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Published: July 10th 2009
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Day 73 - Wuruma Dam - Cania Gorge
A surprisingly late and weak dawn chorus had us springing from our warm bed this morning! We were greeted by several Magpies and a couple of Kangaroos which was a nice surprise! Our neighbours checked their traps and found only the shrimp they’d used as bait, no red claw dinner for them tonight!
The fire was still warm so we treated ourselves to bacon and eggs for breakfast which really sets the day off to a good start!
We set off and found a couple of caravans in the spot up by the amenities and bar we’d first looked at when we arrived yesterday, we figured they must have got in when no-one was around and didn’t realise where we all were!
Our journey today was really quite interesting and took us pretty much all single track, sometimes dirt track through to Cania Gorge. You see so much more when you’re off the big main highways, for example we found the homesteads of Seldom Inn and Gunadoo plus a huge piggery that seemed to stretch for a few km’s!
There are no other sites at Cania Gorge other
than the Top Tourist caravan park and the Big 4, seems a shame that in this vast area the National Parks haven’t allocated somewhere for permit camping. We choose the Big 4 site seeing as how we’re members and when we arrive the site looks enormous with plenty of space. $28.50 is the tariff for a powered site, expensive when you’ve been free camping but reasonable when you’ve come from Hervey Bay and the rate is $42 to be crammed in like sardines!
We get to our pitch to find we do have a fire pit if we fancy doing that later but for the time being we just set the caravan up and then head off, on our bikes, to the Cania Gorge walking tracks. It’s amazing how distances seem halved when driving in a car and remarkably down hill! Phew, it’s hard work slogging back to the tracks on the bikes but we make it and we’re just about to head off on a couple of the walks when who do we spy but Roger, Lee and Judy from Petrie Park! Rob was off on a longer walk but it was lovely to see them all again
but we think that will be the last time our paths cross as they’re heading to Stanage which is 100km north of Rockhampton on dirt road to an undefined camp spot that’s not even in our book! It’s just too far out of the way for us to go so we bid them happy travelling and head off on our walk. We’ve decided to just to the Dripping Rock and Overhang walks today what with the cycle out to here as well, time is getting on! The walks are pretty and the rock is most definitely dripping! Cania Gorge is quite a vast area so there’s plenty to see but not too much wildlife at this time of day although we do spot a couple of kangaroos on our way back!
We cycle back to camp which took less time than we’d expected so we hopped in the car and made our way down to the dam which is only 6% full at the moment. It’s a vast area and cost the Cania Gorge township when it was first built, in fact even the town cemetery is buried under the water but they did manage to save some of
the headstones first off and they are now part of the features at the dam lookout. We had a good old chat to the caretaker there who told us about the dingoes that live in the gorge and fish that are held stocked in the dam for the fishermen.
On our way back we find the Shamrock Gold Mine and wander the trail that’s been built around it. The gold rush was big business here in the olden days, there’s quite a few townships in Queensland where fossicking is still possible so we might try our hand at that and bring home some jewels for you all!
It’s open air cinema night at camp tonight, City Slickers is the movie so we BBQ our tea on the camp gas BBQ and take our chairs down to the camp fire cinema! It’s quite a good film and it was quite warm with the fires going which was a bonus! We didn’t build our own fire tonight but our neighbours did so we had a warm by that when the film finished. The only other thing to see tonight was the wildlife scattered around the park. Bettongs are the cutest,
miniature kangaroo type creatures! They’re so diddy and don’t seem too bothered by humans at all! What with them, possums and a couple of rabbits bounding around it made for interesting photography fun in the dark!
There’s a couple of directions we could head in tomorrow, one is towards the Kroombits Tops where a WW2 bomber crashed and the wreck is still visible or we could head towards Bundaberg to sample their famous Rum or we could just head towards Gladstone where there’s a free campsite.
It’s another toss a coin decision, except that there are more options than coin faces!
We’ll let you know tomorrow but hopefully it will be somewhere with phone and internet signal because there’s been none of that for the last few days!
Dar and Sar
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Jan Kettle
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Rainbow Lorikeets
Great photo of the bettong but weren't there lots of rainbow lorikeets at Cania Gorge? When we were there they were fed at 5pm (that might be a bit old hat for you though!)