Toowoomba to Perth: Section 3

Day Six: Mackay to Cardwell

Started rather late in terms of travel as I was madly writing up my memoirs for my own peace of mind (don’t want to forget anything) and because it was the last time I would have “free” Internet for the trip. It dawned beautiful, brilliant searing sunshine in an azure sky, a little of that pregnant cumulus so common to the tropics that, if it joined with its mates would surely end in a downpour of titanic proportions.

Ultimately a joyful day for a drive. Dear Susie from the motel again told me to use the numbers I had – I must stay at her place when I was in Cairns. “Ok” I promised, got myself together and headed off.

The drive to Airlie Beach was typical to the area and you’ve heard me wax lyrical about it before… sugarcane fields as far as you bother to look, now interspersed with prospects focused on the banana palm; row upon row, falsely bejewelled by plastic bags in traffic-stopping blues, reds, greens, yellows, wrapped hopefully around gigantic unripe hands of fruit.

In the background however was now the endless majestic unfolding rainforest ranges and mountains of this part of the country. Words simply do no justice to the deep grey-asparagus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_green) green monolithic backdrop transposing a sharp, irregular silhouette against the blue azimuth. It is just extraordinary. The words I do not possess to explain the Hawkesbury river region or the northern NSW hinterland would also suffice here. Breathtaking, orgasmic (thanks Lonely Planet for this fine descriptor).

This is also true of the drive into Airlie Beach. Now I’d heard about this place from my backpacker conversations in years gone by so I felt compelled to take this 50km detour from my original destination to satisfy my curiousity. Is it, I wondered, like Byron Bay? All talk and hype, absolute cheese-fest in reality.

Yep.

Nice countryside surrounding, as already explained, and Shute Harbour is lovely but Airlie Beach itself is typically over-populated with tourist-focused enterprises and neon signs. And tourists. More “Wicked” campers, “Hippie Camper”s, Grey Nomads, Wealthy Wanker Boat Owners and sunburnt backpackers than you could poke a stick at. While very pretty, given the vast stretches of coastline fore and aft that would do just the same job, I asked myself “Why would ya?”. And I mean, why would so many people all go to the one place to “get away from it all?”. All of the travellers you basically try to avoid flock to a place like Airlie Beach.

Nuff said, I’m outy. Next stop was Cardwell, me with no mobile coverage praying like hell that it didn’t turn out like Mackay – no room for no apparent reason. But, I thought, Cardwell is about 5 minutes (ok more like 1 hour with no Nomads) from Mission Beach which was my next scheduled destination, and my tent was dry so I had some choices, unlike when I was in Mackay.

So out of Airlie Beach in high spirits, through a few little nothingsvilles and swinging West a little way into the drier bits of the countryside I bent through Bowen – funny little place with tidal flows of the impressive kilometric variety. When I went through it was low tide so I can tell ya, it’s true. Nothin but claypan stretching for ages, signs pointing improbably to boat ramps and fishing spots, and the elevated highway running right through it.

After Bowen the next Worth-a-Mention is Ayr and I could hang up my hat in that little joint. Really pretty, flame trees festooned with flowers, diffienbachia, spathyphillum, cordyline, elephant ears and staghorns growing in every opportunity, palm trees of a hundred differentiations, blooming waterlilies in the dams and waterways, rich, dark, damp soil, impossibly green buffalo grass, typical tropicalia. People are happy to pass the time of day, wide streets, little traffic, beautiful beach within spitting distance, really terrific. Probably too slow for some, but I knew I would like it.

Shame in some ways that I wasn’t staying, but not so bad in others. After a fuel stop in Ayr my journey would take me through Ingham and the nearby state forest mountain passes and into Cardwell which, by the way, is the gateway town to Hinchinbrook Island.

I can see why they make chickens in Ingham, there ain’t a thing else to talk about. Between Ayr and Ingham, though, I saw some of the most beautiful late afternoon weather phenomena I have ever witnessed.

I didn’t mention previously that when I was coming back from Eungella it was spitting a little and the end of a rainbow appeared in the fields just in front of me. That is the closest I remember ever being to a rainbow and it made that day give me a warm glow. This was similar, only more so due to the spectacular vista. It was raining sunshine.

Picture: the Herbert River Gorge section of the Girringun National Park rising up and winding around me in stark contrast to the flat land, bright green sugar-cane fields through which I was actually passing, purple-grey cloud misting the mountain-tops and darkening the sky behind, sun hidden behind early banks of cloud prefixed to the fore of the mountains then bursting, not in the rays that are often seen, but a sheet of light painting its glow onto the sun-side of the Ranges.

This amazing sight happened twice that afternoon, due to the ever-shifting flow of the cloud, sun and geography. This was a good cap to a bad even-later afternoon event, a tired personage (me) stuck behind some really annoying drivers, then hitting the Townsville traffic.

I hardly saw any of Townsville and if that is the way it is when I die I’ll be ok with it. Just didn’t like it at all so I breathed a great sigh of relief when I finally left it behind. After that was just more driving through Significant Environmental Areas (they are thoughtfully signed by the EPA so you know just what your car exhaust fumes are destroying) until reaching Cardwell.

Gateway to Hinchinbrook yes, individual claim to fame – nil. Cardwell is just nowhere. Has a couple of restaurants, a Caltex, some houses, the railway line to Cairns cutting the town into two halves that is the only reason for more than one road (apart from the Bruce Highway), the Reef to Rainforest Information and Education centre, couple of backpackers and Port Hinchinbrook so the Rich Wankers can park their sea-faring Symbols of Decadence somewhere when they aren’t swanning around Hinchinbrook itself.

Needing company I decided to stay at a backpacker and got the last bed in the place. Lucky me, this was a 16-bed unisex dorm and the majority of the stayers were working-visa backpackers. But the people that ran it were the nicest you could imagine and Narine (the owner) said that I was lucky because I was an Australian girl. If I was an Australian boy she would have turned me down.

“Girls,” she said “are touring. Boys are running away from something. Debt, bad relationship, crime, whatever. They’re bad news. They’re really rude to the other guests and they often have a drinking problem. If I get them work, they end up losing job after job because their attitude is bad.”

“Well, I’m really glad I’m a girl today.” I smiled as she gave me a sheet and pillow (yes friends, that’s all we need to sleep in comfort in the tropics IN JUNE!!). Sorted, showered, got a beer and sat down to read my book (Carpentaria by Alexis Wright – excellent yarn a propos when travelling in steamier (not kinky) parts of the globe).

Ended up, as you do, talking to some English and a Danish girl. The Danish girl was doing her gap year and there was no telling her anything. She knew it all, except whether it was really safe to travel in Malaysia. She was believing the LP telling her that because it was a Muslim country and she was a lone female traveller she would run into trouble. I said to her “If you go looking for trouble you will find it. A bit of respect for customs, such as not wearing very revealing clothing, covering your shoulders and wearing say, knee length clothes, and you will be alright. And stay away from protests and political gatherings”.

“Oh, I will find that sort of thing by accident” she said. “Sure, and if you do you probably want to unfind it as soon as possible, that’s all” I said. She smiled and then started talking about the CIA having a secret base in Alice Springs à anyone can jump in here and correct this fantasy?

The English had scored themselves *cough* plum jobs in the prawn factory. The bloke was just making sure enough prawns went into X bin, then hauling X bin off to Y sorting machine 100 times a day. His need to handle or be in any way involved with the prawns was minimal. Alternatively she had the super task of sorting. As the prawns came down the shute in loads that went “splat” (so she said) and on to the conveyor belt, she had to remove ones with black patches, blood spots and rottenness. Obviously the former could be achieved with a visual check alone, but the latter required one to push into the prawn with a finger. When a prawn was proper rotten, not just a bit rotten, you knew about it because it would explode into your face, she said.

I had stopped drinking my beer by now. “How much do they pay you?” I asked, thinking this was a rort of criminal proportions.

“Good money, $17 per hour regular, $20 on weekends and public holidays and $33 overtime. But the job is dead boring, and when you actually talk about it, it’s pretty fucked up. My brain goes numb with the repetition and you know, you can’t even talk to the regular workers there because all they talk about is prawns!! Some of them have been working there for 25 years!”

“How do you stay sane?”

“I’m not sure that I have a particularly strong grasp on reality these days” said the bloke and she nodded. “I’m already dreaming prawns and I’ve only been doing it two weeks” she said.

What these people will do for their second year visa is terrible. I later talked to a guy from Korea who was doing banana harvesting and he said that his problem was the baskets were too heavy for him to carry, which is understandable because they can weigh 60 - 80kg per bunch. Another English girl said that she liked working in the banana fields but they had put her in the factory so now she didn’t see the sunlight all day and all she did was sort bananas into sizes, put them in bunches and put the bunches in boxes.

A hundred times better than the prawn factory, I pointed out and she didn’t disagree.

The main problems are these workers/travellers are 1) pretty green, mostly gap year students and such with 2) no knowledge of what working conditions to expect in Australia 3) little knowledge of minimum working conditions in their own country 4) desperate to stay in Australia for longer 5) fairly wide-eyed to life experience and therefore capacity to sniff out danger or dodginess, 6) forced, by the stipulations for a second visa, to work in the primary industries.

Anyway this sobering conversation then turned, as happens when a gaggle of English find themselves travelling in Australia, to Neighbours and I vacated for some shut-eye.

Day Seven: Cardwell to Mission Beach/Dunk Island

Next day I headed out of Cardwell to Mission Beach, home of the Cassowary and you will, while you are in Mission Beach, never forget it. The signs telling you not to run them over are every couple of hundred metres on the roadside and (because this is Queensland) there is a very Big Cassowary at the entrance to the town. I was talking to a tour guide (native) who advised that there are only 55 – 60 Cassowary in the entire Mission Beach/Tully area, yet it has the highest population of the birds per square kilometre of any place on Earth. Correct! for your green Trivial Pursuit slice, they are endangered therefore not hitting them with your car is good for non-travel-delay-related, tree-hugging, ecosensitive reasons.

At this stage I have not even seen a Cassowary and no that doesn’t mean I didn’t see the one that made an imprint in my bumper. Apparently, they are also on par with Emus in terms of road sense so with that piece of knowledge, the road signs and my eco-friendly leanings I’ll expect the unexpected and be really really careful if one appears.

Anyway, back to Mission Beach because the in-between doesn’t have much to say that hasn’t been written before. Only thing that I haven’t talked about is the sugar factories.

These examples of functional, to-hell-with-aesthetics architecture belch their steamy, brown-sugar/burning grass/molasses fumes over anything downwind for miles. Their invariably rusted, corrugated iron exteriors are an eyesore and a blight on the landscape, not to mention the assault on the nose. But, they are the backbone of the towns in these areas, and the amenities that also support the towns to function (e.g., supermarkets, petrol stations, banks) do not and would not exist only for the whimsy and convenience of the fickle tourist. So this tourist is not actually complaining, rather, reporting.

Again, promises, back to the beach. You must come here. Fantastic little hideaway hamlet, proximal to Dunk Island (yeah, yeah, it’s a tropical island. Nice beaches, nice rainforested mountains, completely monopolised by the Voyages Dunk Island Resort). Mission Beach has the most kick-ass Great Barrier Reef snorkelling/diving you can get if you don’t live in FNQ and own a boat.

Day Eight: Mission Beach and Great Barrier Reef

And speaking of such things, that’s what I did today. What a great gig, easily one of the most satisfying and interesting things I have ever done. I love snorkelling and the range of fish, coral, starfish, sea slugs, cephalapods and other marine life is incredible.

It is quite evident that there are large patches of dead and dying coral, the colours are also nothing to talk about, mostly brown and grey. Nothing like the iridescent pink, peacock blue, radiating green and vibrant yellow of the reef I saw in Thailand.

But the captain of our boat was adamant that he has seen tracts of the Reef die and regenerate over the 25 years he has been living and working the area, and that if the coral just kept growing we would be sailing through it instead of swimming to see it. He also said that the water temperature (mean) two years ago was 32°C and last year it was 28°C but you never heard anyone talking about the water getting cooler instead of warmer, so he thinks the whole coral bleaching, global warming conversation is a load of horseapples.

*Sigh* probably still gets all his shopping in plastic bags too….

Well whatever the argument, I was really excited by the numbers and variety of things that you could swim with, around, under and through, but the coral itself looked a bit sad.

And that, other than many random conversations with backpackers and other travellers (who are impressively more up to speed with the whole environmental debate than I had ever imagined could be possible for people from all walks of life and corners of the globe), is it for now.

Next stops are the Atherton Tablelands and Daintree, so stay tuned!!