END OF COASTAL WATERS

We are now heading inland and leaving behind the lovely coastal waters of Australia. Over the past 4 months we have never been more that a few kilometres from the sea but now we are moving into unknown territory with cooler days and nights, camp fires and hopefully some damper. Fellow travellers have told us that we won’t experience the real Australia until we sit around a campfire, eating damper and listening to bush poets. It will definitely be something different for us. We have a month’s travelling till we return to Melbourne in readiness for our trip home on 9th October.

We spent a week in Bargara, which is a small beach town just out of Bundaberg. Bundaberg is famous for its rum and ginger beer and it is also in the centre of sugar cane country. There is just mile after mile of sugar cane and we were there in the midst of the cutting season. Mechanisation has altered this industry immensely over time and now it is almost a year long season with plantings taking place as soon as the cane is cut and the field ploughed. My photo was taken from a lookout on top of an extinct volcano in Bargara overlooking the sugar cane paddocks. You can see all the different colours with some paddocks already ploughed, some still covered with the cuttings, some with new plants and some cane still waiting to be cut. Some cane cuttings are still carried in small train wagons with railway lines running through the paddocks on a narrow gauge line but most of it is now carried to the refinery by trucks. The cane is now cut by machinery and mechanically loaded onto either the truck or wagon with only 2 people needed for the whole operation. Years ago it was all done manually and then the leaves were all burnt off before being loaded onto the wagons. There is not so much burning off now and the machines do the whole operation in one hundredth of the time it took to do manually. It is a huge industry in these parts with bulk storage facilities and ports to move it all overseas.

Boyne Island, a suburb of Gladstone, was our next stop. We were going to stay at the town of 1770 but we had some bad reports of the only camp in the area so decided to give it a miss. We will call in there for a look on our way back south. Gladstone is a city of 34,000 people but the industry in this place is amazing. Its port is one of Australia’s busiest with coal and alumina exports. There are 2 aluminium refineries, one aluminium smelter, a coal-fired power station that supplies all the power for the smelter and refineries, a cement production company and two coal terminals. There are six wharf centres with 15 berths and there are plans for this amount to double in the next 2 years. There is a desperate shortage of qualified tradespeople in this area as most of the younger ones are going into the mining industry. With the growth of mineral wealth in Australia it is no wonder the whole country is prospering.

The Olympics are now over and Australia can now return to normal. There was live TV coverage of all the events that Australians were entered and of the team’s return to Australia with all the politicians and their hangers on making congratulatory speeches. The civic welcome homes still have to come yet in each state. There is a very strong nationalistic attitude and pride among Australians and most of our fellow caravanners from Oz fly the national flag from their vans. I definitely intend to bring back a NZ flag with me next year.

I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs about the walkways that most towns have. These walkways are usually through a park that runs alongside the sea or river. This means that in most places there is a green belt along the sea front where there are playgrounds, car parks and always lots of toilets. Some of the walkways have exercycles, walking machines, rowing machines etc. on them for public use and some also have every 200 – 500 metres marked out so you know exactly how far you have walked or cycled. A great idea when you are timing yourself.

A most peculiar thing we have noticed lately is the large number of policemen we are meeting on our travels. Some retired and some serving; we have met them in clubs; at the bank and in caravan parks; and they range from Assistant Commissioners to Constables. This has become quite a joke with Jim & I and when we arrived in Boyne Island, Jim went and spoke to the neighbours as usual. When he came back he said “Guess what?” I said, “He’s a retired cop”. He was and not only that but his other neighbour was one also. We don’t search them out but they are everywhere.

We have had quite a few games of golf on our travels and we are really glad we bought our clubs with us. Usually it is only 9 holes and some of the courses have left a bit to be desired but some have been just fantastic. Last week we played at a little place just out of Bundaberg called Innes Park where the Innes Park Country Club and Tavern had an 18 hole course. It was a lovely day, the course was really dry and the balls went for miles, exactly the sort of course I like. We enjoyed it so much we decided to do the 18 holes. Boy, we were stuffed when we finished but it was a great game. It was a very long course with 2 of the par fives nearly ½ km. long. I think we’ll stick to 9 holes from now on though.

We went for a drive down to the towns of 1770 and Agnes Water. It is certainly a beautiful area with lovely long sandy beaches and blue seas. The road into this area has only been sealed over the past few years and now the growth is amazing. New apartment blocks are shooting up all along the hills with lovely sea views. We checked out the caravan park and we are glad we gave it a miss as the sites are so small and everyone is very crammed in.

We are now in Maryborough on our way back south. The weather has been just great for the past month or so and this morning the temperature at 7.15am was 19.9C! We have friends from Waikanae coming up to see us this week so I just hope those temperatures stay high.

We are now finding it difficult finding camps with wireless internet so my updates may not be so regular from now on. I will endeavour to try and do it every 3 weeks at least.