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Published: August 8th 2007
4 in a bed session anyone?
Then we all got down to it...watching a film that is.Townsville
Townsville was only meant to be a stop-over for us on the way up to Cairns, however...
The window I broke after having locked the keys in the van is proving a little more difficult to fix than we'd hoped. It's typical that these windows aren't standard and that they have to be made to order. "3-4 days" said the man at windscreen repair place...That's not so bad we thought..."working days" he added. "It's now Thursday, so that will be Tuesday, more likely Wednesday to actually fit it".
Oh Crap! that's one week in a place that seems to boast a "town" as it's major attraction, and it's still raining!
We asked the man to call us as soon as it was in and settled into life in Townsville.
The only upside was that we had worked out we could stop here for free. The back of the local B.P petrol station had a free camp area and toilets, and the information centre just up the road had free showers. (God we are so easily pleased these days)
The girls (Gemma & Suz) we met on the Whitsundays trip were here as well. They had
Yongala Shipwreck
It's a shame the camera was so crap, but still... their laptop with them so we decided to have a movie night. All four of us managed to squeeze into our bed (See pic) so we could watch the film, that was until the DVD broke and ended the night pre-maturely.
They left the next morning and we had some boring, everyday chores to do, i.e; get photo's burned to disc, write this blog, get Victoria to the doctors because she has a bladder infection...It's all something to do...
The Yongala Shipwreck
The week passed without interest apart form two days. Firstly, I did the best dive of my life!
There is a shipwreck called the Yongala, which, unkown to me was rated the best dive in Australia and one of the best in the world! Unfortunately for Victoria you have to be certified and have so many dives logged before you can do it, so this counted her out.
It is 3.5 hours out in incredibly choppy water. 6 of the 15 people on board the boat were being sea sick, including 3 hardened army men!
On the way we are given a briefing of what to expect down there. The ship sank in a storm
Yongala Shipwreck
The shoals of fish pretty much envelope the whole ship in 1911 and has since been turned by nature into a coral reef and subsequently adopted as a home by a variety of undersea life because it is the only reef around for some distance.
Living on, around and in this ship are; Mori Wrasse, Giant Queensland Grouper, Turtles, sharks; namely; White Tip Reef Sharks, Tiger sharks (Which are aggressive) and Bull Sharks, supposedly four of them, one of them being 4m long, which are very aggressive and also live in rivers where they snatch the occasional person now and again!!!...Oh, also sea snakes, loads of them and they like to swim in and out of the gear that you are wearing! (By the way ALL sea snakes are poisnous and are some are the most venemous snakes in the world!!!).
For some reason everyone is looking round at each other a little nervously...
Oh, by the way. I have forgotten my underwater camera. IDIOT!!! I have to end up buying a crappy disposeable on the boat, which I know take crap pictures but needs must...IDIOT!!!.
As soon as we arrive you are immediately hussled into the choppy water and you frantically grasp onto a guide
line tied to the wreck which is, at it's deepest 27m below us.
As soon as we drop below the surface though everthing settles down and the visibility was really good at approx 20m
The wreck appeared below and Holy Moly there is just so much life here it is unbelievable!
Fish from 1 inch to 1 foot are in the thousands, coral of all different colours and we spotted a 2.5m white tip reef shark almost straight off.
Sea snakes were wriggling there way around the structure. One of them took a bit of an interest and started swimming at us! We were told if they start to loop themselves through our equipment DO NOT move and just let it swim out and away! We decided that we didn't want to risk it and did our underwater version of running away and thankfully it finally lost interest.
As we rounded the end of the ship there was a massive, and I mean massive Queensland Grouper swimming just below us. Body length was at least 3 metres and height about 1.5 m. The biggest fish I have ever seen!!!
We only managed about 30 minutes down there because of
the depth.
Back up for lunch and then after 1 hour of surface time we went for the second dive. The highlight of this was a beautiful Loggerhead Turtle, about 1m in length, who swam towards the ship just below us and then started munching on some of the coral. All this time I had been snapping away with the crappy camera. I couldn't stop the flash from going off so most of the pictures were quite poor. Thankfully the turtle one turned out just about ok though (See pics).
Anyway, enough boring dive talk...
Paluma Range
It's Wednesday so we Called the winsdscren place, who then told us it would be Thursday. For F**ck sake, another day here, but guess what....WE HAVE SUN, IT HAS RETURNED!!!!
So we took advantage and went to Paluma Range.
This area has really nice waterfalls. We went to Little Crystal creek, McClelland look out and finally Jourama Falls, On the way to Jourama (You have to walk for about 30 mins) there are some nice views and rock pools. The book says there are hundreds of small turtles here but we only managed to see one
GOLUM!!
Apart from the shades and he disappeared before we could take his picture.
The area is stunning though with big round boulders everywhere and babbling streams running from the falls. I jumped from one boulder to another and Victoria said she thought I looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings...Full of compliments as always...although on looking at the picture have to agree.
That night the girls returned from there wanderings and we went out for a rare meal. Victoria had two glasses of wine before we met up and was giggling her socks off for ages...Cheap date as usual.
Freezing our bits off!!
On the Thursday we finally left Townsville behind and drove North towards Cairns. The girls had been telling us about more waterfalls on the way so we decided to see those.
The first three were really nice (Mungalli, Zillie & Ellinjaa) and then we got too Millaa Millaa. This one is beautiful. It looks almost man made it is that perfect. The water forms a pool below which is big enough to swim in, so that's what we did...
Christ almighty This is the coldest water I/we have ever been in...To put it bluntly my balls jumped
Paluma range
Little crystal creek into my throat and it still looks like I have 3 Adam's apples!
It literally took our breaths away swimming towards the fall but once we were behind we were able to climb on some rocks and get partially out of the water which helped, a bit, but not much.
As we now have a waterproof camera that we can use without a housing we were able to take some pictures and a video (see on You Tube : ).
Our next stop was Daintree. This is just above Cairns. Here you can do a river tour which is all about wildlife spotting, and the wildlife most people want to see, including us, is CROC'S.
We went on a boat that has "Croc Cam". This is a camera mounted on the boat which they can zoom in close to any wildlife that is difficult to spot, like alot of the snakes.
You don't really need it for the croc's though as the boat gets very close, probably only about 4-5 meters away. The croc's are used to the tour boats so don't really react to us. The ones in this area are Saltwater and tend to be the biggest
Zillie Falls
See the Rainbow? & most aggressive of the Croc family. We spotted 2 females, some babies about 1-2 years old and the dominent male in the area known as Scar Face because of his battle wounds.
The boat ride is about one hour and was well worth it for the Croc shots alone (See pics) but we also saw Tree Snakes and a Python but they are so disguised the pics aren't worth showing.
That night we headed over the river to Cape Tribulation. The drive through is gorgeous as it's right through the middle of the rainforest. The stay overnight was pleasant if not uneventful. We did go for a walk on the beach though at night. It was a full moon and the beach was so lit up by the moon you could see about 1/2 kilometer either way!
We also saw 2 wild Cassowary's on the way back (See pic). These are the birds that look a little bit like the Ostrich but have a small surprise in store by way of a claw with which they attack and have disemboweled people with!
There are warnings posted if you see one and it approaches you have to back away
very slowly and make lots of noise. (Or remove your own bowels before going out in the first place, it never hurts to be pro-active).
We headed for Cairns and managed sneaky free night in a campsite when the lady at reception was eating and couldn't be bothered to do the paperwork, she just told us to park up and come back and pay later...O.K, we'll do that then...Honest!
That was our last night in the van and the next day we returned it to Travellers Autobarn and said our final farewell. In all honesty we have really enjoyed the camper. It's felt like a home from home where we've been able to cook normal meals and enjoy relaxing in our very own space. So with a tear in our eye we bade farewell and found our first Guesthouse for 6 weeks.
We only had a few days to kill here before flying to Brisbane then cold New Zealand. The sun was still out so we took advantage of what will be the last rays of sun that our bodies will see for a while.
Cairns beach is non existent & basically a mudflat, so the city wisely
Millaa Millaa Falls
I'm in there somewhere decided to build their own beach on the sea front with a lagoon. It works very well to be fair did us nicely until we left a few days later.
We flew to Brisbane and only had 2 nights before completing the Australian leg of the journey.
The only thing we did here was go to the cinema (We saw "Knocked Up"...very funny).
In the morning we had to get up at 4.00a.m and were at the airport for 4.45a.m. Our flight wasn't until nearly 10.00a.m but we wanted to go on standby for a direct flight and after waiting for an hour for the desk to open we managed to swing it so it was worth it. (And we saved ourselves 200 POUNDS!!! Nice one!).
Well that's it for Oz. It's 4 degrees C in Christchurch so we might have to pack the flip flops and shorts away for a while. We have been wearing pretty much just that for 6 months though!
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