Sunday, June 29, 2008

The Mission Is Clear

There are so many beautiful places to visit in far north Queensland, but it's not so easy to find a holiday spot that hasn't been completely overused and developed to the point that it looses all of it's original charm and appeal. But we've had a few weeks to travel slowly down the coast, and we managed to find a place that is yet to be overshadowed by rows and rows of high rise apartments and where you can can get a decent cup of coffee or a fresh coconut off the beach, without too much searching. Heaven! Where is this little slice of paradise? Wouldn't you like to know! Ah, kidding. It's a town called Mission Beach.


Now Mission Beach is pretty much smack, bang in the middle of Townsville and Cairns so I doubt it will remain peaceful and relatively construction-zone free for long (Wait up - it may be already too late as we did spy a new Woolworths complex in the process of completion...). But it is worth putting aside a night or two to soak up the beautiful and relaxing vibe of this seaside town - actually Mission Beach is really four separate little towns connected by 14kilometres of sandy, coconut tree lined beach.


There's a bunch of lovely eateries, a few art galleries and even a tropical fruit winery in the tiny main street, and if you stay at the Dunk Island View Van Park (like us!), your $25 will buy you a 50metre stroll to the beach that has a view of... arh, you guys are just too clever! You're right! Dunk Island! You can push your relaxating break to the next level by staying over at Dunk Island too or take a day trip and snorkel and swim and parade around in a bikini pretending that you're on the set of Blue Lagoon.



So channel your inner Brooke Shields immediately and get your butt to Mission Beach pronto (before the rest of the Cairns/ Port Douglas crowd get sick of camping on top of each other and sunbaking on grass and high tail it to Mission too!).

Yours in the great outdoors,
Odette

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Cairns to Kuranda

Cairns is like the gateway to the far north Queensland tropics - you can fly in from most capital cities in Australia and use it as a launching pad to explore the nearby Great Barrier Reef or hire a car and take a road trip up the coast or into the hinterland. Cairns itself was kinda like a really mini version of Surfers Paradise (complete with hundreds of junky souvenir shops and Japanese tourists) and although I'd heard about the Cairns foreshore, I still didn't believe that there was no actual beach in Cairns, until I saw the mudflats complete with crocodile warning signs, myself.



Once you've finished sunbaking on the grass foreshore with the hundreds of pastie white backpackers looking for an instant tan, check out the Rusty Fruit and Veg Markets. Cheap fresh fruit and vegetables are spilling onto the pavement and you can also sample some of the tropical delights that this part of the world is known for - a freshly cut coconut with straw will set you back three bucks.


But one thing that every Cairns tourist should do, is visit Kuranda - not by road, but by Skyrail or scenic railway or both! Yeah, it's pricey (A combo ticket for a ride in a Skyrail gondola and then a trip on the historic Kuranda Scenic Railway will set you back $80 per adult - Phew! I know!) but it's a great way to see some truly beautiful rainforest and the little town of Kuranda in the Cairns mountains.

We caught the Skyrail over to Kuranda (it's an impressive 7.5km long with two stops along the way where you can get off and do a few short bushwalks) and the views were beautiful.



If we had our day again though, we would have caught the train to the town of Kuranda and the Skyrail back - only because you can get on and off the Skyrail whenever you want, but the train only departs at two specific times in the afternoon which you book in the morning before your trip. We chose the 3:30pm ride home, but after wandering around the souvenir shops and tacky tourist traps in Kuranda, we wished we could have come back earlier! Kuranda was once an alternative town, but now, it's pretty much a town built on this tour - with markets that are permanently set up and selling overpriced Chinese junk. There wasn't a handmade or locally produced product in sight!

Except for the delicious German lunch that we had at a traditional cafe complete with music straight out of Euro Vision! It was a classic! Check out the beef and cheese sausage with onion and sauerkraut that we threw in our gobs faster than you can say dahnk-uh shoon! Hmmm!


Oh and after lunch, Luke ran into his long lost brother whilst we were walking around in town...


When it was finally time to catch our train back to Cairns, I was so excited! I felt like we were boarding the Hogworts Express!



The train gently winds it's way down the mountains and through 15 man made tunnels while passing waterfalls and thick rainforest. It's takes about an hour and a half and this includes a stop at the Barron Falls lookout, and there's a guy recorded on a loud speaker, who has a voice a lot like the man from the movie The Man From Snowy River, who tells you all about the amazing history of the railway.




What a great day!
Yours in the great outdoors,
Odette

Kombi Mechanic Cairns

Even though Jefro the kombi has been going quite well of late (although I think we could handle a breakdown in Port Douglas a little better than in the outback), it was hard to believe that we had driven some 6000km in less than a month, since our last service in Darwin. To make sure we'd make it back to the mid north coast of Australia in a couple of weeks time, we booked the van in for his final service of the trip, in Cairns.

And when we pulled up in the car park of the VW mechanic, we realised that we weren't the only ones with a kombi looking for some TLC. We went to Werners VW Centre (http://www.wvw.com.au/), which was a 5 minute walk from the centre of town in Cairns (so you can grab a coffee or go and see Adam Sandler's latest funny flick You Don't Mess With the Zohan at the movies like we did - if you liked Happy Gilmore, you'll be in your element). The VW workshop is run by a young German guy called Toby who has a thing for 'newer' VWs but still appreciates and loves the original hippy bus. He was really helpful, friendly and did a thorough service of our ol' boy that didn't cost us a bomb.



If you're in North Queensland and need a kombi man, here are his deets:

Werners VW Centre
29 Hartley Street

Cairns 4870 QLD
Ph: (07) 4031 7017
Fax: (07) 4031 7155

Yours in the great outdoors,
Odette

Monday, June 23, 2008

Port Douglas Paradise

If you're holidaying in Port Douglas, there are a few ways you can go about it:

1. Total relaxation - This option requires you to do nothing but sit on the beach, read the paper, have lunch at a different restaurant each day and drink coffee at the many cool little cafes around town.

2. Adventure plus - This next option means you won't have time to pull up a towel at the beach because you'll be too busy exploring the amazing rainforest and lookouts and bushwalks in and around the place. This option includes a day trip to Cape Tribulation and the Daintree because, hey, what's another 40km up the road?

3. Kombi Combo - This option would be the one Luke and I created just for us and comes highly recommended - it's a mixture of both options 1 and 2, with a few coffee stops, lunch out at a pub, beach walks but also some more serious bush walks and drives to really check this place out. But where to begin?

Why not check out Mossman Gorge on your way further north just up from Port Douglas - it has some lovely rainforest walks and you can swim in the gorge too, if it's not too chilly (like it was the day we visited). Spot a bush turkey or a Cassowary if you can!

The next stop is the town of Daintree, which to tell you the truth, is kinda random and not what you expect. It's basically just a really small town at the foot of the mountains, with no walks into the rainforest or anything... but it is the place to go if you want to catch a boat tour up the Daintree River and maybe spot some crocs along the way!
From the town of Daintree, you may as well keep going up and jump on the car ferry to Cape Tribulation, the highest town that you can drive to on the QLD coast along sealed roads. The ferry is $18.00 return and takes about 2 minutes each way to cross - it runs from 6am until 12 midnight as well, so you can spend a good day across the water or even camp in Cape Trib and come back a few days later!

Now the drive to Cape Tribulation is a pretty special one. The lush rainforest will have you feeling like you're on some exotic tropical island (Duh... like Australia?) and you will be peering through your binoculars like Luke and I, trying to see Tarzan swing from a nearby vine.

And make sure you stop at all the boardwalk rainforest walks - they will take you even deeper into the rainforest where you can see all types of trees and vines and animals unique to this part of the world.


The actual town of Cape Tribulation isn't that big but there are some nice little cafes and restaurants for lunch, just in case you forgot your tin of vegetable soup, unlike us. And you must stop on the way back to the ferry and wander down to the beach, where you can get a bigger taste for just how beautiful this World Heritage listed region is. The rainforest literally spills into the ocean. I bet if we had seen this place on a cloudless sunny day, we might not have returned at all!


Trip highlight? The Daintree Ice Cream Company. Pure. Heaven. You drive past a bunch of unusual fruit trees on the way in and this is where the ice cream flavours come from! For $5 you get a bowl of ice cream with four different flavours to sample - ours included Black Sapote (chocolate pudding fruit), Yellow Sapote (caramel flavoured), Wattleseed (cappuccino flavour) and Coconut. The flavours were just gorgeous and they make all the ice cream on site!


Back in to town and the next day was our 'lazy' day in Port Douglas, where we pretended that we were staying at the Hilton and not the Big 4 caravan park. The lookout over Port Douglas will give you a nice little introduction to the town - the tropical gardens and coconut trees will instantly make you feel like you're in holiday mode.

Then head down to the sand and soak up the sun before...


...choosing a cool cafe or pub to enjoy a lazy beer and yummy lunch. We had humongous hamburgers at this lovely pub below in the main street and dreamed about owning a house with an outdoor entertaining area somewhat similar to where we sat...

And if all of these activities don't leave you tired and in need of a holiday, you can also head out to the Great Barrier Reef for a tour or snorkel. We decided to pass, after spending a couple of weeks checking out the reef in W.A. and also because our bank balance doesn't seem to be quite as healthy as our appetite for homemade ice cream.

Yours in the great outdoors,

Odette

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Heading North

After our little 'car' dramas, we weren't sure if we would get to travel any higher than Townsville on the QLD coast. Don't get me wrong, I know there would be a few people out there that would prefer a week in Tennant Creek than Port Douglas (Okay, maybe one person? Anyone?) but Luke and I always thought our trip around Australia in our kombi just wouldn't be complete without travelling through far north Queensland as well.


Driving up the coast from Townsville to Port Douglas, is like stepping into a magical world where everything is sooo green and with the mountains on one side of the road and the ocean on the other, it really is a tropical paradise. Yeah, it rains a lot and it was raining on our trip north bound, but that just adds mystery to the place, as the mist and clouds hang low over the forest covered mountains.



On first view, we thought this thing might have been the cloud maker?



But no, that would be a little too 'Willy Wonker's Chocolate Factory' for the real world -although it did turn out to be apart of another 'sweet' business - a steam chimney from one of the many sugar mills scattered up the coast amongst the hundreds of acres of sugar cane. Yum!


Next stop - Port Douglas!


Yours in the great outdoors,

Odette

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Tropical Treats

With all the kombi dramas of late, Luke and I were sooooo excited to make it coast! Growing up by the beach, the ocean has always been important to us and seeing the water again gave us back our bearings after such a long time in the desert!

Townsville was our first stop and although it was a little colder than what we would have liked (Hello? 30 degrees - where are you?) it was like paradise after our unexpected extended visit to Tennant Creek. The Townsville foreshore pumps with water parks for the kids, bike riders and rollerbladers everywhere, people having picnics and even the entire North Queensland Cowboy cheer leading squad practicing their routine for the next home game, all making the most of the great space on the waters edge. Luke quickly found himself a rock and soaked up the sun and views of Magnetic Island.



Oh and the best news of all? We found a mobile auto electrician who, after Luke pulled out our busted alternator, came to the caravan park to pick it up and dropped it back again that afternoon, as good as new! Whoo hoo! With both batteries now charging properly, we're back in stress-free camping business! (Well, as stress-free as camping and travelling thousands of kilometres in a 32-year-old van can get!).

Yours in the great outdoors,
Odette

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Splitty Spotting

Travelling with a kombi obsessed critter like Luke and being married to him for a couple of years now, means that whilst we have been trawling this great big country, we always have our eyes peeled for... yep, you guessed it... kombis. And while there seemed to be a bit of a VW drought as we crossed the Kimberly and down to Uluru, heading from Tennant Creek to Mount Isa proved pretty exciting for us!

First we spied this little beauty, which to the untrained kombi spotter eye could look rather like an old rusted out shell of a car, that has been stripped bare and left for dead. Well, that's pretty much what it is, but it's also a split screen kombi from the 1960s. You know, the rare kind? Anyway, Luke did a crazy maneuver on the Barkley highway, about 93km west of Mount Isa, just to see this guy up close and decide whether it may be worth calling our old mate tow truck driver from Tennant Creek to rescue him too. The verdict? Unfortunately this old boy kombi is a little too far gone and is best left to add an interesting glitch to the barren landscape of central Australia and a little excitement to any kombi fans driving past.



We also discovered this split screen van at a top secret location (hey, these things are like finding a massive gold nugget to the kombi fanatic) and we're kicking ourselves that we didn't take the time to go and chat to the owner. But we're not going to forget this little splitty just yet and have been playing detective for the past few days in the hope of tracking down the person wanting to get rid of this pile of 'junk' from their backyard. We'll take it!


Yours in the great outdoors,

Odette

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Kombi Not Quite Crusin' But On The Road

Okay, so where was I... Oh, yes, that's right - stranded in the middle of nowhere, waiting for our kombi Jefro to be fixed. So Luke and I drove around to meet our new best mate, the Tennant Creek mechanic called Les, at his state of the art workshop. Yesterday we agreed that 8am would be a great time, so we could hopefully get the kombi back and be on our way by no later than 10 or 11am. Well things happen a little differently in Tennant Creek, like much of the Northern Territory, and when Les finally rocked up at 8:50am, he didn't mention us eagerly waiting at the gate like kids waiting for a lolly shop to open, but instead, chucked Luke the gate keys and said he had to quickly help out a mate with a truck. Bloody hell.


Our mechanic finally reappeared an hour and a bit later (and by this time, Luke and I had been joined by Brian the tow truck driver, Les' wife and two young kids who were running around with no shoes on and some random 'swagman' (his words) who drifted into town and had been hanging out at Les' workshop for the past two weeks) and was now ready to finish our van. Luke played 'goffer' to Les - i.e Go find me a screw driver, go find me some degreaser, go find me a bucket load of concentration and a couple of litres of determination so I can finish this blasted kombi!!! I could see Luke was getting more and more frustrated, not because Les wasn't a good mechanic, but because this guy had so much stuff EVERYWHERE that it took him half an hour every time he needed a different tool. He actually kept his tools in an old weather beaten wheel barrow. That's right.

Ah well, finally the motor was back in the car and we were on our way (minus $850 ($500 for the gear box and $350 for labour) which we thought wasn't too bad considering a mechanic could charge pretty much what they wanted in Tennant Creek as there aren't a lot of options if you say no). Finally! Yippee! Whoo hoo! Party time!! I was so excited to get our car back and get out of this town that I almost did a small victory dance on the side of the road while Luke was getting petrol. But I'm kinda glad I restrained myself because our car troubles were not quite over.


The Barkely Highway runs from Tennant Creek across the Queensland border to Mount Isa and is a really desolate road. In the 560 odd kilometres between the towns, there is literally one roadhouse/ petrol station and one small village called Camooweal (pop: 400), 13km east of the QLD border. Because we didn't get the kombi back from the mechanic until 1pm, we wanted to drive as far as we could away from Tennant Creek that afternoon because - 1. We were understandable quite eager to leave this part of our trip WAY behind us and 2. If we were to (heaven help us!) break down again on the N.T side of the border, guess where the NRMA has to tow you? Yep, straight back to good ol' Tennant Creek.


But as we were making our escape, the battery indicator light came on and the further we drove, the brighter this bad boy light glowed. Nooo!!! Luke wasn't too concerned at first, as he thought it was just the fridge draining the battery (because we'd had no power to the van for a few days whilst it was being fixed), but when we pulled up on dark at Camooweal, we thought we'd be pushing our luck to drive another 2 hours in the dark to Mount Isa. So with no food in the fridge and our cupboards almost empty, it was a true campers dinner of tinned spaghetti on toast for us!

The next morning, we were up early and hit the road to Mount Isa. We'd made it! But then, after we'd shopped up a storm, we had a flat battery. Now I'd just been reading along the way that Mount Isa was the rodeo capital of Australia and who should come to our rescue? Two cowboy hat wearing, RM Williams totting country boys who gave us a jump start from their humongous ute, complete with piggin' spotlights and a set of bull horns. Classic.

But even these boys couldn't bring poor Jefro the kombi back to life for long... And this is when I realised that there were a few sides to Luke that I had been seeing quite a lot of lately.

This one...



And this one...



And this one...




Finally he found that the main alternator cable hadn't been re-connected to the battery. Was this Les the Tennant Creek mechanic's way of letting us know how annoying we were by putting the pressure on him to finish our van? Well, haha. You got us. (But I think we'll be the ones laughing when we get home to lush green NSW and realise we don't ever have to go back to Tennant Creek again!)

A quick call to the RACQ to make sure all our batteries were now charging and unfortunately our main battery still wasn't. This meant we had to get to the closest caravan park as soon as possible to manually charge the battery which will get us to Townsville so we can find an auto electrician who can recondition our alternator because it had burnt itself out after being unplugged for so long. The dramas!


In short, I had a moment of weakness where I actually thought we may have avoided some stress and a few sleepless nights by trading our kombi in for a brand new 4 x 4... but then I came to my senses. Where's the fun in that? Luke, on the other hand has treated the last week as a kind of express course in VW mechanics and is stoked at his new found kombi knowledge! Ah jeez. We're both just happy to be back on the road.


Yours in the great outdoors,

Odette

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Kombi Break Down... Noooo!

Okay, so for those of you keeping an eye on our travel tracker, you'll be no doubt thinking to yourselves, "Why the hell have Odette and Luke decided to stay five nights in Tennant Creek?" and the answer to that is not that Tennant Creek has a secret five star health retreat hidden behind the local Food Fresh supermarket that is T.D.F (to die for, for all your oldies), the simple reason for our extended stay in the middle of freakin' nowhere is that poor Jefro the Kombi has broken down.

It's a dramatic story, and one that I'm sure is getting a little more animated with each telling but believe me. It really was as bad as it sounds. Here goes:

So we had left Alice Springs, excited to get on the road and back track the 500km to Tennant Creek (where we intended to stay the night - just ONE night) so we could continue our travels east to the QLD coast. After passing through Barrow Creek and laughing about how terrible it would be to break down anywhere near this remote roadhouse and imagining the scary things that went down ten years ago on the night of the Peter Falconio murder (who along with girlfriend Joanne Lees, were also travelling in a kombi let me remind you), guess what happened? We heard a terrible scraping noise. We pulled over and Luke quickly diagnosed the problem. The gear box was screwed. I think that's the technical term but for all you mechanical novices, basically we'd lost fourth gear and oil was starting to leak from the gear box all over the road. Jeepas! Noooo!

In the middle of nowhere and seriously ten kilometres from where the Falconio incident occurred, we had no choice but to drive another 80km to the next roadhouse at 60km an hour. Either that or wait for some kind soul called Bradley Murdoch to pull over and kindly offer us a lift... Okay, enough - but this is pretty much exactly what was going through my very vivid imagination. But we managed to make it to the next roadhouse, still some 125km from Tennant Creek, and Luke and I just looked at each other as if to say, "Haha, what a HILARIOUS joke! I wonder where the hidden camera is and all the people to jump out and say "Surprise! You're on candid camera!" But, alas, our nightmare was just beginning. (Gee that does sound terrifying doesn't it!)


Stranded at Wauchope Roadhouse, we walked into the petrol station (which doubles as a seedy-looking bar) and about ten filthy dirty men, straight from the bush, all looked at us as if we were aliens or had three heads - whatever was more foreign in these parts. When we told them that we had broken down in our VW, they all cracked up in hysterics and said "You guys are screwed! The last guy to break down in a kombi in these parts was that Flaconio bloke and look how that ended up!" HAHAHA. Um, again, not funny. With tears in my eyes, we made our way to the phone box and called the NRMA, who were great, and immediately sent a tow truck out from Tennant Creek to pick us up. But 'immediately' in Northern Territory speak, means hang tight, have a few beers and we'll be there when we can. Almost 2hours later and our knight in shining armour arrives - Brian, a young bloke with a ciggie hanging out of his mouth and covered from head to toe in oil and grease. Even so, I wanted to hug him for rescuing us from the sticks.


Now new laws in the Territory mean that instead of no speed limit (this is how it used to be), you now have to drive at a very sensible maximum speed of 130km an hour along the main roads. But in a tow truck that looks like it may be in need of its own tow in the not too distant future, with our kombi strapped to the back by two flimsey looking chains and not a seat belt in sight, 130km feels very, VERY fast. We arrived in Tennant Creek in darkness with the rain pelting down and the desert temperatures dropping fast. Yep, this is EXACTLY how I'd imagined our return to one of our not so favourite towns in the N.T.


And it seems we should have bought a lottery ticket that morning before leaving Alice Springs because our luck couldn't have been better. Not only were we stuck in a town with a population of 3000, at a pretty crumby caravan park called The Outback (I've never wanted to be in Sydney more than now) but there was a public holiday on Monday, so no one was going to be able to even look at the van until Tuesday - and that's if we were lucky according to our new mate Brian (whose wife drives the local icecream van and whose father-in-law was the town undertaker).

So we had a few days to kill in Tennant. Now a day in Tennant Creek is not so bad - there's a tourist info centre to look at, a great Aboriginal art centre and a recreational dam just out of town that we were told was worth a look. Oh and we found a BP petrol station that made a very average cup of coffee to satisfy Luke's caffine addiction. But now what?

Tennant Creek doesn't really have too many shops (they have an IGA sized supermarket, a butcher, a newsagents and a few pubs) and the town population is about 80% Aboriginal and 70% of those people tend to hang out on the streets or under trees, just cruisin'. I must admit, it was initally pretty confronting and the first day we weren't quite sure what the go was, but after spending almost a week here, it seems like these guys just love being outside with their family and friends. And the kids are just so beautiful and curious about everything that's going on. They ask 100 questions and want to know all about where you're from. It's been interesting and quite good to get to see this little town for what it is and it turns out that it's not such a bad place. Although five days here with nothing to do has been far too long...


There are some sad areas though, where you really can't believe the state of some of the houses. It's like a third world country. Again, the problems run deep and aren't easily fixed but whatever the case, it seems living a half/ half existance for most of our Indigenous people just isn't working. Staying here makes you think about what the answer might be - maybe our politicians need a little breakdown stopover out this way as well?




So after this break down, all I can say is that if you're planning any kind of extended trip, it is TOTALLY worth bumping up your roadside coverage to the premium package. Luke and I signed up to the top NRMA cover before we left (it was like $40 extra for the year) and the NRMA looked after us so well from the moment we broke down. They covered the tow into town, up to $700 worth of accommodation (not a lot to choose from in Tennant so we stayed in a cabin for a few nights and a motel for our extra, unexpected night) and gave us a brand new Mitsubishi Lancer to drive around in until we were sorted (rememebering that there are about 5 streets in Tennant but so handy to have in case we decided to ditch our broken kombi and flee across the border).


Anyway, Luke just spent 3 hours with his head in the engine bay of our kombi, playing apprentice to our funny mechanic Les, who has already spent two days putting in a gear box, only to find out it was the wrong one (an 1800 instead of a 2 litre - NOOOOO!). He has promised to meet Luke back at his very organised, very tidy car yard (see pics below...) tomorrow morning at 8am to put the motor back in and make the final touches. Fingers crossed we will be out of here by mid morning.



We will keep you posted...

Yours really looking forward to hitting the QLD border and getting ol' boy Jefro back,
Odette