our great week at Moruya. We promised to keep in touch and catch up. What are the odds? We still can’t believe it!

We’d had some strong winds during the past few days and luckily they were tail winds, making the going much easier. I decided to have a go at towing the caravan and was quite surprised at how easy it was. Double axles certainly make it much easier! With the wind still up, we didn’t quite relish the idea of camping at Carmila Beach, plus the photos on Wiki Camps showed the sand there was quite thick. We were told about Wiki Camps by Dane and Elody, it is a great app that costs $2.99 and we use it on our iPad. While we still use our Camps 6 book, the Wiki Camps gives us up to date information from comments and photos left by others, and we have also been adding to it ourselves.

We decided to stay at Flaggy Rock, not far away. The name of this place makes me think of the television show with the Muppet characters, Fraggle Rock, from the late 80’s! This is a Community Centre that charges $5 per site per night, with clean toilets, but no showers, as they were being built. There was very clean bore water to hook up to but we didn’t bother as we only planned to stay a night. We were very pleased with the place, the caretaker is very friendly, the camping area is huge and you choose where you want to park your rig. The best part was all the soft, luscious green grass!! Quite a delight to walk on after camping on all sorts of different ground…sand, course sand, fine gravel, dried up grass that is more like straw, weeds, black sand that makes your feet disgusting, dirt , dirty dirt (yes, there IS a difference between dirt and dirty dirt, it’s the type that is just yuk!) Those who know me will know what I mean…that’s you Lorraine & Kaitlyn!! And then there’s what I call ‘talcum powder dirt’, because when you walk on it, it puffs up like talcum powder!!! No doubt we will come across lots of different types of ground, but it’s not like you get a choice. Millie thought all this grass was absolute heaven and rolled around in doggy bliss! After driving 330kms that day, it was a nice welcome!

Flaggy Rock

After our peaceful night at Flaggy Rock, we drove onwards for 370kms and stayed at Home Hill. We are quite amazed to think that 5 years ago this month, we flew up to Airlie Beach with our friends Wayne & Natalie to celebrate our 20^th wedding anniversary, and their honeymoon. We all had the most brilliant time staying at Airlie and Long Island and going on the Camira Catamaran to Whitehaven Beach. Now, we have actually driven all this way!

We didn’t turn off to the right for Airlie, as we wanted to keep going. We did stop in Bowen on the way, hoping we could find a Rest Area or low cost place for a few days, as I really wanted to have a look around. The guy at the Information Centre was not at all friendly and made it clear that Bowen had nowhere to stay except the town’s Caravan Parks. So, we left it for another time. Our aim is to get up to Cooktown, and then as it will be getting hot further up, we will come back down through the Atherton Tablelands.

Big Mango at the Bowen Information Centre

The country side is still quite flat, and there are a great deal of sugar cane fields up this way, miles and miles of it. When it is being harvested as you drive past, it leaves a really dirty dust blowing everywhere and you need to wind the windows up. I remember as a child living in Qld seeing the cane being burned before harvesting, which is a spectacular sight, but I shudder when I think of all the huge snakes and horrible creatures that make their home amongst the cane. When it is burned you can just imagine what comes out of there! It can be quite scary! Ugh! There is no way I would live near one of these! We’ve seen a lot of sugar cane refineries out this way also, puffing out their steam in huge billowing clouds that you can see for miles.

Sugar Cane fields

Home Hill is a small town that provides a free Comfort Stop with a huge camp kitchen, water and very clean toilets and hot showers. It is right next to a train station where massive, extremely long coal trains pull up. When we drive along the road and see one driving in the distance, their length makes it virtually difficult to see where they begin and end!

Home Hill Comfort Station for the night

The Great Dividing Range in the distance

Smile!

After one night at Home Hill we headed on towards a group of camping areas just past Townsville. The mountains out here are part of the Great Dividing Range and are so impressive with their size. The first camp, Saunders Beach, was very small and there was nowhere for us to put our van. So we made lunch and a cuppa then drove 20kms to the next one, Toomulla Beach. This was a large area with clean toilets and water. The beach was not very nice as Cyclone Yasi last year made a big mess along the coast up this way. There are also more and more warning signs for crocodiles! That just freaks me out and I am very vigilant when Millie goes near the water! We’ve been told that the signs are there to warn people, even though there may not have been any crocs for a long time. We met a lovely couple camped here and along with a few more couples it made a nice group. We went for a drive on Saturday to check out the next couple of camps. All three were completely full and one couple were trying to park their van, so we told them to follow us as our camp still had plenty of room. That afternoon 5 of us couples were sitting around drinking (except me, I was the only sober one!) and chatting, lots of laughs and stories of life on the road. One of the couples we had met at Home Hill were also camped with us. I left at 5.30pm to cook dinner and Mark made his way back at 7pm, had a shower, ate his dinner and then went to sleep! So, a quiet night for me with a book.

The Great Dividing Range before Townsville

Saunders Beach but nowhere for us to camp, so lunch and a cuppa instead!

Picnic area at Saunders Beach

Camped at Toomulla Beach

On Sunday we drove 45kms back in to Townsville to check it out. Wow! Townsville is enormous! It took us a while to find where we were going, as most of the roads seem to bypass all around the outside of the place. We eventually found our way to Castle Hill which is a Lookout. A sign said ‘Goat Track’, which is for walkers to make their way up the huge mountain or you could drive the steep 2.9km up to the top. As we were driving up, there were a lot of people making their way up or down, including Mums with pushers! The Lookout has several vantage points to give you a 360*view of Townsville and it was incredible to see just how BIG Townsville actually is!

Looking out over Townsville

Magnetic Island

The views are incredible, you can see for miles!

We saw this guy below one of the lookout decks and yes, he was a big boy!

This deck looks out over the Port of Townsville

It's just so amazing from up here!

We had a lovely time at Toomulla and after three nights there, on Monday morning we packed up and made our way just 15kms up the road to Bushy Parker Park. It’s a large area to camp in and as with the four camps along this road, it has a 48hr time limit. The Rangers come to all the parks along this area and he arrived not long after we had set up and took all the cars and vans rego numbers. He will be back again on Thursday, so when you think about it, if he only comes Mondays and Thursdays, you can stay here a while. They mostly don’t usually mind if you stay an extra night, as long as you are not a trouble maker. We will leave on Thursday morning.