Road Trip!!!

Right! Ok, so after the hippie music festival I headed further north to the so-called "gold coast" in a car with Ammon and Sarah. The Gold Coat is an infamous sport for surfing and partying, the epicentre of which is ata place called "Surfer's Paradise", it used to be called Elkton or something but when it didn't bring in enough tourists it changed its name to be called after the nearest hotel, Surfer's Paradise, and has never looked back! It is now the Miami equivalent here with high rise buildings, malls, bars and many ways to part with cash. Oh and a big gold beach with surf. Thats what I hear at least because we stayed just down the coast from surfers in a very sophisticated apartment of a friend of Sarah's who doe something well payed in supermarkets and while she started work at a new job we fully took advantage of her new pool and beach location :)

We used the time on the gold coast there (Palm Beach to be specific) to decide on our routes onwards. I had left Sydney with the aim of seeing what turned up, Ammon had a car to return to Sydney (as he was weirdly uninsured to drive in a different state! Which incidently also has an hours time difference despite being on the same longitude) and Sarah had a one-way bus ticket to Cairns. My dilemma was that I wanted to go North but was wary of getting stuck in Cairns, 4000km from Sydney with only very expensive routes back! I decided to sign up for a car relocation for the hire company Apollo who needed a car delivered to Cairns in 4 days and would pay up to $250 of fuel and give me the car for free to do it! Luckily Sarah took pity and decided to accompany me and so we set off for Brisbane the next day to pick up the car.

After taking the wrong turn out of the train station 3 times on the way to the hire place we finally picked up our car (named WOU after a distinctive number plate) and invested $10 per day for a sat nav that we named Berty, who was not always on the ball and certainly easily confused but I'm sure meant well. The car was a shiney air conditioned automatic Toyota with cruise control, by far the slickest number I have ever driven and it certainly felt like backpacking in style! We took along our tent and provisions and stopped off first at the Galss House Mountains. Tese are a very distinctive land formation that look not much like mountains but are names after the glass houses in Kent apparently. They rise with vertical sides out of a completely flat plane and are apparently volcanic plugs in old tectonic hotspots which thousands of years ago were the same height as the land around them but now that land has sunk they remain like great volcanic posts on the landscape.

That nigh we set up camp in Bundaberg, a small sea-side town infamous here as the brand name for a large percentage of the nations alcoholic beverages. Howver we were more interested in the loggerhead turtles who lay there eggs on its beaches and once it was dark we went over to sign up for a $10 trip down to watch. It was an incredible sight to see the huge (100kg) turtle lay its eggs, then thoroughly bury them and return to the sea (it all took about an hour and she laid over 100 eggs) although we did share the experience with about 40 other keen spectators!

In the morning we headed off early with great ambitions to arrive at Eungella National Park, inland from the Whitsundays, another 600km or so up the coast. We also took our lunch break at Rockhampton where we visited our firts Aboriginal Cultural centre where apart from having a good chat with some aboriginees we were given a personal didgereedoo recital and taught to throw a boomerang! (Well at least made a start). From there we went on up to some well-regarded caves where we were given a tour round by someone clearly just out of the girl guides and learnt about how some people get married in the caves there which could only summon Miss Havisham style imagery! The cherry on top though was that walking out I saw my first wild kangaroos and wallabies (smaller kangaroos) which was very exciting!

The next 350km up to Eungella certainly felt long, and unfortunately Sarah's driving liscence had expired leaving me to cover all the miles with a steady supply of coke and cheese straws for focus. After a very unfortunate hour detour due to missing a sign post we arrived at the Platypus Bushcamp an enchanting little campsite in the middle of the forest! Unfortunately despite our 80km detour the platypus that we got up at 5.30am to look for did not appear...possibly because a barramundi fish presented itself instead but we just cant be sure! Still, with less mileage to do the next day we chilled out in rubber rings at the water hole there for a happy while before hitting the road again this time aiming for Townsville, the capital of Far North Queensland, for no more particular reason than being in the right place. We arrived and found fpr the first time we were not the only campers and actually had to share the site with others! It is strange thing here that actually there are so many amazing things in Australia that there never seem to be many people at each one...they are simply too spread out! After a very long walk into town the main highlight was a race up a giant spiders wed climbing frame on the beach there and a very nice esplanade!

On our final day we set out at 8am giving us time to visit Mission Beach before returning the car to Cairns. The beach was a beautiful secluded spot and on getting out our lovely AC car we realised we had finally reached the tropics! Palm trees and rainforest surrounded us and we also enjoyed some thai noodles from a little local market. We delivered the car just about on time and after a whistle stop tour of the coats and alot of fun had arrived at our destination!