Where the bluddy hell have we been for a year?

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Okay, I've started writing our travel blog again.......and should offer a quick explanation of where we've been for the last year, what with it being more than 1 year since the publication of our last blog!! We'd gotten as far as Darwin when I last wrote. Between June 2nd and June 20th 2006 we travelled from Darwin into the middle of the country and over to Cairns on the east coast. This took no time at all but we crammed a lot in, far too much to put in this 'catch-up' session. I have written most of those 3 weeks up already and will publish them soon, but to bring you up to speed I thought this was the best way! Bear with me......it WILL make sense I promise......

Following a nice trip up the coast with John & Steph we returned to Cairns with money-making in mind. One evening at the campsite we bumped into Paul & Elaine, a couple from Somerset who have emigrated over here & are working their way up and down the country for a few years. When we mentioned that we were looking for work Elaine very kindly mentioned that there were jobs going at Paul's place! He was working for the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency and was enjoying killing South American Ants for a living. A brief description of the job sounded right up our street - walking through the rainforest laying lures, collecting samples of ants & then going back and poisoning them! Claire and I phoned up the following day, had an interview the day after and started two days later.

Organised chaos is a polite way to describe the job which had 40 'field officers' being sent to a whole variety of sites around the Cairns area, 2 to a team in brand new hire cars (ours was a red V6 Commodore.......V E R Y N I C E.....). Once on site we laid a series of lures, otherwise known as lolly pop sticks with peanut butter on them. We then waited around for about an hour before picking the lures up, marking the site on a map, taking a GPS coordinate and filling in some paperwork that had to be perfect or the girl in the office would whinge. And so......life was good. We had a 6 week contract and would then be on the road again......or so we thought. We hadn't really had a firm plan of action for this trip. It has been made up as we have been driving from place to place. The only plan of 'work 6 weeks, get paid, carry on travelling' soon went down the proverbial crapper! On the very last day of the 6 weeks, just before we were going to hand in our notices, Claire and I were in a particularly steep part of the rainforest collecting & re-setting pit-fall traps that we had laid the previous week. Following a nice lunch beneath the cool shade of the forest canopy we began traversing the hillside again, me leading with Claire following behind. "Watch out for the loose rocks" I said, Claire dutifully stepped over the rocks and then slipped on the loose forest floor. She only slipped about a metre but the sickening "CRACK" sound was enough to tell the both of us that she had broken her leg. The searing pain was also another indicator to Claire of the double spiral fracture to her tibia and fibula, but what confirmed it to me was the odd angle that her lower leg was bent at as I packed rocks underneath it for support. Luckily we had mobile phone reception but the description to the emergency services would have been something like "go along the creek for about 500 metres, turn left up a gully and continue through the undergrowth until you hit the edge of a steeper hill, turn right and we are about another 300 metres around the hill from there."

Luckily, I found it much easier just telling them to find a silver toyota and wait for someone in a luminous shirt to turn up & show them where we were. 3 guys from work and 4 paramedics reached us within half an hour and a helicopter evacuation was quickly called due to the rather thick terrain that we found ourselves in. Claire was fighting through the pain and then as suddenly as the pain had come, the pain disappeared - due to the morphine 'cigar' that the paramedics got her to puff on! I now know what it would be like for Claire to drink 2 bottles of wine in 5 seconds! She was instantly incoherant with a huge smile on her face, mumbling something that I can only imagine was "This is bloody good stuff, where can I get some more!". Half an hour later the medics had stabilised the fractures & the helicopter arrived, smashing a huge hole in the forest with the downdraught. 2 guys were winched down and it took 4 of us to carry the heavy stretcher from the clearing in the forest back up to where Claire was lying in drugged up bliss. It then took a further 6 of us to carry the stretcher, with Claire aboard, back down the hill into the clearing. She insisted that I filmed the rescue as she was winched up through the trees into the helicopter, along with a guy who looked straight out of TopGun. Due to the helicopter being full (a likely story), I drove around to the emergency room and after a few discussions with the doctors and phonecalls with the office, Claire was transferred to a room at the private hospital to wait for her reconstructive surgery the following day. The x-rays say it all but she now has a titanium 'nail' through her tibia, held in place with 4 screws. One week after the operation the dressings were removed to reveal a severely bruised leg with 5 tiny incision scars. Amazing work if you ask me!

I continued to work at the 'Electric Ant Control Centre' whilst Claire recuperated in a hotel room watching 'The Young and The Restless'. After 3 weeks she was quite mobile on her crutches and so went back to work in the office at the Electric Ant Control Centre. By this time we had moved out of our cosy little tent and into a small beachside apartment North of Cairns at Clifton Beach. Claire's leg began to steadily improve, with regular physio and daily sessions in our 20m lap pool (handy!) to get the muscles working again. The pool became a bit of a haven for cooling us down as Cairns moved into the hot & sticky 'Wet Season'. Following a series of interviews the staff of 40 was whittled down to just 6 field staff and a handful of scientists. The small team was much more organised and it was actually quite good fun to go tramping through the rainforest, machete in hand knowing that you were actually doing something worthwhile. The ants had been ruining the ecosystem in the Smithfield suburb of Cairns for the past 3 or 4 years - so much so that a large number of rainforest birds have moved away as their insect food sources have diminished due to becoming Electric Ant food. Our job was to attempt to sort out the problem and that is what we did for the next 8 months! Our team passed the time walking through sugar cane fields, palm plantations and rainforest, sometimes throwing rubber snakes at the funny talking English bloke and other times simply laughing at him when he jumped six feet in the air as a snake ran between his legs in the long grass. We watched the first ball of the ashes test being bowled whilst sat in the tropical rain beneath the canopy of a palm plantation but I wasn't allowed to cheer for Australia when they won all of the subsequent games - there is apparently some kind of rule that even if you want to be an Aussie so much that you move over to Australia and cheer against England in the cricket, you will NEVER be allowed to claim that Australia's victory is YOUR victory.

We had made lots of great friends in Cairns but were itching to continue our travels, so following a brief trip to England in May 2007 we returned to our new home and set off on the road again. Our apologies to those people that we didn't get around to seeing. Nothing personal. Honest. We still love you all!

First stop Bowen, the home of the 'Big Mango'. Here we go again! They grow lots of mangoes so they have a huge plastic statue of one on the outskirts of town........they also grow lots of tomatoes, capsicums and corn but you don't see the 'Big Cob of Corn' anywhere in town. My thought is that building the mould for a huge egg shaped thing was probably a whole heap easier than building a huge cob of corn or capsicum shaped mould. So big funny coloured egg shaped thing it is then! We travelled to Bowen to meet up with Paul & Elaine and maybe do a bit of work to pay for our overspending whilst in England - we did end up travelling to the Canary Islands and Crete whilst over there so decided we might need to put a bit of money into the bank again. Unfortunately the unseasonably cold weather put paid to our ideas of working as most of the local crops weren't ready when we arrived and the campsite had several groups of disgruntled backpackers who were sitting around waiting to be called into their underpaid vegetable picking jobs. Instead of getting work we decided to ease ourselves into our travels with of spot of nude sunbathing on one of Queensland's finest naturist beaches at Horseshoe Bay. I was given a phone number by a very nice naked man in the sea one day, but before you get any ideas I must explain that he was a combine harvester driver in the corn fields and gave me a number to ring and ask about work. The place turned out to be the same place that Paul and Elaine were already working at and they were quite interested to find out that we had met their combine driver on a nudist beach. Apparently he just didn't seem the type.....but then again what is the type?

Nicely chilled out after a week of beach-bumming it was time to move on. Bowen has just had the rather delightful Nicole Kidman in town to do some filming on a Baz Lurhman film called, quite creatively, 'Australia'. When the production company moved out of town, Bowen went back to being itself again and unfortunately that wasn't all that interesting. In fact, slightly boring. You could even say 'Dull'. Good beach though.

Following a tip off from an Italian Melbournian camped next to us in Bowen, we headed southwards to the Whitsunday Coast area of Cape Hillsborough and spent a nice evening camped right on the beach being lulled to sleep by the sound of the waves crashing on the shore. If some bloke hadn't already beaten me to it I would suggest recording the sound of the sea and selling it to help people get to sleep. Nicely refreshed we took a morning hike to the top of the nearby Mount Rooper, climbing up through a fantastic forest of grass trees to a lookout that allowed us to see the majesty of the Whitsunday Islands without forking out a king's ransom for a choppy half-day boat ride. If you know me and boats then you'll understand my choice of a 3 hour hike over a 4 hour boatride! Back down at the base of Mount Rooper we headed west up the Great Dividing Range to Eungella National Park to go platypus spotting at nearby Broken River.

The drive up was extremely steep and the clutch on the truck was stinking by the time we got up there. After a rather chilly evening on the hillside I discovered that we had sprayed our clutch fluid on the drive up - possibly due to an idiot mechanic in Cairns not tightening the bleed screw following some minor repairs to the slave cylinder. I spoke to a mechanic who was unfortunately down the bottom of the hillside and he gave me a quick talk through of how to re-bleed the clutch system, something that I'd never had to do before (duh!). After bludging a bottle of fluid from a passing tradesman (it was that easy!) we were ready to go on one of several outings to spot the elusive platypus. These prehistoric beasties are extremely specialised little freaks with duck webbed front feet, sharp clawed back feet, the body and flat tail of a beaver and of course big duck billed faces. Their eyes are sunken into their heads and they look like they are wearing cream coloured mascara - something to do with seeing better at night, which is when they come out to play. We camped out over several evenings trying to get some decent photos of these elusive mutated rats, along with hoards of other people who had all made the trek up the hillside to do just the same. They move extremely erratically (the platypus not the people) and come to the surface for only a few seconds before diving below for a minute or two. This made getting the perfect photo rather tricky and some might say hit-and-miss but we eventually figured out the pattern in their chaotic travellings up and down the river, as they moved between their bankside lairs in search of river dwelling insects in the murky mud. On the last day on the riverbank we decided to purchase a fishing line - not to capture one of the mutant creatures but to retrieve Claire's rather expensive sunglasses that slipped off her head and were at the bottom of the river. We could see them lying there with only curious turtles to disturb them so we had to return at the dead of night when everyone else had gone so that people didn't stone us for trying to capture a platypus. I managed to fish them out quite easily but have to say that Claire still has a faint odour of estuarine mud even now!

We had several extremely cold and sleep-disturbed nights to contend with due to our tent being beneath a mandarin tree which was the nocturnal feeding ground of a bunch of amorous possums. I flashed my camera into their huge eyes in an attempt to scare them away but they just gave me the finger. Quite literally! They sat above our tent noisily scoffing mandarins, one in each of their opposably thumbed hands, occasionally hissing at each other whilst constantly pooping down little pellets onto the roof of our tent. And to think that we were wondering about the rather odd smell in the area whilst we were setting up camp! We made a quick trip to the beany hat shop when we got back down the hillside and set up our next camp on the beachside in Bucasia. We were back to the relative warmth of the seaside but had the smell of possum firmly ground into our tent. We spent two great days enjoying the beach and our new wooly hats but had to contend with more aerial nocturnal emmissions from the bloody possums that yet again made their home above our tent. These guys had a bit more life in them as they practically bounded around the tree fighting with each other, pausing only to take a leak or poop on our tent!

We had heard that there were riches to be had in the nearby gemfield towns of Sapphire, Emerald and Rubyvale. Cunningly creative names I'm sure you'll agree-especially as there are no emeralds or rubies to be found in the area!! We stocked up on food and headed out to one of the lesser mined areas called Willows Gemfields and set up for 3 days of 'fossicking' for sapphires. The next hardest stone after diamond, sapphires were spat out of a nearby volcano millions of years ago and came to rest in ancient river beds now covered with boulders and ash. We got tooled up with a pick, shovel and sieves and set out into the gemfields to find a good hole to dig amid the moonscape of spoilheaps that have been generated over the last hundred or so years. I thought we'd found a good one with all the signs of sapphire rich layers but some bloke that we'd seen on the campsite came rushing over and said it looked rubbish, he was an 'expert' after all and even showed us his copy of 'Gems, Gold and Treasure' magazine to prove it! Feeling slightly down hearted we went to visit a local guy named Tony who owns one of the only mechanically excavated mines in the area - this being ground strictly designated to public fossicking. Tony is an ex music industry catering manager who happened across the gemfields and purchased his mine from an old bloke who had mined it for 20 odd years. He said that he hated being there but his girlfriend enjoyed owning the mine so they had stayed for over 10 years with the dream of finding their riches. After giving us the rundown of what we were looking for he happily loaned us some better equipment including a rather expensive set of graded box sieves, a nice sharp pick to replace the one we'd got from the campsite was so blunt it was almost rounded, a small hand hoe to make digging easier and also an old ironing board which acted as a gem-finding table. Professionally tooled up this time, Tony found us a recently excavated hole and we set to work. The reasoning is that the more dirt you move, the more sapphires you will find and having checked my computer-softened hands he thought that I'd only last half a day at the pit-face. How wrong he was when 3 days later I had doubled the size of the hole and Claire had sieved her way through what seemed like half a ton of spoil in order to find our booty of 20 or so sapphires. They range in colours from dark blue through to green but our favourite is the rather more rare purple coloured one that is nice and clear so will make someone a nice engagement ring or something.......

I had thoroughly enjoyed my 3 days kneeling in a hole with my hoe, but it was time to shake the dust from our clothes and move on. I checked in with the know-it-all bloke on our campsite who had dissed the quality of our original choice of hole. He and his wife had been digging their hole for 3 days and had not even found a tiny chip of sapphire. I waved the small bag of gems that we had acquired in his face and imagined stickng my tongue out, but didn't. They were planning to stay a month in this not-even-one-horse town. Good luck to them I reckon. We said our thankyous and farewells to Tony who commended us on our earth moving abilities before climbing back into his latest mine shaft for some more jack-hammer action.

We headed back to the coast further south again to the lovely Kinka Beach. I'd decided it was time to spend some time on the laptop putting together my portfolio so that maybe I would be able to get a job that didn't involve sitting in a hole in the violent sun. We found ourselves a nice campsite and did just that, with Claire teaching me how to use some new software in between sunset walks on the beach and lounging about in the sun. It turns out that I've done loads of work over the past 5 years and it took almost 2 weeks to put it into some sort of order and write a bit of blurb about various jobs. My portfolio won't be needed until we eventually settle down but you never know! Claire had already managed to put her portfolio together during breaks whilst working at the office - unfortunately I had never had the time but this 2 weeks was a really good way of getting back into the swing of things. We bought ourselves a fishing rod and went down the the local creek for a spot of fishing in between work. As I write this we are still yet to catch anything, but as one zen-like fisherman next to me said one day "'That's why it's called 'fishing' and not 'catching'." Thanks for that!

Portfolio safely saved to disk, our next port of call was to be 'The Town of 1770'. There is apparently some history attached to this name, something to do with Captain Cook landing there in 1770 or something. Yet again I didn't bother to read the plaque on the historic monument near our campsite but that is what I imagine it said. We again took up residence on a beachfront campsite and attempted to further our fishing skills, this time with some borrowed sardine bait from a fisherman who took pity on us. He stood next to us catching one fish after another, feeding the occasional undersized fish to the local pelicans who knew full well what the score was. A crowd of pelicans cruised up and down the beach and quite often knew when people had caught fish even before they felt the first tug on their line. We both quickly discovered that fishing is not the most exciting of pastimes but that is just what we were doing - passing time. It seemed that we had been spending a large amount of time simply enjoying ourselves and relaxing so we planned a rather more exciting and energetic time of diving and 4-wheel driving on nearby Fraser Island, the largest sand island in the world (so they say). We landed at our next port of call, Bundaberg, booked a days diving on the Cochrane Artificial Reef and a ferry across to Fraser Island from nearby Hervey Bay and we had the next week or so planned . . .

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Photos

Elaine & Paul, Bowen
The professionals call this 'Throwing a Lure' otherwise known to us as 'dipping a rubber fish into the sea and then reeling it back in, completely untouched'.

Claire, Claire and Claire
She was literally beside herself on the cliffs overlooking Horseshoe Bay.

Big Mango
The 'Big Mango' is on the outskirts of Bowen. Quality craftsmanship I think you'll agree.

Grass Tree Forest
The walk to the top of Mount Rooper took an hour or so but was well worth it.

Aww how cute!
Tree-Climbing, Pig-Nosed Growling Rat or is it just a longtail possum?

Duckbilled platypus @ Broken River
See, they really do exist. Amazing mutation and without any evidence of nuclear waste in the area!

The Gemfields
Check out the size of our precious gem laiden hole. We moved pounds of rock to find pence worth of sapphires.

Gemfields head office.
Claire felt like doing a bit of al-fresco ironing in the gemfields.

Kinka Crab
One of thousands of soldier crabs that we crept up on along the mangrove inlets. The lower half of my legs were silky smooth after being up to my knees in creek mud.

Anger Management
Claire found a 'show your emotions' sign on the clifftop at Kinka Beach

On me 'ed son!
Ever had one of those 'What the F#@K!' moments? Have we missed some important news regarding the genre spanning actor/footballer/hardman ?

Sea of 1770
You can see why Captain Cook came ashore here in 1770. Even I'd go out in a boat on that sea.

Pelicans of 1770
'Oi geezer, you gonna catch some fish or what?'