Bowen, Qld - 6 August 2011

Our Saturday trip to Bowen was one of our shorter ones. Pity the big mango did not mean we could have mangos for lunch.  We talked the Caravan Park people into letting us stay overnight in a drive-thru site that we could not have used if we intended to put out the awning. So we were set up in time for a late lunch. I went exploring with the new camera and Anne decided on a nap.  

Stone Island from Flagstaff Hill lookout

My favourite colour: sky, sea, mountains - it just has to be blue

Rocks at Horseshoe Bay Bowen

The beach end of the rocks at Horseshoe Bay.

More rocks - did we tell you Anne is a scenery freak?

She collects it!

The Port Dennison marina at Bowen

Well, I did the trip to Flagstaff Hill and shot some lovely scenery at about 150 degrees of seascapes. Then did the town tour, watched kite boarders who had runs for distances like 2 kms and back on very smooth water that looked quite shallow, took some interesting rock formations at Horseshoe Bay and came back to the Port Dennison Jetty – which is still celebrating its part in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Some other scenes from that film have not fully recovered and there is scaffolding round the Hotel.

I was drawn to check out what people were photographing in the water near the jetty. Found it was a herd of Dugongs so raced off to get Anne. We saw about 6 or 8 Dugongs and a Turtle and were able to get quite good photos (of Dugongs). Unfortunately for the land-based photographer Dugongs have very heavy bones to enable them to stay underwater where their tucker is so they only just make it to the surface to breath and then drop back down again. We were lucky that the water is so shallow here that we also saw lots more of their body shapes than one does in deeper water. The cyclones ripped the weed beds about badly along this coast so the Dugongs and Turtles are having a thin time foraging.

Sea Eagle over one of the beaches in Bowen

Dugong coming up for air

The old seamen's saw a mermaid's tail

And this view is surely a mermaid. 

Anne here: To me they had a pale biege/pinkish body with randomly spaced and sized circles like leopards spots.

Best view of a dugong from the surface

Turtle feeding with the dugongs at Bowen

Of course I then took Anne for a tour round the spots I had identified earlier. We found the ‘right’ Fish and Chips Shop got an early dinner and had an early night before our trip to Townsville the next morning.

Anne here again:  I could quite see why Baz Luhrmann's people chose Bowen, the architecture of most of the central part of the town is quite beautiful with large very broad streets - such a change from the narrow little streets of a lot of towns.   The recent murals are well located to show the town's history and industry.

Whitsundays 30 July - 6 August 2011

Arlie Beach and Shute Harbour are interesting places right on the oceanfront with little spare room for parking or housing before some abrupt high hills.  Anne here...The shorefront shopping strip is full of boutique style shops stocking products that would appeal to the tourist.   The high rise resort style appartments cling to the hills immediately behind the shopping strip and there is a feel that it could just be picked up and plonked in the middle of the Greek isles somewhere and it would fit.
Our caravan park is between the two villages and right next to the light plane and helicopter airport so the occasional plane takes off over the park and the helicopters do their thing a bit further away. They don’t fly at night and seem not to be going much before 7.30. However there is some really noisy vehicle that goes by on the road to Shute Harbour at about 5.00am that we got used to in a couple of days. Book-in times here are quite early as some vans are coming in at 10.00am and the book out can be quite flexible from 4.00am to mid-day.  The local water is heavy in Calcium and perhaps some oily deposit that reminded me of the gummy residue that was in the Blue Mountains water in the drought of the mid 60’s when dam levels were low enough for the old trees to be at the surface. We broke out the bottled water we carry for just this reason. I washed the car later in the week and let some light showers take care of the white residue that would otherwise have stayed on it as the water dried. Park bookings for more than 2 days were a bit tight.

We went into Arlie Beach on Sunday to book the Knuckle Reef trip. The village was busy with lots of young people booking tours etc and just chilling in the coffee bars and pubs. The stinger problem (May to September) means there are swimming enclosures or pools near the beaches up this way. Arlie is no exception except that its pool is large and inviting. After the look round at Arlie we went down to Shute Harbour for a look. There is very nice scenery all around this area, lots of blues and greens of ocean and land, islands and high headlands with islands fading into the distance. It really is very picturesque and the real estate clinging to the hills is varied from the spectacular to the renovator’s dream (with a few Developer’s Dreams for good measure). Anne had picked out her site within minutes.

The view I wanted from my future house in Shute Harbour

(double click images to enlarge them)

And here is the house I want... Ah well I suppose 70 squares is a bit much and all that window cleaning

This one would do at a pinch

Or this one with about 270 degree views of Shute Harbour

The trip out to the reef on Monday was a bit rough as the wind was picking up a scattered swell that even in a large and very comfortable boat had the galley closed early and lots of people enjoying the view from the back deck (bits of burley too I’m told). Knuckle Reef has a large pontoon anchored in the reef where we had free options of a glass bottom boat trip over the top of the bommies(you see most with this option), a trip in a semi submersible (you are sitting below the waterline looking out through glass panes at the corals) and a very low lower-deck viewing area where the fish come over to feed from a slow release feeder hung in the water outside the window plus room for sunbaking and taking the water-slide.  Paid activities include, gear supplied, snorkelling, scuba diving and joy flights in a helicopter (10 minutes over the reef or fly back to the big island). We, and most of the other guests, decided that the chop, even in the reef, put snorkelling way outside our level of skill and interest. I noticed that very few of the more practiced snorkelers stayed in the water more than 15 minutes and one of the team who would otherwise have been accompanying/guiding  snorkelers told me he was pleased to do other things.

The Flametree Caravan park is home to a number of the Bush Thick Knees (formerly called Stone Curlews) that make a rather disagreeable noise at night until you get used to them. The bird feeding, held each afternoon, calls up the Rainbow Lorikeets, the Blue-faced Honeyeater and the occasional Sulphur Crested Cockatoo but does not attract the Thick Knees, Black Butcher Bird, the numerous Wattlebirds or the pretty little Yellow-bellied Sunbird. A usual the many plovers are about their own business. Did I mention that we bought a new camera in Mackay? 

Puffed up Thick Kneed Stone Curlew tries to intimidate Jim

Another pix of the Thick Kneed Stone Curlew resting

Blue faced honey eater

Yellow-bellied sunbird

Close-up of the yellow-bellied sunbird

(Anne here... This caravan park looks like it was originally developed in the 70s and the owners spent not another penny until they sold it to current owners who are now stuck with cleaning the pipes and putting in a new septic system, in addition to replacing the very old on-site vans with modern cabins)

Tuesday started as a rest-day but when the washing was done we went for a shop at the big Woollies complex at the residential town of Arlie Beach called Cannonvale on road to Proserpine where the locals shop. I decided to get both my watches fixed. (Yes there has been some relaxation – one watch just ran out of energy and the other decided to retire by ripping through its band). Prouds, the only real jeweller in the area, has an assistant who had never put on a watch band – and still hasn’t. No one else in the shop could solve the problem of getting a band onto my watch either. The battery watch would have had to go ‘into Town’ and take 2 weeks. I decided to relax.....  Took a look at Eimeo Beach round the corner from Airlie and found its warning sign for stingers, submerged rocks and strong currents. 

We filled in most of Wednesday on a trip to Hydeaway Bay and Dingo Beach. The latter is a nice beach with a stinger enclosure and lots of Collared Kingfishers flying about. I also saw a Sea Eagle being escorted off a Kite’s patch. Both would have happily caused the other a grave injury. Dingo Beach gave way to a small area of beach scrub that is being conserved by a local group as that sort of scrub does not have the appeal of a rain forest and is quickly disappearing. We liked the Dingo Beach end of this long bay (Anne: houses reminiscent of 70’s beach houses, not pretentious) but were not so keen on the Hydeaway Bay end despite the houses being a bit more up-market. Perhaps the high stony hill immediately at the back of those houses and the evidence of recent landslips were influencing factors...

We found an Eastern Reef Egret grey morph at Dingo Beach

The usual suspect on Dingo Beach with Pelican Rocks in the background

It rained (pretty sure I have not said that before in the Blog). So I washed the car and we did some planning and made some bookings and appointments.  The future is starting to close in again...

As Friday was fine again we did some more washing and the pre-departure pack up for our big trip (80km) to Bowen on Saturday. In the afternoon went for a drive to Proserpine. It was a short Town Tour as there is a Sugar Mill with the attendant odour of Molasses which neither of us likes. On the way back we called in to Conway’s Beach and Cedar Creek Falls. We found Conway’s beach very quiet especially a low tide and the Caravan park crowded and a long way in on a very narrow road. 

Cedar Creek Falls was down to a trickle in the Dry Season but looked like a very nice spot. In the wet it would be quite spectacular(found evidence in nice postcard). From the foot of the falls it looks like there is a large plunge pool about half way up. We did not have time before dark to explore and the other people there looked much too laid back to have explored.                              

Mackay - 23rd -30th July

Our stay at Mackay had the auspicious start of a drive-thru site for the van because we got there earlier than the people behind us and were able to come in forwards over their site to ours (drive-thru site explained!).  At 4.30 we also came upon the daily bird feeding event where the park feeds the hundreds of whistling ducks, the many rainbow lorikeets and some Sacred and White Ibis plus a few drop-ins like the moor hens, plovers and the blue-faced honey eaters. Very noisy but generally well behaved until they are all fed then some birds get a bit aggressive with each other. In a walk around the park later I met one of the permanent residents who, at 84 and fairly housebound, was keen for a bit of a chat. Among other things he told me where to get a good fish and chips meal and gave me directions to a couple of scenic spots.

Feeding time, then feuding time

Whistling Ducks at the Andergrove Caravan Park - most spacious in Mackay

The next morning saw the annex up to the tune of a Murri radio broadcast that supplied another ‘must see’ destination. Apparently somebody had belted the Leichhardt Tree with something resembling an axe and damaged it. While lamenting the mindless stupidity of that act, the announcer pointed out that it was a historically important tree as it had served as the tie-up point for early port users and had also been where the ancestors of many Australians of Islander descent were chained up pending their auction to sugar farms. Strangely, I could not find any marker near the tree to tell its history. Interesting old tree though and a bit much for one camera shot...

The Leichardt Tree opposite the ABC studios about half a block from the CDB.

Somehow we seem to visit most spots at low tide so the ocean views at Mackay were often over a vast distance of sandy flats. There is a strong sea breeze here that has a large impact on the trees.

Both these trees show the prevailing wind - not your usual bottle tree shape



The Light House at the Marina village does serve the best fish and chips ever. The fish was fresh Mackerel, it was well cooked in nice sized portions and it was well priced. We sat inside the glassed in area, watched seagulls squabble outside and saw a couple of small boats come in to the boat ramp. One was collected by an old Land Rover Discovery that I would not have been game to park on the steepest (floating end) ramp I have ever seen. (Perhaps some of you are not aware or have forgotten that our old Landy once skipped the pawls on the Park gear and ran away backwards down a hill – and Jim came tumbling after...)

From there we cruised around the coastal area (Shoal Point, Bucasia, Eimeo, Dolphin Heads and Blacks Beach) and took photos from the lookouts.  At Lamberts Beach we were intrigued by the number of ships anchored off the point (about 20 of them - way too many for Mackay Harbour itself) and the long jetty we could see in the distance so decided to visit. The trip was way longer than we expected. We would probably have given up had Anne not called it up on the iPad, learned it was Hay Point and done the navigation there and back with the iPad.

Wow! The Hay Point coal loading facility is really something. I had the camera out and had taken a number of shots before I wondered where the long jetty thing was. There are two. The Hay Point Coal Terminal is 1.8 km long and the Dalrymple Bay Coat Terminal is 3.85 km long. This one is so big that I had taken it for an enormous crane-like structure. Second looks put the whole into perspective – what I had seen as a several hundred meters long crane was in fact the several kilometres long jetty!! Then whole site became the simply enormous place it is!!! And the big coal mine trucks start to emerge as those match-head sized things moving about in the distance. Anne here... The statistician must out... Coal from the Bowen Basin coal mines 300 km away is exported from here. Train sets of up to 2kms in length powered by up to five locos deliver up to 10,000 tones of coal each.  900 ships  visit per year, and bulk carriers of 230,000 tonnes can be accommodated at these wharves.  130 million tonnes are exported each year with expansion likely.  The Authority had a very good way of containing its visitors by erecting a lookout on a nearby low hill, the simple horizontal iron rail fence and large signs warning people not to venture out onto the grass as the snakes are very active in that area. The villages of Half Tide and Salonika Beach are looking a bit sad these days but the pub seemed to be doing a good trade.

Trucks dwarfed by the size of the operation

Miles of conveyor belt take the coal from the trains to hoppers, to stockpiles of coal by type and then out to the ships



The quiet drive out to Eungella National Park took us along the floor of a long wide valley through the few small townships of Marian (where Melba House museum is located – she apparently lived there while married to a sugar cane farmer), Mirani, Gargett, Pinnacle and Finch Hatton, past sugar fields and a couple of sugar mills which we decided have a strong and unpleasant odour, strongly reminiscent of ammonia. Then came a very steep and curvy road up to Eungella (pronounced Young-Galah) that had Anne working on the wheel and the gears and me wondering if my vertigo would stand the ride... Here we had lunch at Eungella itself and admired the view that on a clear day goes all the way back to Mackay some 100 kilometres.

Our lunchtime view back down the Pioneer Valley from Eungella

We had a couple of short walks in the National Park. I found the one along the creek less worrisome than the sky window walk around the edge of a cliff above the valley. It was too early for the platypus sightings that make the park popular but a toad did manage to amuse a number of visitors by posing in a spot that made photography worthwhile.



View from the Sky Window back along the road up to Eungella

A short stroll from the kiosk at Fern Flat to this piece of Broken River

The trip back took us to the start of the Finch-Hatton Gorge walk. It is another one of those unfortunate National Park “short walks” (15 kilometres along an unmade track that is ‘steep and slippery in places’ please advise a competent SES search party of you intentions and take adequate food, water, and first aid supplies). That said, the track in and out was very pretty, crossing several creeks and following a good track along a nicely forested narrow valley floor.



The first of many river crossings on the way the Hatton-Finch Gorge

We could not decide whether these were gum trees with paper bark or tree sized Melaleucas.

One of the several rocky little creek crossings

Sugar Cane dwarfs the car - the plume reminds me of Pampas grass - bet they are related.

Our last day in Mackay saw us purchase a new camera, a Nikon D500 digital SLR which was on special with 2 lenses (18-55 & 55-300), tripod and bag. We settled for a good memory card instead of the tripod and ordered some polarising filters to be picked up in Townsville. Anne had a haircut – mine was on the first day in town. We also did the cook-up, the washing and a pack up of Annex and outdoor furniture so we could be on the road early the next morning headed for Arlie Beach or thereabouts.

Anne here... Mackay has seen Manyana set in with a vengeance; lost a couple of half days here to indolence, reading and various lazy pursuits.  Have not done a bit of appliqué nor cross-stitch handwork the whole time and it looks like it will not get even started.  As one of my fellow quilter on the road said ‘Ah well, there is always tomorrow’.