David and Enid's Travels

Apsley Falls

We left Nambucca Heads this morning after three nice days on the beach, and drove into the tablelands area of North Central New South Wales.  We exited from the Pacific Highway and headed west at the sign which said “Wauchope”.  That wasn’t the best decision, as we would better have gone a few more kilometres south before turning off.  The road was paved, but very narrow and rough.  About 10 km along the road we came to a low railroad overpass.  The height was only 3.1 m, and we are taller than that.  There was a bypass that was about 4 m high, but it was flooded and we really couldn’t tell how deep it was, or what the bottom was like, so Enid waded through.  It was a bit muddy, but not too deep, just up to her mid-calf, so I drove through.  There was a very sharp drop off right at the start which really jarred the motorhome, but the bottom was solid so we got through.

We started to climb over the Great Dividing Range not too far west of Wauchope, and then the road became very steep and twisting with many hairpin turns.  Most of the turns were signed for 35 km/h or less.  We followed a car and caravan for a long way, but a fair number of cars started to collect behind us, so I pulled off into a pullout and let them by.  The caravan did the same later on, and we passed it when it did so.

We climbed to over 1200 m from sea level this morning, and then started to descend slightly, but stayed close to 1000 m on the interior plateau.  The scenery is very beautiful.  When starting to climb there is a spectacular view out over the valley far below.  Unfortunately there are almost no places where one could stop to view it as the road is so narrow, and there are very few pullouts.  All along the way up we drove through great forests of towering eucalyptus trees.   We saw a number of red and blue parrots. Once over the summit the country opens up into open fields, and herds of cattle and sheep.  We stopped to take a picture and the air smelled of fresh grass and clover.

We stopped just after two p.m. at the Apsley Gorge campground in Oxley Wild Rivers National Park.  When we arrived we were the only ones here, but just shortly after the car and caravan pulled in that we’d passed earlier today.  There was one man alone, and he hollered across to us, “are you from Canada,” as he’d seen our flag in the back window when we passed him.  As we talked to him he said he’d been in Canada this summer, and we asked him where.

 “Saskatchewan,” he replied, and on further talking to him he mentioned Rosetown.  Enid said she’d grown up near there, and as we talked we found that he’d actually been living in Fiske for a few months in 2009 with his ex-partner.  It was quite a coincidence to find someone with that connection in such an isolated spot here in the Australian outback.

There is a spectacular gorge at this campgrounds with a drop of at least 100 m straight down into a narrow canyon.  The River plunges into the gorge over a waterfall, and there is a good trail along the gorge and to viewing sites for the falls.  Normally there is a bridge across the river and a trail on the other side as well, but it was washed out by the floods through here over the last couple of weeks.

While walking along the gorge we saw a number of kangaroos, and many different kinds of flowers.  I was stopping to photograph the flowers when I felt a sharp pain on both sides of my ankle.  I looked down and saw two black wasps, one on each side.  Though I killed them, they stung me badly and my ankle burned for a long time.  Then just a few hundred metres further I stopped again, and again was stung on the same ankle, this time in front.  I don’t know how I stirred them up, but my ankle stung for well over an hour.

Parasailing at Nambucca Heads

It was another beautiful morning, so we decided to stay here one more day.  The beach was great, and we used the body board again today.  Both Enid and I didn’t want to get any more sunburned, so we wore our full stinger suits in the water today.  I wore Enid’s canoeing hat, and Enid wore a bandanna on her head.  It was a good idea as the sun is pretty intense around noon, which is when we were out on the water.  Two people were out with parasails and boards today.  They went a long way out – I’d be worried about losing the wind and having to swim back in.  The wind was pretty steady though.

The cicadas are very loud tonight.  I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the weather, but tomorrow it is not supposed to be as nice, with showers in the forecast.  We are going into the east central region of New South Wales tomorrow, and probably camping in a national park.  We’ll see how much damage the rain and flooding has done, and that may affect where we actually go.

Enid on body board at Nambucca Heads Beach

It was a great day.  When we awoke this morning, all the cloud and rain of yesterday was gone, the sun was out and there was almost no wind.  After breakfast we went out and swam for a while in the waves in the ocean, then walked along the beach towards the Nambucca Heads.  A lot of other people were out on the beach this morning, mostly walking or excercising their dogs, and a few people were in the water.  There was a class of young children, maybe ten year olds or younger, close to the surf clubhouse.  They were being trained as surf lifesavers.  Mostly though they were just having a lot of fun taking part in a relay race running into the water.

We thought it would be nice to have a body board, so when we got back to the caravan park asked at the registration desk if there was a surf shop in town.  The man said that there was, and we thought we could walk downtown and get a board.  However it’s a long walk, and so we went back into the office and asked if they had a phone number for the store so we could check if it was open.  The woman didn’t really seem to know what a body board was, but while she was looking up the phone number the man said, “it’s one of these.”  There were several old boards stacked in the corner.  She said, “well just let them use one of them,” and the man went back into a back room, and got a slightly bigger board, though the strap on it was broken.

David body boarding at Nambucca Heads Beach

“Give me five minutes,” he said, “and I’ll fix it.”  I went down and did some filming of flowers with the video camera, and when I got back Enid had picked up the board.  We spent the rest of the time until lunch learning how to use it, and having a great time.  After lunch we went back again, and spent another hour in the water.  The only problem is that while most of my body was covered (either with a shirt or sunscreen), the top of my head was not, and I have a very sunburned scalp.  We hope to stay here again tomorrow if the weather is nice, but if so I’ll have to wear a bandanna on my head when in the water.

Nambucca Heads Beach

It was warm, but overcast for the entire day.  As we drove south it rained a bit, though never very heavily.  We arrived here shortly after 1 p.m., but didn’t see a grocery store when we entered town.  We enquired at the campgrounds, and they told us where a store was located, so we drove back, got bread and a few other things we needed.

After setting up our motorhome we walked for over an hour on the beach.  There is a long beach running for many kilometres to the north, but unlike the other beaches we’ve been on, this one has some rocks.  It still will be nice to swim on if it clears up tomorrow.  Tonight it is raining slightly, but the forecast looks better for tomorrow.

Enid in the waves at Pottsville Beach

It was another beautiful day today in Pottsville.  Early this morning Enid did a load of laundry and hung it on the line.  It was dry in just over an hour in the sunshine and northerly breeze.  While she did that I worked on getting a bunch more pictures uploaded to www.digipac.ca/pictures and changed the menu system as it was getting to be too big.  Enid also swam laps in the pool this morning for about half an hour while I finished up the editing.

After lunch we went back to the beach and once more played in the waves.  It was a lot of fun.  The water is just the right temperature to enjoy, and the waves aren’t too big for us.  We’d try and catch a wave and body surf in on it, though mostly we just got dumped on by the breaking waves.  After about three sessions in the water we walked back.  The sand was so hot it burned our feet, so we had to put our sandals on.  We swam a bit more in the pool after that.  There were a couple of young children in the pool being watched by their grandparents (who were considerably younger than us), and Enid had a lot of fun playing with the kids in the water.

After that we walked about ten minutes to the small grocery store and bought a box of four ice cream sandwiches to eat in one sitting or they would melt.  It’s the first ice cream we’ve had since we arrived here.  Up to now the weather hasn’t been very ice cream inducing.

Pottsville Beach

Today was a beautiful day.  We left Brisbane just after 9 am, stopping at a small shopping centre to buy groceries for the next week.  It is interesting that fruits and vegetables here (in fact food in general) are so expensive.  We pay more here for apples from New Zealand than we would in Canada, which is somewhat surprising given the short shipping distance to here.  Cherries are just coming in to season, and are $17/kg.  The meat is quite a bit more and nowhere near Canadian quality – except for chicken, which is cheap, so we’ve been eating a lot of chicken.

We drove just a short distance south to the small town of Pottsville and camped at the Pottsville North Caravan Park.  It is a very nice site, and not at all crowded today, though the clerk hinted that it will be very busy from this weekend on.  From here to the beach is about 200 m, and we walked there after we’d eaten lunch.  There is nice surf here, maybe not great surfing surf, but Enid and I had a lot of fun swimming in the waves.  The water is a very nice temperature, and the weather today was warm and sunny.  There were very few people on the beach, just a couple of young boys on body boards, and another young couple.  We had the boy take our picture, and then had a long chat with his Grandmother.  She lives here, and her two grandsons were visiting from Brisbane (since school has just finished for the year in Queensland).  She had visited B.C., Alaska and Calgary in late August and September.

There is an older man here in the park who has stopped by twice to have a chat.  I think he is lonely.  His wife is undergoing chemotherapy treatments, and I think he is here in his caravan by himself.

Brisbane Botanical Gardens

We spent the day in the South Bank area of Brisbane.  For the first time in a long while it didn’t rain at all.  This morning we caught the bus, though the schedule we had from the park was wrong, and the busses were running at a different time, so we had to wait for the bus for about half an hour.  When the bus did arrive it wasn’t too long to get to the South Bank area, perhaps 30 minutes.

This was the site of the 1988 World’s Fair.  Now it is a park and walkway along the Brisbane River, with a number of museums and other cultural sites located at one end.  We walked along the river for about a kilometre to the “Goodwill Bridge”, a footbridge across the river to the Botanical Gardens.  Along the way we passed a fairly large swimming area, “Street Beach” and the maritime museum.  The area of the gardens is where the original settlement of Brisbane was located, and where they learned how to grow crops in the tropical area such as sugar cane and pineapple.  It is a nice park, though it doesn’t have as many kinds of flowering plants as the Sydney Botanical Gardens do. 

David and Enid at Christmas Tree, Queensland Parliament

We stopped in front of the Queensland Parliament where a German family asked us to take their picture in front of the Christmas tree, and then they did the same for us.  After that we ate our lunch in the park, and a man came by, quite agitated and asked us if we knew where the park caretakers were, as he’d seen a carpet snake.  We told him where the information booth was.  A few minutes later one of the park volunteers came by and told us that if we wanted to see a nice snake, we should go look at it.  He was quite sarcastic about the man who had reported it, and told us that it was a python, they find them in the park all the time, and they aren’t really dangerous.

Next we stopped at Old Government House, the residence of the Governor’s General for the colony of Queensland until the early 1900’s.  Now they have started to restore the building.  Though much of it was empty there is an art gallery of Willam Robinson on the upper level.  He must be a fairly famous local artist, as there were also several of his works in the Queensland Art Gallery, which is what we visited next, after hiking back across the bridge.  The most interesting art in the building as far as both Enid and I were concerned were scultpure of large red polar bears in a large pool of water.

Red polar bears, Queensland Art gallery

We wanted to take the City Cat (catamaran ferries that go up and down the Brisbane River) so we walked back to the ferry dock and got on.  We took the cat back to where we could catch a bus to bring us back home.  The cats are very fast and cost the same as a bus.  Unfortunately we missed our bus connection by about 5 seconds, so had to wait an extra 30 minutes for the next bus to come by.

Everything today was free, except for our transportation, which cost us a total of $25.  We did do a lot of walking though, almost 12 km in all today.

Koala at the Australia Zoo

We had a very nice day at the zoo.  The weather was pretty decent, and it only rained a couple of showers.  Since we had our big new umbrella we didn’t get wet at all.

This morning I washed down the motorhome before we left.  It had a month of grime on it from our travels, so it needed to be done.  Then we drove to the Australia Zoo.  This is a private zoo, started by Steve Irwin, “The Crocodile Hunter”, and it is very well done.  It is very clean, the animals are almost all Australian or South East Asian native species, and we enjoyed it very much.  They put on a show twice a day in the “crocoseum” which is a large ampitheatre that would seat around 5000 people.  It was entertaining.  They had a lot of free flying birds in the show.  I don’t know how they have trained them to fly on command into the theatre, but they did.  They fed a large crocodile, and it is amazing how fast such a big animal can move.

8.2 metre saltwater crocodile replica

There were lots of koalas and kangaroos of course, but also a lot of other animals like Tasmanian Devils, Dingos, Wombats, some of the most poisonous snakes in the world, and many different kinds of Australian birds.  They’ve got alligators from America, and of course many Australian salt and freshwater crocodiles, including a replica of an 8.2 m long salt water crocodile.  It is easy to say 8.2 m, but it is hard to fathom how big that really is.  The crocodile is enormous when you see it in a life size replica.

After we left the zoo we drove to the south side of Brisbane where we checked in to the Nestle Inn park.  We’ll be here for at least tomorrow as we spend some time in Brisbane.

There’s supposed to be a nice beach here.  I guess we’ll never know.  This morning we drove to the area of the beach, but the road to the National Park which is where we wanted to go was under construction, and limited to one lane.  I was not certain if I could get the motorhome through or not, so decided not to try.  Instead we drove to the grocery store to stock up on food.  When we came out it was raining, again, and so we just drove back to the campsite.  It rained steadily until about 2:30, then quit for a little while, long enough to set up the water, drain etc. in the dry.   However now it’s raining again.  All this rain is really getting to be a bit depressing.

Yesterday (Saturday, December 4) we stayed in Rockhampton and didn’t do too much.  Enid washed clothes in the morning, while I edited pictures and built everything for November into one slideshow video.  We walked to the mall near our campsite and looked for a pair of shorts for me, but didn’t find what we were looking for.  In the afternoon we swam laps in the campsite pool.  Our sink drain was leaking (I think the watermelon we put in the sink so it wouldn’t roll around while we were driving was too heavy, and broke the seal).  I walked across the street to a hardware store, bought a pipe wrench and some silicone, tightened up the nut on the drain and gooped it up with silicone and it seems to have stopped the leak.

This morning it was a lovely day in Rockhampton, and we got away early.  The rivers in the Rockhampton area are all very high, but they are starting to recede.  An 81 year old man was swept away yesterday and drowned while walking beside the river.  As we drove farther south there was more rain beginning in the later afternoon, and some of the creeks were high, but nothing like what we drove through farther north over the last few days.

We had originally planned to stop at Maryborough, but we changed our minds when it was raining anyway, and not much to stop and see.   So we drove on to the Noosa Beach area and stopped at the Big 4 Noosa Holiday Park.  It is in the small town of Tewantin and we are about 9 km from the beach, so we’ll drive down there tomorrow.  The park is wet, and now it is raining again.  On the news this morning they said this is the wettest spring on record in Eastern Australia.