Ok, this could be a long one – grab a coffee or beverage of choice, settle in, and prepare to see some very cute animal and bird photos and maybe learn some interesting facts too!
Last blog I mentioned that we were heading in a direction we hadn’t previously traveled since moving to Oz – that direction would be north. With my work schedule, it’s easiest to get away in Dec-Jan, which is the height of summer here, and you really don’t want to be heading north then. So you may have noticed that all our travels to date have been south. But this past week, I was able to get away from Tue to Sat and so north we went!
Our sailing friends were up at Hamilton Island for Race Week (6 days of partying racing across 7 days). We decided to drive up to Airlie Beach to stay for 3 days and take the ferry over to Hamo (Aussie for Hamilton Island) on Wed, which was the lay day for race week. This was our first road trip in Daisy the Tesla and it was FABULOUS! Just as terrific to road-trip in as Ruby was in Canada, and my smidgen of angst about limited charging options on the stretch between Rockhampton and Mackay was unwarranted. Exactly as my friend Toni had told me, it was a breeze. Charging has changed a lot since I last drove Ruby in Canada in April 2023 – it’s so fast, even the non-Tesla stations.
In the screenshot above, we were charging up at 1,150 km/hr – with my 2017 Model S and the typical charging stations around in early 2023, we were lucky if we got half that rate. This is good in that you can get to your destination much faster, but bad in that there’s no time now to watch a show on Netflix while charging! We tried to watch the first episode of Janet King but only got through about 30 minutes of it across 3 charging occurrences (the above estimate of 25 min was if we were to charge to 100% from 28%, which is almost never necessary). If we had an ICE vehicle and drove straight to Airlie Beach from Yeppoon without stopping for petrol, food, toilets, etc., it would take 5.5 hours. We only needed a total of 45 min of charging time, so without our other stops to check some sights out, it would have been 6.25 hours – EV technology is advancing so rapidly! And of course, filling up with electrons costs a fraction of filling up with petrol. I somehow forgot to take a photo of our first time charging in Oz, but I did take a photo of a dumpster located right next to the chargers:
Apparently blue-faced honeyeaters are trying to push aside the great Australian Ibis for the title of Bin Chicken!
At the Tesla chargers in Mackay, we met Lindsey from Cairns who was driving Daisy’s identical twin. This was a longer charge stop before we headed to the mountains (story below), about 30 minutes, so we could have got some serious Netflix-ing done, but we instead had a great chat with Lindsey. He is 75 years old, worked as a mechanic for 54 years, and is a self-confessed petrol head – he would race anything with an engine (and still to this day races vintage motorcyles with side cars!). And then he discovered Tesla. He’s still a petrol head but his favourite car to drive by far is now his new Model Y. And boy, was he a wealth of knowledge about all the accessories – we enjoyed getting to know Lindsey and we learned a lot from him!
Also at the Mackay superchargers, there are toilets nearby and I just loved this sign there:
OK, our destination on the way north was Airlie Beach and it is beautiful. It’s a major tourist spot so very busy compared to Yeppoon – and you have to pay for parking! I’d happily forgotten about the concept of paying for parking; it’s been awhile. There are marinas EVERYWHERE in Airlie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many boats. Here is one itsy bitsy portion of one marina:
Hamilton Island is also a major tourist area and definitely a playground for the rich and famous. It’s a one-hour ferry ride from Airlie (the rich and famous of course take their massive yachts or helicopters over). We had hoped to see some whales on the way across, but we ended up chatting with the couple sitting next to us and didn’t get much chance to look out the window. They are from Melbourne but are caravanning for 3 months to escape the Melbourne winter. They told us that after leaving Airlie, they’re staying in Yeppoon for a couple nights – so we’re meeting them for dinner tonight!
Hamilton Island is also beautiful! I won’t bore you with all the photos of gorgeous turquoise waters, but here are two:
These photos were taken en route to and at the top of One Tree Hill. We are managing to not look dead in these photos, despite us walking up a very steep slope in thongs (meaning flip flops for you non-Aussies :)). We had been waiting for a bus to haul us to the top but it was running on island time so Joanne said, we can just walk, it’s not bad. We should have known that Jo was not to be trusted when Rod and Llew suddenly had many more important things to do and took off back to the shopping area (Llew’s feet were still suffering from following Jo to Passage Peak a few days before :)). I seriously don’t know where Jo gets her strength and endurance because she hardly broke a sweat to the top whereas Hugh and I could barely breathe. However, it was so worth it to get spectacular views! And lucky for us, the bus arrived after we’d caught our breath and we took it down to the other side of the island where the airport is. Got this fun photo of Hugh doing a jig (just kidding, a golf swing of sorts) with the giant golf ball in the background and a plane coming in to land:
Other than the free buses around the island, the only other way to get around is by golf cart – there are no cars on the island (other than little trucks to serve the resorts, etc.). Here was a traffic jam while we were there:
A huge piece of construction equipment was being moved down the narrow, steep, winding road so all the golf carts got backed up behind it.
We met up with the rest of the sailing gang for lunch, where we encountered some entertaining bird antics. We get pied currawongs at our bird bath at home on rare occasions, but they were plentiful near the restaurant. Here is one not getting into trouble:
Nice looking bird and I normally like its song, but anytime people left their table, they swooped down en masse to eat whatever was left on people’s plates and it was quite a cacaphony.
But then there was this cute cockatoo who came to visit us:
He was unobtrusive and just quietly waited for us to succumb to his cuteness, which didn’t take long. Here is a video of us feeding him a leftover chip (I’m trying out posting videos via YouTube links instead of directly embedding them in the blog to speed up playback for those in Australia – click on the word Cockatoo to watch this cutie): Cockatoo
We were loving hanging out with our new feathered friend. It was only after the fact that we noticed this little sign on the right:
Oops…
We also saw our first wallabies whilst on Hamilton Island:
How cute is he! Wallabies are much smaller than kangaroos and seem less inclined to kill you. Which reminds me of this funny email that came around work a month or so ago:
After a great day catching up with our friends, we took the ferry back to Airlie and enjoyed some nice sunset views along the way (this time I did watch closely for whales but no luck):
The next day we met up with our friends Jamie and Bettina for breakfast. They are cruising around the Whitsundays for a couple months (the life of the retiree, I tell ya!) and happened to be docking in Airlie the Wed night, so it was perfect timing to catch up with them. After breakfast, we headed further north to Dingo Beach and Hideaway Bay (big thank you to our friend Ruth for recommending visiting here – just gorgeous!). These areas are just 45 minutes from Airlie but there are next to no tourists. I took this photo while we were having a drink at Monte’s at Hideaway Bay:
And this one at Dingo Beach (thankfully, no dingoes):
In addition to noticing the complete lack of people, you’ll notice that Hugh has a rugby ball in his hand. It was floating in the water so the plan was to take it up to the picnic tables and leave it there for either the owner or some kid to pick up. We were looking at it thinking it looked rather official, but really, what would we know about rugby balls. Hugh left it on the beach while we walked to the far end and picked it up on the way back. As we were approaching the picnic table area, a family of four were sitting on towels and the son approached us to ask if it was perhaps his ball. It turns out it was! So we ended up chatting with them. They were from the UK but the son, Joe Bancroft, has been in Australia as an import to play rugby league here – guess where he first played? In Yeppoon with the Seagulls (who just won the grand final last night, BTW)! But then he signed with the Noosa Pirates down on the Sunshine Coast. Will have to keep an eye out for his name to see if he becomes a famous player one day. And it was indeed an official ball that he was keeping – very glad now that we found it. And even more funny, his sister is also a rugby player and will be heading to South America to play, but she’s shortly heading to… Brampton, Ontario! What a small world.
Driving back to Airlie Beach, we saw yet another one of these:
Just like in North America, there are Stoney Creeks EVERYWHERE here. But it always reminds us of our friends at the Gulch 🙂
We spent the late afternoon at the pool at the caravan park where we were staying in Airlie (had a terrific little cabin there):
The original plan for this trip was to head home on the Friday. However, a couple months ago I was reading the novel The Frozen Circle by Peter Watt. The story takes place in 1919 when British forces were supporting the White Army against the Bolsheviks in Russia. I happened to read the Author Notes at the end of the book, which I rarely do, and he commented that most memorials list the WWI years as 1914-1918 but very occasionally, you’ll see one that says 1914-1919, to cover the ongoing part of the war that isn’t often discussed. The author said the memorial in his town of Finch Hatton was one of the few showing 1919 as the end of The Great War. I therefore googled to see where Finch Hatton was and discovered it was about an hour inland of Mackay, which was on our route back home from Airlie:
(Canadian friends, you will undoubtedly notice the town on the map south of Mackay and see “Sarnia” – but it’s actually Sarina, home of tasty meat pies.)
I thought it might be neat to go see the memorial at Finch Hatton, so we decided to extend our vacation to travel inland from Mackay. Sure enough, just as the author said, here is the memorial:
From this point forward, I’m always going to check WWI memorials to see if they include 1919 or end at 1918. I had been completely unaware of the Allied Forces continuing fighting in Russia in 1919.
Whilst looking into Finch Hatton after reading that book, I saw that Eungella National Park wasn’t much further inland so we decided to go there as well. The first syllable in Eungella is pronounced the same as the first syllable in that American beer, Yuengling. So Eungella is pronounced sort of like, “YUNGellah.” If I thought the roads on Hamilton Island were steep, narrow, and winding, they were nothing compared to the climb to get to Eungella. This was the last of the valley before heading up and there was a handy warning to reduce your speed to 80 km/hr to manage the first S bend:
We’re still blown away that narrow country roads like this have speed limits of 100 kph here!
(BTW, the crops you see on either side of the road are sugar cane. I had thought there was a lot of sugar cane growing in the Bundaberg region, between Yeppoon and Brisbane, but wow, the Mackay region is sugar cane as far as the eye can see!)
Our neighbour Virginia was a teacher and she used to go up to the school at Eungella from time to time and she said she dreaded the drive because if a milk tanker was coming the other way, there was next to no room. Sure enough, we saw warnings about milk tankers:
Hugh thinks the switchbacks on the way to the top were worse than those of the Apache Trail in Arizona! It’s the dry season here but there were still little waterfalls all along the way:
The grates across the road where there are waterfalls are presumably to let the water flood the road if needed rather than destroying the road. I should’ve taken a photo of Hugh walking across the grate – the gaps are really large! I didn’t take a chance walking across, I was worried my foot would slide down the gap. Can’t even imagine what this road would be like in the wet season.
We had lunch at the Eungella Chalet – click here to read a bit of its history. There is a room there that is full of photos and news stories since the 30’s – very interesting reading! If you read the link, you’ll see that people used to hang glide from there and the old launching point is still on the property:
Amazing views:
And this is from the valley looking back up to the chalet:
And then there’s this photo:
Don’t worry, I didn’t actually push Hugh over the edge. Although curiously, there are no more photos of Hugh after this point of the trip, hmmm… 🙂
Off to the right, I could hear noises that sounded like birds. But then I realised it wasn’t, it was bats, hanging in the trees like Christmas baubles:
Have definitely seen A LOT of bats in this country.
Aside from being a subtropical rainforest with lots of walking tracks, lakes, rivers, etc., there is one REALLY big reason to go to Eungella – platypuses! Yes, that is indeed the plural of platypus :). We stayed at the Broken River Mountain Resort and they told us that our best chance of seeing a platypus was between 4:30pm and 6pm or else 6-7am (was REALLY hoping for the former as 6am wouldn’t be my preferred time to get out of bed to go look for a platypus). We had read that they’re very skittish so don’t always appear when they’re supposed to and our friends here also told us it would be unlikely to see any. But we had to try! Platypuses only exist in eastern Australia – click here to read about this very interesting creature. They forage underwater and apparently come to the surface to chew and swallow their food, then back down they go.
Well, we arrived at our cabin around 2pm, so we decided to go walking along a couple of the tracks (that’s Aussie for trails) before heading to watch for platypuses after 4pm.
So many beautiful views along the Broken River. Just a couple photos for you:
And giant prehistoric looking plants like this massive fern (imagine trying to fry up that fiddlehead!):
We called this rotting stump behind the tree Homer – it does sort of look like Homer Simpson 🙂
We finished our track walking at about 3:30pm so thought we’d wander back to the cabin and come back to look for platypuses at 4:30pm. But because we were so close, we thought we’d just stop to take a look in case any happened to be there. At the one viewing area, nothing, so we continued down to the one further away. We had been told you have to be vewy vewy quiet (spoken in Elmer Fudd voice) because they’re skittish and you have to look for bubbles in the surface of the water because that means they’re going to come up to chew and swallow their food. Those of you who know Hugh know that patience is his middle name (insert extreme sarcasm here) – but patient we were, and it paid off! They don’t tend to surface for very long so you have to be quick to try to get a photo. I took dozens of photos, although some were decidely sasquatch-like – very blurry so you couldn’t for sure say it was a platypus but nor could you say it wasn’t. Hugh managed to get some excellent photos and videos over the course of the 45-60 minutes we spent there so I finally decided we’d hung out long enough, I should stop trying to get the perfect photo/video myself. But then we saw one surface and I got a great photo of him and thought I would just try one more time to get a video. OMG, did I ever get a great video! Click here to see 13 seconds of fabulous platypusness: Platypus
There, now we could return to our cabin to enjoy a glass of wine on the porch and go through all our amazing photos and videos of the trip.
Knowing we were 680m up in the middle of the Clarke Range (as in middle of nowhere), we thought we’d wander out to a clearing at night to look at the sky. I really need to figure out how to take night sky photos with my phone. Wow. You can see the Milky Way from Yeppoon, but nothing like we could see from Eungella. Gazillions of stars and planets twinkling in the sky. Beautiful!
Yesterday was time to come home. The Bruce Highway is the main (as in only) highway to get north and south along the east coast in Queensland. It’s just two lanes so if anything goes wrong, you can be stuck on it for hours. We had very fortunate timing yesterday. A “B-double” (transport truck with 2 trailers) had flipped over onto its side, completely blocking the northbound lane. We sat there for only about 20 minutes and were able to get by. The line of traffic behind us was crazy and I can’t imagine how long it would take once the equipment got there to try to haul the transport back onto its wheels.
We continued on our way, stopping at Clairview. Bettina grew up in the Mackay area and she told us their family used to go to Clairview for summer holidays. We looked it up on the map and saw that it was really close to the highway, but more importantly, that it was the home of a Dugong Sanctuary! We haven’t yet seen any dugongs (although they are in the Yeppoon area too – really, almost everywhere along Australian coasts) so figured this was our opportunity. We had stopped on our way north on Tuesday but the tide was out, so no chance of seeing dugongs then, but took a picture of the sign to send to Bettina:
When we’d had breakfast with Jamie and Bettina, we’d told them of our plan to see a dugong. Bettina looked at us with a facial expression that said, in fine southern drawl, “aww, bless your heart” 🙂 Apparently no one has told the dugongs there’s a sanctuary there for them. Well, Bettina was partly right – I didn’t see a dugong, but Hugh did! One surfaced the way dolphins do, just to the left of these mangroves:
We kept watching and thought we saw movement under the water, but it could have been a turtle. Or a log. Or a shadow. So I still haven’t seen a dugong, but at least Hugh has.
Back home now, gearing up for an insane week at work (Hugh the retiree is of course at a golf comp today and tomorrow, poor thing). But one more fun bird video for you. Those of you who have been following this blog for a long time will recall the issue we had with crows. They liked to marinate their gross food in our bird bath and while they do make some neat purring noises, they also make a really annoying squawking sound. For a number of months it was the battle of Hugh vs the crows (the crows seemed to be winning – do you remember the salmon tin they left in the bath for us?!?!), but we eventually came to an understanding with them. I’m pleased to report that the truce is lasting and so here is a cute video of crows in our bird bath: Crows
That’s it for now. Sorry for the mammoth novel, there was just so much new stuff to report on! Next time I post will be in a month when we have friends from Canada coming to stay with us – super excited to see them!!