Blogs from Queensland, Australia, Oceania

The plan for this week was to get away somewhere but be close enough for my girls night in Brisbane (to see Queen) on Thursday, and to attend the Caravan & Camping show at Redcliffe on the weekend. We left Grafton early on Monday morning (10/02) and headed north to our first stop - Ballina RV Centre. The ESC (electronic stability control) had stopped working last trip and was still showing a red indicator (not working properly). After a couple of hours of trial and error it was finally working and we were good to go. Then there was a traffic accident between Yelgun and Chinderah which caused a detour off the motorway up the Tweed Valley Way, and then another accident on the Gold Coast which caused bumper to bumper traffic on the motorway for ... read more

Leaving Adelaide, we flew straight to Cairns. Along with Townsville, Cairns is one of the gateways to the Great Barrier Reef. When Jennie and I were here in 2005 we went to Townsville and took a dive boat boat out 200 miles into the Coral Sea for a week, but we never actually saw the GBR. For this trip, we decided to headquarter in Cairns, where the reef is much closer to the shore. Our hotel was right on the waterfront. Initially, it appeared that there was a big harbor outside our door, but when the tide went out it became apparent that it was actually just a large mud flat with sprouting mangrove seedlings. The harbor was at the end of the city, where there was a large mixed use development that appeared to be ... read more

The next section of our journey is to sail from Darwin to Airlie Beach in Queensland. We will sail across the Gulf of Carpentaria and south of Papua New Guinea. At the closest point between PNG and Australia is a cluster of small islands, Thursday Island being probably one of the best know, but not the largest. Prince of Wales Island is the largest, but our cruise will pass a number of the Torres Straight islands including St Joseph's and Kiriri (Hammond) Islands. It takes a couple of days to come around the top of the Northern Territory and cross the Gulf of Carpentaria. Unlike our flight to Singapore, this was calm sailing all the way as Pacific Dawn is actually a wonderfully stable ship even with winds and currents pushing her around. The top of ... read more

There is a 1030 kms between Alva Beach and Hervey Bay. Could have done more than one blog, but I'm late enough on writing my blogs...let's put it simply, it's a busy world out there, and I'm already more than a month behind this epic trip. The drive from Cairns to Hervey Bay is all about....great quality road without a single pot hole! Sadly many kangaroos lying dead on the side of the road, at some point more than one per kilometers...and a mix of rainforest, sugar cane field and other farm lands. We are also crossing field which are suffering the current solid drought with cattle in sadly pretty bad shape. But let's put it honestly, it's a lot of driving and from time to time can be a little boring. We cut the road ... read more

We woke on Sunday morning to a bit of a dust storm. IT was slowly building so it ended up being a good day to leave as we had ourselves on the outskirts of town before it really hit hard. Was a bit of a struggle to drive at times with the vehicle and trailer catching the wind. We drove through Windorah which was our first stop for the day at around 9.30am. A pie, a coffee and top up the fuel and out! At the next stop (Quilpie) I discovered that the same tyre on the Paj had finally given up the ghost i.e. dead flat, so I had to do a quick change out for another tyre that already had a plug in it - so far so good with that one (touch wood)! ... read more