Whitsunday Islands, Queensland, Australia

From Cooktown we travelled south inland through the Atherton Tablelands and then down the coast, passing through Tully and Townsville. We had overnight stops at Flying Fish Point near Innisfail south of Cairns and at Ayr, before arriving at beautiful Airlie Beach overlooking the stunning Whitsunday Islands. We stayed here for two days, taking a boat trip around a few of the 74 islands in the Whitsunday group. We snorkeled over the colourful and varied corals on the fringes of Hook Island and spent a couple of hours on Whitehaven Beach on Whitsunday Island. This beach is widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest with tropical blue waters lapping along 7 km of pure white sand.

Airlie Beach was teeming with overseas visitors, particularly young English people, and the hotels were pulsating after dark. We had been carrying a tent in the car as back-up accommodation and we decided to pitch it in a park next to the beach. But we hadn’t counted on the late night revelry of the many backpackers in the park in their tents and campers, or their post-midnight phone calls back home to Mum in England. One young woman in a camper van next to us breathlessly and loudly recounted to her Mum her day’s adventure skydiving, and then repeated the whole detailed story in turn to the five or so other relatives who seemed to be on the other end of the line in England. But her genuine excitement was infectious and it was nice to hear what a great time she was having in Australia, so all was forgiven and I quietly put the tyre lever down. Eventually silence fell across the park, allowing us to get to sleep.

Cooktown, Queensland, Australia

From Cairns we headed to Cooktown on Cape York Peninsula, stopping for awhile just to the north of Cairns at beautiful Palm Cove. This is a great palm-fringed sandy beach lined with modern apartments. This would be a great place for a quiet beach holiday and many people here were having just that. But we carried on to Cooktown about 350 km to the north where we stayed for nearly a week, walking and fishing. This was our first visit to Cooktown and we were pleasantly surprised by the place. It is a more substantial town than we were expecting and it is located at a physically beautiful spot where the wide mangrove-fringed Endeavour River flows into the Coral Sea. In 1770, Lt James Cook on board his ship the HM Bark Endeavour was in desperate need of safe haven and he beached the vessel here, naming the river after his ship. The ship and crew remained here for seven weeks while repairs were carried out. On board was the botanist Joseph Banks and staff who busied themselves collecting Australian flora specimens. Surprisingly for a town of its relatively small size, Cooktown has its own botanical garden with one section containing specimens of all the trees and bushes collected and described by Banks.

Cooktown had its heyday 100 years after Cook was here when alluvial gold was discovered on the Palmer River in the 1870s, sparking a regional gold rush. The town’s population swelled to several thousand to service the approximately 15,000 people on the goldfields. Like most gold rushes, few prospectors struck it rich and the only ones to make a fortune were the hotel keepers and carriers. A legacy of the gold rush days are some very fine colonial buildings particularly the hospital that functioned for a century after opening in the late 1870s and is now a Jehovah’s Witness Church.

We fished at nearby Archer Point, battling strong winds and keeping a close eye on the water’s edge as salt water crocodiles live along the whole coast and river banks here.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/30/2378215.htm

Fortunately we saw no crocs but we did see several sea turtles cruising around the bay. We caught some good fish including a large mangrove jack and silver trevally, and Lee Tuan hauled in what looked a lot like a monster garfish and which we later identified as a Long Tom.

We stayed at a motel/backpackers joint, sharing the kitchen each night with an interesting group of people including young Japanese and German visitors who were working as pickers in a nearby banana plantation to save extra money before moving south to snorkel on the Great Barrier Reef and to hike in the Daintree Rainforest. Cooktown has a very pleasant laid-back atmosphere and the air was warm despite it now being mid-winter. No doubt, though, it can get very uncomfortable here in the height of summer. We looked longingly at a detailed map of Cape York Peninsula to the north and the many seemingly interesting places we had never heard of, and the great fishing spots that must exist along the 1,000 km of coastline between here and Cape York, the most northerly point in Australia. The Peninsula is 14 million hectares of savanna country and rainforest, with 21 big wild rivers that feed vast wetlands and mangroves. You could spend months here and barely scratch the surface.

Cairns, Queensland, Australia

After a 4,500 km drive from Mt Gambier, and two more overnight stops, at Injune and Charters Towers, we arrived in Cairns in far north Queensland on Wednesday afternoon 6 August with a full day to spare before the wedding. We last came to Cairns a few years ago when we brought our teenage children here for a tropical beach holiday. One of the highlights then was a day boat trip out to the Great Barrier Reef just off the coast where we snorkeled over the colourful coral amongst tropical fish.

The wedding was at high noon last Friday at the groom’s house in Kuranda, a beautiful rainforest village in the mountains 30 kilometres west of Cairns. The nuptials went very well with my zany niece ensuring it was a fun day to remember. The food was great; much of it from the warm Coral Sea not far to the east. We spent a few more days in Kuranda walking in the stunning rainforest that forms part of Queensland’s World Heritage Wet Tropics Area. We hiked to the Barron River Falls and happened to be there when the Kuranda to Cairns Scenic Railway train came through and stopped for 20 minutes at the Barron River Falls stop. Several hundred passengers from many different nations spilled off the train and put their digital cameras through their paces before returning to the carriages and leaving us alone on the platform as the train commenced its descent down the Barron River Gorge and on to Cairns.

On Tuesday we made the descent ourselves, stopping at Cairn’s northern beaches to do some grocery shopping before booking into a motel near the esplanade. After the oppressive heat and humidity of Guangzhou and the wintry cold of southern Australia, it was very pleasant sitting by the barbecue tonight in shorts and sandals in warm air carrying just a hint of pleasant balminess. One of the things we always miss in China is fresh ocean fish. Now in Cairns with our own wheels, and fishing gear in the boot, that’s a deficiency we now hope to address. Intensively.

Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, Australia

We were looking forward to continuing our wanderings around China for another three months; there are many places we’ve yet to see. But a few weeks ago we received an invitation to attend a niece’s wedding in Queensland, Australia, and we accepted. So after a few days in Guangzhou following our return from Macau, instead of boarding a train to Xiamen on China’s east coast we caught a flight to Melbourne, Australia, arriving at 7am on a chilly winter’s morning. We had six hours to wait for our next travel connection, and to pass the time we caught a local commuter train to South Yarra station from where we went for a bracing stroll along Chapel Street, one of Melbourne’s clothing outlets. Even with the ubiquitous 75% winter sale discounts though, prices were still about 300% higher than Guangzhou so we weren’t tempted to buy anything. But we did buy some fruit at the excellent nearby Prahran produce market where everything for sale was fresh and bright. By 1pm we were back at the Southern Cross Station in Spencer Street, on board the train leaving for Warrnambool in western Victoria.

Once past Geelong we glided through cold green countryside and further on travelled along the coast with nice ocean views through the large clear train windows. In Warrnambool we transferred to a coach for the final leg to Mount Gambier in the south east corner of South Australia. There we picked up our car in storage at my father’s house and after a day to get organized we set off for Queensland. We had overnight stops at Adelaide, Cobar, and last night at Lightning Ridge in northern New South Wales. We had never been to Lightning Ridge before and we spent a couple of hours looking through a few of the many shops that sell the product this town is famous for – black opal. Like most opal mining towns, Lightning Ridge has more than its share of eccentric personalities, resulting in some weird structures and signs around town.

After the chaos of China’s traffic, the last few days have been very pleasant travelling in our own car on quiet outback roads under an enormous bright blue sky. What traffic there has been has been predictable and careful. That is, apart from that very silly wild pig that tried to outrun a road train at presciently named Big Dinner Creek. True, the large heavy load of steel pipes increased the probability of a successful crossing, but when that proved to be a massive miscalculation, the subsequent rapid-fire pummeling by 40 sets of weighed-down wheels ensured that the pig emerged from the experience rather disconnected from reality. And a ready-made meal for the appreciative carrion eaters that swooped the instant the slipstream abated. We had no culinary designs on the flattened porker ourselves – it was $10 Tuesday at Eagle Boys' Pizzas and we had artichokes and kalamata olives on our minds.