Bundaberg: Cold Rock Ice Cream and relocating 137 Loggerhead Turtle eggs!

The place where Cook first landed, now called 1770.

At a roadhouse on the Bruce Highway, the owner enquired if we had any spare British money; I asked if she was visiting the UK soon. She said that she couldn’t travel, but had taken up the hobby of collecting overseas currency as a way of virtually visiting these countries. I grabbed a handful of my loose change from India, Nepal (yaks and rhinos on the notes), etc and she told me the story of how she was bitten by a white tip spider 3 years ago. She didn’t feel the bite, because the spider injects an enzyme to liquefy their prey. It had had the effect of rotting her ankle bone and cartilage from inside! Her doctor had suggested amputating her foot, but like lots of feisty Australians she had refused and tried alternative therapies which had improved her foot slowly. She thanked us for the cash with a family size pack of strawberry jelly frogs.

Tired turtled after laying 137 eggs and then having the energy to cover it up with sand.

At Baghara beach, just outside Bundaberg, we saw a shinny boulder above the lapping tide. Digs seeing the boulder was slowly moving, realised it was loggerhead turtle trying to make it's way onto the beach. Unfortuately a woman in a skimpy lilac bikini ran down and positioned herself next to it, for a kind of Hello! (on the beach with turtle) photo and it did a prompt U turn and headed back to sea.

Later, that evening we went to the next beach, Mon Repos, where there has been a turtle rockery under conservation for 40 years. Dr Col Limpus, an eminent turtologist (?) was there with some research students. We were called down to the beach around 9pm when 2 turtles had already come up onto the beach. We waited in the dark on beach for one turtle to progress further up the beach so as not to disturb her – their eye sight is similar to ours, but their hearing is not so good. 

We crouched around the back end of the turtle who had come back to her birth beach to nest. She was probably around 40 years old and had not been back since her birth. These turtles go down to Moreton Bay to feed and then have a little latino break in South America.

When our turtle had finished making the egg chamber, pausing for breathes along the way,(apparently they can fall asleep while doing it) she started popping out ping pong sized eggs .
Dr Limpus attached a new marker tag on her flipper as she poped out the eggs. Poor dear. Must be like having your ears pierced and giving birth at the same time. She wasn’t impressed and opened her beaky mouth into a F-word howl.

Dr Limpus' team dug a new egg chamber, a little higher up the beach, out of the way of a potential cyclones and we helped to move 137 eggs by hand. They will take around 8 weeks to hatch.

Only another 136 more eggs to relocate.

Like a ping pong ball, but squishy.

11th Birthday ice cream.

Bundaberg RSL. Quite liking the 50s vibe of this town.

A birthday isn't a birthday with a ride-on inflatable dino.

Whitsundays: Cape Hillsborough

After Bowen we continued down the Eastern seaboard to Cape Hillsborough; where a chap in a campervan shop in Cairns said he'd had Roos coming into his tent. Raz got an 11^th birthday present in a bait and tackle store in Prospertine. The fish shirt wearing owner gave Raz a great rod with a free reel; saying that we that we had caught him at a “weak moment”. There were varnished skulls of a “GT”, Golden Travelly and Spanish mackerel on the wall. Massive.

At Cape Hilsborough there are plenty of Ross.  There is a large grey Roo which grazes and lounges around and some wallabies, one with a joey, his little head involuntarily nodding as mum lurchers and lunches around. Occasionally he scraps soil and gets a bit of tucker if she lunges low enough. As we were finishing off our Spag B I noticed a little furry creature with a longish tail approach and over-sized eyes, like Puss in Skrek. Is it a tree kangaroo, a mouse kangaroo or a bush baby? It's very cute –and the kids all want one. We get our last apple, and offer it to the furry creature. It loves it. It loves us! It is so cute when it eats that we get a banana as well. A car drives by and the creature runs up the tree. We shine our torch up there and see that there are loads of cute furry creatures running up and down the branches.

A local woman who lives near Eungella, where the platapuses are and you get toads in your toilet, said it was a possum, possum. She told us that they shouldn't be fed - oppps - and that they get into everything. Later they get into our bucket of mangoes and start attacking the bins in team formation.

We spend Sunday morning catching up on kids school work – half and hour of groaning before we can actually get down to work - and then we walk over to Wedge Island, which hangs onto the tip of Cape Hilsborough by a sand causeway. On the way back, Raz and I, wanting a longer walk, started to walk out to turtle point along the bush track, but as usual got freaked out by all the crazy wildlife scurrying about in the bush; mainly lizards, but could be the puff ball adder or red bellied black snake. When we got back Bear managed to sing the whole of Elbow’s Grounds for Divorce whilst balancing on Raz’s shoulders in the pool. Not sure this counts as a literacy session.

Bowen: Baz, Nicole and Hugh loved Bowen...so will you!

All around Tully on the Bruce Highway there's still evidence of February's cyclone Yasi. Trees lining the road were snapped like pencils and one house stille had it's roof in the garden. We stopped off for some meat pies just opposite Hinchbrook Island in the Whitsundays.

Cyclone Yasi damage in the Whitsundays.

Sugar cane train.

Driving into Bowen, these days you are meeted and greeted with a huge bill board with Baz Luhrman, Nicole Kidman and Hugh's (surname?) smiling faces with the tag line, "Baz, Nic and Hugh loved Bowen – so will you!” It is a 30s town that stood in for Darwin in the film Australia a few years back (another film I fell asleep 3/4 way through). I took my bike and cycled up the wharf that the cattle ran along in the film!

Old police station that was used in the film.

Bowen is famous for it's Kensington Pride mangoes.
This Big Mango just outisde the town cost $90,000 to construct!

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Kuranda: cuddling koalas but not cassowarys (they're plain weird)

He's called Hogan. Yes, he is real.

Raz got to hold the 9kg Hogan: the most poppetiest poppet I have ever seen.

Hogan in profile. This koala knows how to work his face for the camera.

Wombat we love you, even though you are always too damm lazy to do anything apart from sleep.

Ying Yang Roos

Looking at You.

Looking for head.

Don't call me Dino-Bird.

Upalo Reef and doing a 360 in the Coral Sea

We got to our large Cat at Finger D on the wharf in Cairns for 7.45am to go out to Upalo Reef, a couple of hours off-shore. Breakfast was unpacked from our large blue plastic snorkelling trug; croissants, nutella and orange juice.

Derek gave us a lesson in sea creatures and coral. "It's easy to name coral: if it looks like a brain, it's brain coral, if it looks like a mushroom etc". Raz spotted a sea snake as we pulled up to the reef (Derek said they were really friendly, he had one wrapped around him once) and a green turtle come up for air by the boat. We snorkelled all morning and Digs did a dive after lunch and saw white tip reef shark. Raz, Bear and Digs saw a huge blue Maori Wrasse just before they gave their gear back and headed home.

On the way back to Cairns, Mark the boat owner let Bear steer the boat. He did ok, not that straight, but nothing compared to Magi, who was then given a go and turned the wheel so far to the right we ended up doing a 360 degree turn in the coral sea. I’m not sure what his other paying guests thought!

Derek giving us a lesson in the middle of the Coral Sea. Lovely chap. Used to work in the sugar cane fields and get chased by Taipans! No wonder he loves cuddly sea snakes.

Bunking off school for another day.

Magi and Bear.

Bear and a Giant Blue Star Fish.

Magi and me.

Bear at the helm.

Cooktown: apparently it's always this empty

The Mulligan Highway goes past the black opal mines and 3 black mountains to Cooktown; the end of the line these days for non-4WD vehicles

The first person we met In Cooktown was an old british man (from Newton Abbot originally)  who had claimed to heal many cancer sufferers using sellenium (farmer’s drench for animal pests) and black salve. He said that the Australian Gov had taken apricot kernel off the health food shop shelves to support the pharmetceutical companies and talked about the hospitals as being “killing fields”. He specially mentioned a visitor with throat cancer who he met while feeling low after chemo and he advised the sellenium treatment. The man came back after 6 weeks, after coughing up a big black pellet, and amazed his doctor by getting the all clear.

Cooktown Museum: shutting up for the afternoon. We were the only visitors that afternoon and had the Endeavour's anchor, log book and tree stump it was lashed to, to ourselves.

Rush hour in Cooktown.

Waiting for the giant Grouper to be reeled in.

Cooktown jetty.

We bushed camped again, 10km down a red dirt track, at Archer Point; a kind of croc heaven with mangroves, just south of Cooktown. After we parked up next to a small sandy cove, we cooked some lamb with heaps of rosemary. I bagged up the rubbish, including a wine bottle and stashed it under the van. Later, when I went out to do my teeth, I noticed that the bag had gone. There was quite a sea breeze which might have blown it away, then I remembered the wine bottle, so I got the filling station flashlight out to see it I could spot it. The bag was lying about 30m away on a grassy mound and a pair of large bright eyes lurked next to it. The creature backed off with the light. It turned out to be an oportunist dingo who clearly had a penchant for Italian style bbqed meat.

We left Cooktown, taking the Mulligan and then Kennedy Highway back to Cairns. We stopped for lunch at a roadhouse in Mount Molloy where, luckily for us, the menu and the prices were 20 years out of date. Steak pie, chips and gravy was still $5.50! As we walked in, Magi said “is this a gay bar? When we had sat down I asked her where she got that from. She said Paul; as in the alien comedy. Good to know that Pegg and Frost are educating our kids whilst on the road.

Cooktown Crossing: "Mummy, they're having terrapins for supper!"

Love this picture of Raz on the Cooktown Crossing.
Hadn't realised that it bore such a resemblance to the Napalm Photo from 'Nam at the time it was taken.

An ageless man, a kind of white aboriginal with a matted white beard and long hair, who'd been the bush warden here for 5 years, came and sat with us. His opening gambit, after he'd settled himself next to me by the camper and said hello to the kids, was “they’ve been massacres here!” Did he mean last weekend (we had a bbq and it all went horribly wrong, they bought Shiraz, not Pinot Noir) - or in Capt'n Cook's time?

It turned out that there was an "incident" between the white folk and the aborginals in the 1950s when 3 white children became ill and died over a period of 2 weeks. It was blamed on the local aboriginals and then 50 of them were killed in a revenge attack. This man, whose name we never found out, said it took him many years to get the full story out of a local woman, who had been a child at the time. He took up the offer of a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta marinara and then told the kids that it was fine to swim in the river. "It's full of crocs, but these freshies and are more scared of you. If you shine a light over the water at night you'll see their red eyes."

Raz and Bear collected dry wood and got a fire going for the night on the river bank under the gum trees. We met some local boys and their dads, that had come up for the weekend from Mossman. Raz and Bear were keen to find out what they were fishing for and trying to catch in their cages. They came back to the camper surprised and concerned in equal measure . They told us that these boys were hunting terrapins and were eating their tails for supper.

I didn't realise that terrapins were native to this area or that they lived in fresh water. Less so that they were bush tucker for schoolchildren. We wondered down to the river in the dark to to talk to them and their dads. 

It turned out that they were looking for yabbies and a local crayfish, called a “cherrapin”. All through the night I could see the boys from Mossman checking on their yabbie cages and cherrapins. Raz and Bear got out of the campervan at 6am to go fishing with them and check on their hoard from the night. They hauled up a beautiful red clawed cherrapin which got put in a plastic washing up bowl with an empty can of beer. Later one dad got a chain saw out of his 4WD and started chopping up the wood in the fire as it was burning. Raz, Bear and the Mossman boys  (Dallas the blondie that Bear liked and Damien, the aboriginal boy) went swimming in the river - with the shy crocs.

Happy Yabbies?

Red spotted Cherapin.

Bear and Dallas fishing.

Bruce, taking Cooktown Crossing in his stride.

We packed up shortly after the Mossman boys and left Cooktown Crossing, back through the ford and up the dirt track for 10km to the “Hurricane” signpost. We turned left and took the Mulligan Highway to Cooktown itself.

Just after Dead Dog Creek, which was all dried up like the others, we saw our first large dead Roo by the road. We stopped for a late breakfast at a truckers café at the Palmer Rail Road Crossing. The cafe had a side museum devoted to the gold rush that hit the Palmer River area ("purest gold in the whole of Australia") in the 1830s. The woman who ran the place had a “small family mine” up near the now abandoned town, of Maytown. She said it was pretty violent during the gold rush era and mentioned that the Chinese came in their droves and took gold out of the country in their trouser turn ups and shoes!