Airlie Beach

I know, I know - it’s been a while - but we’ve been on a boat and on the road! My journal after Mission Beach is pretty sketchy for a couple of days - Nov. 16 “Drove to Townsville”; Nov. 17 “Drove away from Townsville”. We stayed at quite a nice campsite which turned out to be bordered by an Air Force Base, an industrial park and a very noisy main road. We have since met 3 other couples who also have the same entries in their journals who stayed in the same camp ground! We were actually offered free tickets to Magnetic Island (just off Townsville) given to us by a Calgary couple who were so anxious to leave, that they were prepared to pass over their ferry tickets! But we were keen to get on the road to Airlie Beach, so we gave the tickets to the camp ground guy and waved goodbye.
We stopped just south of Townsville to go to the Billabong Sanctuary (wild-life park affair). They adopt orphaned koalas, wombats etc. and they did a very nice job of introducing us to all the animals. I had never met a wombat face to face before - they are quite large with fearsome looking claws and are apparently more intelligent than koalas which just lie about and eat leaves and sleep all day. The one we met was called Wilhomena and her life’s ambition for that day was to chew through her keeper’s steel-toed boot. Apart from the marsupials, there were lots of birds (cassowaries also are enormous!), crocodiles (ditto) and other assorted animals.
We arrived in Airlie Beach (mainland off the Whitsunday islands) in the late afternoon and drove to the delightful-sounding campground I had found in the Lonely Planet, but it was quite a way out of town, so we turned around and went to one closer in. When I went in to register, the guy asked me if I minded the schoolies. Maybe my accent was a give-away, but he kindly explained that for about 2 weeks at this time of year (summer here, in case you needed reminding!) the grade 12s (schoolies) migrate to the beaches to get drunk and party (this is BEFORE their final exams??!!) His campground welcomed schoolies, but he evidently thought that maybe someone of my advanced age might not appreciate being next door to partying teenagers. So back we went to the original camp ground which was lovely (yes, there was an aerodrome behind us, but only for helicopters and pleasure planes!) It was very beautiful - lovely gardens, palm trees and tons of birds and assorted wild life. We stayed there for about 4 days and they baby-sat our van while we went on an overnight sail boat trip which unfortunately wasn’t an unqualified success. For a start, they advertised snorkeling (diving in Queensland is out for John at the moment) but we discovered on getting to the boat that they did not allow fins (to protect the reef, which kind of stuck in our throats when other boats turned up with hoards of tourists all flapping their fins madly and standing on the coral) and you had to wear a stinger suit to protect you from the dreaded jellyfish. So lots of extra buoyancy and no fins meant that even John couldn’t get his head much below the water. You can imagine how thrilled he was about that! Plus the visibility was poor, the captain was new to the boat etc. etc. etc. On the plus side, the other 10 people were all 30ish European couples who all spoke excellent English so the company was good and we had a very nice sail back on the second day and the scenery was spectacular. ‘nuff said! Onwards and upwards (or downwards in our case as we’re heading south). Which leads me to another interesting quirk in our travels. The guide book is for East Coast Australia, assuming that you are traveling south - north. We, of course, are going the other way, so I’m trying to read everything backwards, starting from the end of the book and working towards Sydney. I seem to have got the hang of it and we have managed to find some interesting little places. Yesterday we stayed at Capricorn Caves just north of Rockhampton and did a tour of the caves which were quite amazing. They were found in 1890-something and were originally explored using only candle light. Our guide took us quite deep into the cave system into the Cathedral Cave (no bats there for some reason, but we saw thousands on our way through other caves). It really did look like a cathedral and people even get married there (a bit creepy we thought!) The acoustics are almost perfect and we listened to a CD of Anya (sp?) who has a glorious voice - really beautiful. Then the guide asked us if we wanted to “see” what it would have been like for the original finder of the caves with his one little candle, so of course we said yes. He then blew the candle out (he did warn us first!) and I don’t think I have ever experienced such total darkness. And of course we were a long way underground so I was glad when he lit the candle again! He also asked us if we wanted to do the zig zag and Hartley said yes before we even knew what it was! It turned out to be a narrow slit in the rock that zig zags you out of the cave. The guide gives you a candle (and a lighter!), cheerily says he’ll see you on the other side, and off you go! It actually wasn’t that bad, but glad I don’t have even a whiff of claustrophobia! Of course there were all kinds of amazing rock formations - curtains, stalactites and mites and fig tree roots that grow hundreds of meters down through the rock to find moisture.
We are now at Mon Repos, a tiny little place just east of Bundaberg where there is a loggerhead turtle rookery. We are booked to go on a turtle watch tonight to see the females come and lay their eggs. The eggs don’t hatch until January unfortunately as that would be amazing to see the little turtles make their run for the sea. Our campground is right on the beach and the weather has turned today (rain for the first time since we’ve had the van) so almost everyone else has abandoned ship!