and back home again

[hnpcc]

Saturday in Bundaberg we lazed around and then did a cruise up the Burnett River to Bundaberg Port and back. Very relaxing, very quiet, lots of birds, lots of mangroves. I like mangroves, even if I'm not sure how you'd walk on them in bare feet. And they harbour crocodiles further north, which always worries me a bit. We also saw the Botanical Gardens and the zoo in Bundaberg - the zoo worried me a bit, mostly because the enclosures didn't seem quite big enough for some of the animals (specifically the deer). The deer were also in a very bare enclosure. The crocs seem to have gone since I was last there though. The botanical gardens have millions upon millions of birds. Everywhere. Ibises, ducks, geese.. it was insane. They also had rather a lot of spiders, so when Dean was sufficiently freaked out that he couldn't go near buildings or trees we had to move on.


The trip out to the reef the following day was fantastic. We had a reasonably calm sail out, saw dolphins!, did a walk around Lady Musgrave Island, saw turtles! from the glass bottom boat, saw many, many multicoloured fish from the semi-submersible boat, fed the fish (which got really large - honestly, it always amazes me how large fish get. You see tuna, and they're huge. Not that we saw tuna there of course, they're a cold water fish IIRC), and then went snorkelling around the reef itself.

Well, tried to. I was mostly fine, but Dean couldn't get the mask to fit properly around his large schnozz and so eventually gave up and gossiped with the dive guys instead. Me? I snorkelled happily for a couple of hours. The lagoon was a bit choppy at that stage (apparently there were waves of 15-20 knots forecast, for those who can follow such things) and the shallow waters meant that there was quite a bit of wave action happening across the lagoon itself. For me that mostly meant that I was occasionally having trouble keeping my head and my feet in the water at the same time, something which is kind of necessary if you want to continue moving while snorkelling. I still managed to attempt to take photos of many, many fish and coral and probably the ocean floor given that I was having enough trouble staying in roughly one spot to take the photo let alone actually look properly through the viewfinder. We'll see what I actually have photos of when I get the pictures back!

The trip back started off being a bit of a theme park ride, but then became almost dead calm for the last hour and a half. Unfortunately a bit too late for a couple of the Chinese tourists, who probably needed more anti-seasickness medication a bit earlier. I've discovered that I'm OK with nausea as long as the horizon stays stable. When the horizon starts moving around, that's when I get really dizzy. And we didn't see whales, despite my best efforts. Apparently they saw a few humpbacks heading north the week before, but we weren't quite that lucky.


Monday we started heading south again. First though we went up the top of the Hummock, which is an extinct volcano hump just out of Bundy and looked at the beautiful view. The Hummock site was originally bought by the RACQ, and was given to the Shire of Bundaberg back in the 60s. The Shire promptly showed their appreciation by giving planning permission for an absolute monstrosity of a house which blocks off a third of the view. Seriously? Onya guys. *sigh* The other two thirds is beautiful - it's just a shame they allowed building exactly where they did.

I should point out at this stage that I can be a bit of a sad fan. Therefore it was absolutely totally necessary for me to go to Underwater World
in Mooloolaba. It was great. They have a tunnel which goes under the shark/stingray enclosure. We went around it about 3 times, then stayed to watch the feeding. One thing about the tunnel is that it reduces the size of what you see by about 30%. So watching the feeding from the side non-reducing panel meant that we were freaked out by the absolute size of the sharks and rays all over again. They were huge. The rays also were the most efficient feeders I'd seen: a dead squid landed near where we were and this giant swimming carpet just swooshed over it and then a few minutes later swooshed off again. Squid gone. In the interim there were lots of other rays trying to push it off, but to no avail. Gorgeous. :)

Underwater world also had the daggiest seal show I've ever seen, called Seals behaving badly. Heh. And stingray feeding (feel the stingray!), and otters. And - possibly not at all surprisingly - fish. Millions of them. Well hundreds at least.

We stayed until dark, then kept heading south till we hit the Gold Coast. It being the off-season, we managed to get reasonably priced accommodation in Surfers Paradise - unfortunately we didn't think to go a bit further out for reasonably priced food. Oh well. It was good food at least, and we did manage to ignore the desperate spruikers trying to get us in the door every 5 minutes.


The original plan was to get up at 7am so I could go swimming. What actually happened was that I slept happily through the alarm, and by the time I woke up, got ready and looked at my watch we didn't have time to go swimming and get back before we had to check out again. So we packed up, checked out and headed down the beach anyway. Surfers Paradise has a beautiful beach. It's absolutely huge, it reminded me a lot of the beach at Santa Monica in LA in that respect. And of course it being off season and virtually no one there helped. ;-) For the first time though I really understood why people go to Surfers. (Granted the last time I went there it was pouring rain, so I don't think I appreciated the beach anywhere near as much as I could have.) We mooched along the Gold Coast to Coolangatta, where I finally went swimming while Dean sat on the beach and read.

The surf was fantastic. There was a massive undertow though - I kept being pulled off the sandbar which I was standing on and moved back a couple of metres into the deeper water. And there were schools of fish in the waves. I dunno, I've been swimming at surf beaches since I was about 10, and I don't remember ever seeing schools of fish actually in the surf before. As the waves were rising up to break you could see them moving back off the wave front even. That's not to say the fish aren't at Victorian surf beaches, it probably just means that Bass Strait is too murky and I don't see them as much. The gulls were going ballistic about another 5 metres out trying to get the fish. I just bodysurfed and floated and got really, really sandy. Did I worry about sharks? Nah, couldn't be bothered. After all, there were enough fish to distract them. :-)

After I'd finally decided that I'd had enough and got changed we continued across the border into NSW. We actually missed the border entirely, it's somewhere between Coolangatta and Tweed Heads but we were too busy trying to work out where the highway was to notice any signs up anywhere. We stopped for lunch at Ballina (hi barrington!) which struck me as being quite a nice town (Lonely Planet begged to differ, calling it boring and ugly?!?) then continued through alternating bush and sea views down to Coffs Harbour. No, we didn't stay because of the big banana, we were just tired. :-)


More southerly mooching the next day, with stops in Sawtell, Taree and just outside Port Macquarie. You'd think by now I'd know not to fill up at service centres: talk about overpriced. Even so, I was pretty surprised that the Service Centre was 115.9, when literally an hour down the road in both directions was 110.1. Hm. Still - there are some absolutely huge rivers in this part of the world, and I think we crossed all of them. I'm beginning to understand why people don't accept the Yarra as an actual river when it's not in flood.

We came to Newcastle at around 3ish, and decided to go into town to get something to eat. Big mistake. I'm sure there are lots of lovely areas of Newcastle, but where we ended up was... surreal. Every second shop was a kitschy aromatherapy yuppie-type shop. Every other shop was boarded up with graffiti everywhere. We couldn't for the life of us find a food shop. There were very few signs. We ended up parking at David Jones, which had the worst parking I have ever seen a major department store provide. The spaces were too small. Given the size of my car, that's an achievement. We went into DJs, couldn't find a shop listing anywhere, managed to find the street and an ATM, still couldn't find a food shop and finally gave up and went to retrieve the car. And there were still no signs in DJs. Not even to the car park.

"I think it's Newcastle" said Dean. "They don't believe in signs".

We eventually managed to get back out of the non-CBD and on to the highway through the now picking up traffic. Following the badly marked route (I'm serious, it was very oddly marked. Signs just vanished, and then you'd continue until finally you saw a sign pointing you back in the other direction. Wierd.) we got back on the highway and headed down towards Sydney.

The one and only other time I've been to Queensland I drove back from Bundaberg to Sydney in one day with one other driver (hi Adam!) By the time we hit the last stretch between Newcastle and Sydney it was quite late (around 10pmish), totally black and we were both pretty tired. My main memory of that stretch of road is of there being a lot of twisty bends, with sheer drops and overshoot ramps. So I wasn't really looking forward to doing it again. Particularly in the dark. As it turned out we hit that section of the highway just before sunset, so we had a lot of beautiful views of green bush, orange and pink tinged rivers and glowing stone. Oh and they've entirely redone that section of highway and taken out most of the scary bits (I only saw one overshoot ramp) mostly by driving the road literally through hills. I swear, if aliens ever come and look at us they're going to call us the road builders. These roads were... spectacular. And beautiful, in a very strange way. We crossed the Hawksbury (another huge river) and headed into Sydney with the dying light.

And of course ran straight into peak hour traffic.

That was interesting. We actually managed to avoid most of it by going around the city centre via Paramatta and then out to the Western suburbs. But the bits we did hit (around Paramatta and just before Campbellfield) were absolutely horrendous. On the positive side, we managed to find a good radio station. :-) We finally stopped for the night in Goulburn which, for no reason that I can think of offhand, has a lighthouse. A working lighthouse. On the hill as you come into the town. *shrug*


Setting off from Goulburn was interesting. When dusk fell the night before we were still on the outer outskirts of Sydney, and all around us was green and bushy. Goulburn on the other hand has been on stage 5 water restrictions for quite a while now and is dry. Very, very dry. It's like most of the colours have been leached out of the landscape, leaving only greys, faint yellows, browns and the grey-green of the eucalypt leaves. And the blue of the cloudless sky of course. It was quite a shock after days of being close to the coast where there's water to hit country where there really hasn't been any rain for a long time. And it continued like that all the way back down to Melbourne. (Just incidentally while I remember - Sydney's water supplies are at 39%. Shit. I thought Melbourne's were low - around 56% at the moment - but 39% is just incredible.) Goulburn was also where we noticed the first real drop in temperature from the north - it was -6oC overnight, quite a shock from the 25-26oC days we'd been having. We crossed the border and the Hume started resembling a real freeway (the NSW side is occasionally dual lane, goes through towns and is frequently two lanes only, whereas the Vic side is dual carriageway and separated the entire way) and we stopped having to slow for roadworks every 150km. I'm serious here, the Pacific Highway had works literally every 150-200km. You'd just have gotten used to doing 100kph and you'd be crawling along at 40 again, hoping that there'd be an overtaking lane ahead so you could stopping getting the diesel fumes from the truck ahead of you. On the other hand, it's supposed to all be finished in 10 years or so. ;-)

The trip ended at about 6pm. I went off to play netball. :-)

The summary? It was great. I want to do it again. And I'm definitely the water rat out of the pair of us.

And geez Melbourne's cold! Pictures (if there's any good ones) will come later. :-)

Comments

[epideme.livejournal.com]

Nice write up, I enjoyed reading it. How~s the soccer going:

[dalmeny]

Ah, snorkelling. I keep telling myself I'll do more of that.

I don't remember ever seeing schools of fish actually in the surf before

I've seen it a few times now, but dmw had to point them out at first. We saw garfish down at Aldinga (Adelaide's southernmost "suburb") for instance. And when we were on KI Quebecois-Australian Scientist caught a bunch of mullet out in the surf.

Isn't Goulburn close to Canberra than Sydney? Or are there two? This is the Big Merino town, right?

Very, very dry. It's like most of the colours have been leached out of the landscape, leaving only greys, faint yellows, browns and the grey-green of the eucalypt leaves.

I'll post a picture of Gum Flat soon. It's grey... but that's not all because of the drought though.

[hnpcc]

Isn't Goulburn close to Canberra than Sydney? Or are there two? This is the Big Merino town, right?

Yep, this is the big merino town on the turn off to Canberra. It has a lighthouse. :-) And a couple of total Shazzas talking loudly in the main street - *grin* not that I'm going to hold that against them.