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Published: February 25th 2013
Ayr
Main street.Ayr > Bowen > Airlie Beach > Mackay > Sarina
Ayr is a town near the delta of the Burdekin River, named after the Scottish town of Ayr by the early settlers. As with most of the coast up here in FNQ sugar is a dominant feature of the landscape and the Burdekin Shire, in which Ayr, and Home Hill lie, is no exception. The Burdekin Shire, produces the most sugar cane per square kilometre in Australia utilising underground water supplies and water from the Burdekin Dam to irrigate crops when rains fail, (seems unlikely when they measure the stuff in metres up here!), but it does get dry outside of the wet season. Ayr and Home Hill are sugar towns and between them have all the infrastructure required to support the town and farming communities that live within the region. Ayr is a great place to stop and wander with the trees and gardens providing a nice tropical feel. Alva Beach just 16klm east of Ayr is a popular beach with locals and worth a look. By the way did you know that there is a crater on Mars called Ayr?
Our next stop was Bowen where we
had booked in for a week to enjoy the famous beaches and Mangoes. Bowen is at the top of the region in Queensland known as the Whitsundays, a region known for beach resorts and tropical islands (and Mangoes!). Ok, let’s get the disappointments out of the way first!
The first disappointment was that although Mangoes were being picked up north where we had just been, the season had not started here as yet, so no Bowen Mangoes! The second was this…the film Australia, (which I did not like much anyway) was mostly filmed in Bowen and when inquiring as to where all the amazing buildings are that were used in the film, we were pointed to a big vacant block of land opposite the waterfront and told ‘the entire set was there’! The whole set was made up including the buildings! OK says I, ‘what about the (Darwin) wharf that was bombed in the movie, that could not have been a set as well?’ the answer was ‘see the fishing pier over there, they did a makeover on it to make it look like the wharf that was bombed in Darwin’. Ok, we have ticked off eating mangoes for
a week and visiting all the sites from the movie in our first ½ hour in Bowen, let’s try the beaches!
Despite Cyclone Yarsi’s best attempts at destroying everything up here including the beaches, there are heaps of great beaches here in Bowen from small secluded coves and bays to long stretches of ocean beaches, just beautiful, and you are spoilt for choice. We spent most of our time at Rose Bay, a beautiful little beach with sapphire blue water and views across to the Whitsunday Islands of Gloucester and Middle. The park we stayed at was across the road from Front Beach, a great place to take Jackie walking in the mornings for Trish. Two of the more picturesque and most popular beaches are Horsehoe Bay and Grays Bay. Both are fantastic beaches with good offshore snorkelling and crystal clear water. Then there is Coral Bay (clothes optional, obviously we did not frequent this beach!), Murray Bay and Queens Beach, another good walking beach and all within 15 minutes from the centre of Bowen.
Flagstaff Hill lookout is a must do when in Bowen with spectacular views out over the Gloucester Passage and Gloucester Island, below you
Burdekin River
Between Ayr and Home Hill. is North Head Lighthouse and Stone Island. To the west is a fantastic view over Bowen and Edgecombe Bay. We also went to Grays Bay Lookout and the Reservoir Hill Lookout, both were also well worth it. Captain Cook who sailed past here in 1770 and named Cape Gloucester, which turned out to be an island, had no idea as to the importance this area would end up playing to the then fledgling colony. Captain Henry Sinclair discovered Port Denison, which is the Bowen Harbour, in 1859. Two years later he returned and with George Dalrymple founded a town they called Port Denison in April 1861. Several months later the then District Commissioner George Dalrymple sought permission to change the name to Bowen after Queensland’s first Governor.
Today Bowen is the centre for the Abbott Point Coal Loading Facility where an expansion is underway to take the facilities capacity to almost 400 million tonnes per year. The Bowen and Gumlu Region is the largest winter growing vegetable region in Australia and is often referred to as the Salad Bowl of Australia contributing an estimated $400 million per annum to the horticulture industry. Other important and influential industries here are
Home Hill
Inkerman Sugar Mill Fishing, Salt production and the cattle industry. From Bowen we headed to our next destination Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour.
Airlie Beach is the gateway to the Whitsundays and the Islands, a true ‘resort town’. 10,000 years ago, give or take a few years, the Coral Sea’s level rose converting volcanic, coastal mountains into today’s cluster of tropical islands. After the local ‘custodian’s’ of the region, the next significant event was the arrival on Whit Sunday of Captain James Cook who discovered the Great Barrier Reef by running aground on a submerged reef! Resorts are only on seven of the islands but you can visit most of them. Hamilton, Daydream, Hayman and Hook Islands are just some of the more ‘famous’ with resorts attracting travellers from all over the world.
Airlie Beach is the main centre of all this activity and has a main street that is full of coffee shops, restaurants, cafes and boutique type shops. Set in an amphitheatre of hills, the town sits on the Whitsunday Passage and in peak tourist times is absolutely heaving. We were absolutely astounded by the huge amount of accommodation here, it seems impossible that they can all survive; there
must be thousands of beds available every night for tourists. Having said that there was plenty more investment/development going on so I assume the heaving crowds in the streets that we saw are keeping all the available beds full! Airlie Beach is all 4 star plus and unless flying directly into Hamilton Island it is the stepping off point to the Whitsundays via the numerous ferries that run out of Shute Harbour. Shute Harbour is a natural harbour within Conway National Park and although there is little here except for the ferry terminals and marina, the views of the harbour and the Whitsunday Islands are amazing from Lion’s Lookout. We stayed at Flametree whilst here, on the road out to Shute harbour, a great spot and only ten minutes away from the hectic centre of Airlie.
After leaving Airlie Beach we were headed for Mackay, but our first stop was Proserpine. The permeating ‘sweet’ smell that greets you in Proserpine is a gentle reminder that this is another town with it‘s roots in the sugar cane industry. We walked the main street checking out the shops and after asking a few local ladies where the best coffee was we
Bowen
Kings beach, a good beach for Jackie. received mixed answers such as; ‘McDonalds’, ‘over at the bakery’, ‘the café over the road from Woolies’, plus a few other enticing suggestions. We settled on a café (which may have been the one suggested to us in fact) …. and it was, well, OK; on to Mackay!
Mackay is a fabulous city on the banks of the Pioneer River and is nicknamed the sugar capital of Australia because its region produces more than a third of Australia's cane sugar. Scottish born John Mackay along with John McCrossin and a party of eight others, including Duke, an Aboriginal tracker, explored the region in 1860 reaching the Pioneer Valley in May of that year. After exploring the valley and the river mouth, which they named the Mackay, the members of the party selected land and then returned to civilisation. On the return journey, they all suffered from a fever that claimed the life of Duke. John Mackay later returned to the area with 1,200 head of cattle and founded Greenmount Station.
Mackay is widely recognised as the gateway to the Bowen Basin coal mining reserves of Central Queensland. The Bowen Basin is the single largest coal reserve in Australia,
Bowen
Rose Bay with 34 operational coal mines extracting more than 100 million tonnes annually and an influential industry for the region and the port of Mackay. But sugar cane production is the ‘history’ for the region and today growers have a total cane production area of approximately 86,000 hectares. The growers are capable (in good seasons) of supplying up to 6.5 million tonnes of cane to the mills for processing. On average, Mackay Sugar produces about 850,000 tonnes of raw sugar and 180,000 tonnes of the by-product molasses annually. It is no surprise then that Mackay Harbour is also home to one of the largest bulk-sugar loading terminals in the world.
The original city centre has palm fringed streets and great shopping with twenty beautifully restored heritage-listed buildings to see. We chose to shop at Canelands a new undercover complex of specialty shops including all your big name brands and Myer; Trish was happy!
The beaches here continued in the theme of all the beaches along the Hibiscus coast and the Whitsundays to the north of Mackay, palm fringed with crystal clear blue water and white sand, just magic. And there are 31 one of them within the Mackay region!
Bowen
Horseshoe Bay, great, but popular, spot. Stingers are still an issue here so during the season most popular family beaches have stinger resistant enclosures.
We chose to stay at a really small and friendly spot at Sarina Beach, some 30 odd Klm’s south of Mackay. Sarina itself is another small coastal sugar town. We visited the Sarina Sugar Shed, an interesting working miniature sugar mill where we followed and heard about the process of sugar production, good value. Sarina Beach was a long beach stretching for Klm’s to the north and south. We were right on the beach here and Jackie quickly settled into a routine of many walks in the morning and evening, upon our return from ‘touring’ each day, she loved this spot, in fact we all enjoyed the city of Mackay and the Mackay region.
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Pat
non-member comment
Interesting travels
Hi Trish & Mike. sounds as though you are having a great time and where did the 16 month trip get you to, have you found a spot that maybe called home?. Cheers Pat