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Published: July 19th 2010
Moonrise over the island
while the sun sets behind Conway beachLiving in another country does strange things to your head.
When we were making regular trips to Britain for work and pleasure I kept saying, “Back in England...” instead of “Back in New Zealand...” because I lived in England for my first 12 years.
I sometimes do the same here; “In England we...um...I mean in NZ...where are we?...who am I???”
Flying back to Cairns after two weeks NZ to see family felt like flying home - our home on wheels was waiting here for us. Australia feels like home right now, and there are places we’d love to live in, but financially we know we’ll be better off back in godzone so will be flying back in December.
Cuzzies Iona and Murray have been enviously reading this blog back in the Waikato and after visiting us here in Cairns have decided to buy our rig so they can start to be Grey Nomads too early next year.
So we’ll be back in Matarangi on the Coromandel Peninsula by Christmas and stationary - for a while at least. We haven’t been everywhere by a long road - we’ve left some good bits to
flying 'home'
heading towards an Aussie sunset look forward to for other trips when we get sick of the cold and rain.
This trip was about seeing the Australia that’s hard to get to on a week’s holiday - the outback, small country towns, Northern Territory, Western Australia. We’ve covered those places pretty well and think we’ve got a good feel for the “Australia” that Australians imagine they live in - the McLeod’s Daughters Australia - although in reality 90% of Aussies live in urban areas.
There are a lot of things about life here that are the same as life in NZ. People work, shop, dream of the weekend and a new big screen TV. But there are lots of differences - mainly small things. We’ll look forward to buying wine at a supermarket again. And eating Vogel’s bread.
I always thought it was a silly travel cliché to miss certain foods, but the trip home last month made us realise how much we missed Mr Vogel’s bread!
There’s still a bit of ground to cover before we feel we’ve finished; the north Queensland outback and stretches of the east coast we haven’t explored on previous trips. We’ll
Barron Gorge
rafters heading down towards Lake Placid end up on the Sunshine Coast at the end of November - which feels like home as well, as we spent three months there waiting to pick up the caravan.
Right now we’re “wintering over” in Cairns, but for some reason the dry season hasn’t properly arrived. As I write I look up to the rainforest covered hills of the Barron Gorge above Lake Placid and watch the tourist train to Kuranda as it wends its way up the gorge.
Since we’re literally IN the rain forest, we can’t complain too much about the constant sweeping showers, although we’re a bit concerned about our fading tans after two weeks in NZ where it either showered or rained every day, and not in a tropical rainforesty kind of way.
Cairns comes a close second to Darwin as a winter destination for refugees from the southern states, but after our 3 months in Darwin we know which we prefer. Cairns is a tropical paradise city with lush gardens, great restaurants, lovely rainforest valley or beach-side suburbs and all the shopping and services anyone could need.
It seems somehow less dangerous than Darwin, although there
the Barron Falls
(they're better in the wet season) are “Beware crocodiles” signs 1km from the van park on my jogging path and you still can’t swim in the sea for fear of stingers.
Cairns is more touristy than Darwin, with loads of Asian tour parties and backpackers from everywhere drawn to the Great Barrier Reef experience. But the city’s large enough (the fastest growing in Qld) to have an international holiday playground feel and it all adds to the cosmopolitan mix - we’ve seen many different nationalities here who don’t appear to be tourists.
Indigenous Australians of course are rarely seen, although this area was relatively densely populated pre-colonisation due to the abundance of food in the rainforest-meets-sea environment.
Would we live in Cairns? Fellow nomads Sue and Lawry, escaping the extremes of weather in their native Adelaide, have been seriously considering it since they arrived here at Lake Placid some months ago. Lawry has got a good part time job, they love it here...should they swap the lives of itinerant retirees for tropical lotus eaters?
Their van is big and beautiful, but so are the houses here in Cairns - houses in Australia are now officially the biggest in
Kuranda train
we met up with the tourist train at the Barron Falls lookout the world on average. Aussies have taken the English adage of one’s home being one’s castle and developed it into an art form. Real estate is a similar obsession as in NZ, but building houses - and buying stuff to put in them - is a national sport.
Cairns is in the tropics and has a wet summer and dry winter season. We’re supposed to be in ‘the dry’, which is a worry in terms of what ‘the wet’ would bring as it’s showery and 27 degrees right now.
Sue and Lawry are wisely going to wait until they’ve been through a wet season to see if they can cope with destructive cyclones, high temperatures, even higher humidity and their shoes turning green with mould in the wardrobe.
So - where did we go on the way up to Cairns? We left you, dear reader, in Sapphire - ogling our haul of sapphires and zircons. From there we travelled gently down the escarpment of the Great Dividing Range, past huge coal mines, cattle stations and cane fields to Mackay on the coast.
Mackay is lucky to be a mining city without the
mess of mining - coal is brought by train to the huge port and shipped to China etc, so there are jobs and burgeoning economies both at the port and inland in the mines.
North of Mackay the coastline is littered with names we know from glossy tourism brochures, TV travel shows and plans we make in our heads for when we win Lotto - Whitsunday, Hamilton, Magnetic, Hinchinbrook, Dunk - islands that look west back to the mainland and east to the enticing turquoise snorkelling paradise of the Great Barrier Reef.
These are holiday islands that are an easy mix of tropical resort hotels, virgin rainforest, romantic palm-fringed ocean vistas and the magic of knowing that you are on an island, away from the hoi polloi and removed from the prosaic normality of life on the mainland.
We didn’t go to any of them.
1. You have to get there by boat (Rhys will be sick) or plane (Rhys and his wallet will be sick)
2. Everything on the prosaic mainland was new to us, so we didn’t need more new
3. The islands looked the same as the mainland, just
Conway Bay
sunset from Conway beach, Airlie Beach peninsula on the other side of the water
4. It was nice enough looking at the islands from the palm fringed ocean vistas of our (much cheaper) mainland caravan parks.
Conway Beach was one of our ‘hidden gems’. On the same peninsula as outrageously popular Airlie Beach - Gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, Conway Beach Caravan Park was a psychedelic oasis in a tiny beach side hamlet.
We took our bottle of bubbly down to the beach reserve and watched the moon rise after sunset over one of the aforementioned islands. No amount of tourist dollars can buy anything as naturally magic as that.
I spent hours chasing poor little soldier crabs, scaring the bejeesus out of them with my shadow so I could watch them fall over each other in their race to get away, or lay on their sides and screwdriver themselves into the muddy sand, then pop out again in a few minutes if I stood still enough. Sick, I know...but such fun!
I’d never seen soldier crabs and there were THOUSANDS of them - no exaggeration - they formed scuttling dry-ice clouds on the surface of the mud flats
Psychedelic camping ground
the cabins at Conway Beach at low tide, coming out to feed. They are the only crab that walks frontwards rather than sideways, they are a beautiful blue and VERY cute.
I believe the caravan park set up a counselling service for traumatised crabs after we left.
Fortunately we didn’t see any of the other fauna Conway Beach is famous for; crocodiles and marine stingers. There were large signs up at all the surrounding beaches warning of the different types of stingers (jellyfish) found in the area.
One of the most deadly is Irukandji - tiny (1cm), translucent and fatal unless there is someone there to resuscitate you and get you immediately to hospital. The part of this huge health warning sign, found all along the coast, that has stuck with me concerns this nice little piece of God’s handiwork - apparently you only feel the pain half an hour after being stung, then all sorts of ghastly things happen to your internal organs, culminating in, and I quote, “a dreadful feeling of anxiety and ill health...”
“Anxiety”? “ill health”?? You’re dying!!
Needless to say my feet did not feel the cool softness of wave-lapped
sand at Conway Beach - shoes on at all times please.
On a day trip into Airlie Beach we realised how right our decision had been to choose an isolated spot rather than the tourist Mecca.
a. There is no beach at Airlie Beach
b. It is full of backpackers moping around like zombies who’ve only eaten vegemite sandwiches for the past month
c. The only thing to do is part with vast wads of cash to go on a boat/plane out to one of the poncy islands, where you will be relieved of your last Pacific peso to stay/eat/drink or go on a tour to see the same flora and fauna as on the mainland, or snorkel with the deadly stone fish, sting rays and irukandji.
Shute Harbour was pretty though.
I wanted to go to Bowen because there’s been much hype about it being a location for Baz Luhrman’s Australia (the disaster movie starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s biceps).
It’s a bit rough around the edges, the kind of place that promotes its town murals, but they never completely disguise its architectural shortcomings.
But the
Beware - Stingers!
enough to keep you out of the water for good effect of movie stardom is obvious - the huge water tower still adorned with giant BOWENWOOD lettering, the revamped foreshore designed and completed with funds generated by Bowen’s role as Darwin in the movie, and one lone movie set piece slowly crumbling on the outskirts of the town centre.
The star of our visit was again the caravan park - right on the water’s edge for sauvignon sunsets.
After Bowen comes Townsville, a major centre with a wonderful esplanade, The Strand, where you can swim (in the stinger net), walk, jog and generally see and be seen. The other place to get physical is Castle Hill, right in the centre of town.
We walked up the goat track and the views were so brilliant we decided to drive up the road that night for a secluded sunset bubby, or so we thought.
Half of Townsville and their dogs were doing their constitutionals up the steep summit road, pausing for a brief nod to the stunning views then dashing back down again.
There were other lovely places on the way from Townsville to Cairns, such as Mission Beach, but we were
Soldier crabs
millions of them on Conway beach on our own mission to get up to Cairns as quickly as possible to be near an international airport for a dash back to NZ.
Which we did, but now we’re having a very relaxing time and doing as little as possible each day like real Grey Nomads. Lake Placid Tourist Park caters specifically for cashed up baby boomers and retirees - sausage sizzles and Asian nights in the camp kitchen and... our first Trivia Night.
Team ANZACS (with Sue and Lawry) came second on our first go, but after some team training we blew the opposition away. First prize? A bottle of bubbly Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc of course!
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Geoff Pope
non-member comment
Good on Ya
Keep it up It's all good fun. We are on the road at the moment , auto transmission in MDX fell to bits at White Cliffs, dog locked himself in hire car and the fun continues, Regards Heather and Geoff Pope.