Wanderung 20

Australian Walkabout

May - June 2009

Sunday, June 14th, Driving from Hervey Harbour to Yeppoon.

Bob:

Having decided that we would like to see some of the Great Barrier Reef area up North, we checked out after breakfast and drove northwards on the Bruce Highway. Monika had her Laugh Of The Day when I entered the left hand side of the car, which is the passenger's side in Australia, and looked around futilely for either a steering wheel or ignition lock to insert the key into. Very funny. Once I got into the correct (right-hand) side of the car, we soon got the show on the road.

As we drove north, the countryside was eerily reminiscent of central Florida: flat with sandy soil good for grazing, mostly, and very sparsely settled. In fact, after 11:00 when we started to look around for a place to have lunch or a grocery store to purchase some sandwiches, there simply wasn't anything. That continued for a couple hundred kilometers. Getting desperate, we stopped at a gas station with a couple of roadside benches and munched an apple and some pretzels while we were buzzed by some local birds. One variety had a yellowish back, cream underbelly, and stripes around the eyes including a vivid patch of blue. Very pretty.

Monika:

Another day of driving. This day was supposed to bring us to the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. Frommers had praised a little island, Great Keppel Island, where you could stay right close to the beach. We were thinking, depending on the ferry we could either spend three nights or two nights over there since today was Sunday and we had to leave again on Wednesday.

The country side seemed to get drier while we were driving along and more sparsely settled with only an occasional windmill.

Bob:

We continued looking for lunch in each small town we passed through, but we finally gave up and just continued driving to Rockhampton, the really "big" town of the area. Being the main town, there was a collection of fast food options including a "Red Rooster" that specialized in roasted chicken dishes. That sounded healthy so we stopped there and I had roasted chicken breast with a baked carrot, potato, sweet potato, and peas, all swimming in rich brown gravy that I sincerely hoped was also low fat. Monika had a chicken breast club sandwich, which almost certainly was healthy, and an order of French fries, which almost certainly was not.

The information center in Rockhampton helped us reserve a hotel room on the beach in Yeppoon, from whence we could take a day trip out to Great Keppel Island just a few miles offshore to see at least a sample of the Great Barrier Reef ecology. The ferry over to the island, by the way, did not run at all on Mondays, rather to our surprise, and we had missed the single Sunday morning sailing, but we could afford to stay over Monday at Yeppoon, see Great Keppel Island on Tuesday, and then start our long backward trek on Wednesday. The information center had one other claim to fame, by the way, in that it was located directly on the Tropic of Capricorn. So as we drove further North to Yeppoon we were technically driving in the tropics for the first time in my life, I believe.

Monika:

When lunch time came around, we looked for the next bigger town for some sort of fast food. To our surprise the next three towns had nothing that we could identify as a food place. We finally arrived rather hungrily at the major city for this area, Rockhampton. We first found a "Red Rooster", a fast food place that served only chicken.

Once we were no longer a danger to bite fingers, we returned to the Tourist Information Center. It was situated on the Tropic of Capricorn, on the south side was the temperate zone and on the north side the tropical zone. Hooray, we made it to the tropics! But once inside the center, we found out that for once our non-planning bit it. Not only had Sunday ferry to Great Keppel Island already left earlier that morning, but to make matters worse, since it was winter, there was no ferry on Monday. But we did see that on Tuesday they had a ferry ride with a coral reef cruise and lunch. We re-thought our plans and decided to stay at Yeppoon, a beach town across from Great Keppel Island, for three nights. The friendly staff at the TIC booked us into "The Driftwood" a beachfront resort that sounded really nice. Along the way out of Rockhamptom we stopped at a grocery store and then headed on to Yeppoon.


 

Bob:

Arriving in (tropical!) Yeppoon late in the afternoon, we checked into our beachfront suite at the Driftwood Hotel. It really was located right on the beach, as in "walk across the lawn and cross a small dune to get to the water.

Monika:

Our accommodations turned out to be really very nice, a little apartment with a bedroom, a living room and kitchen facilities in addition to a double bed and two additional single beds. A family of four would be happy here. But the best part was that it truly was on the beach. Walking across the lawn and down the dune led us directly onto the beach.

Bob:

We decided to take a walk on the beach as the sun set. We both enjoy walking on a nice beach, and the beach at Yeppoon is a long, large, beach with pristine golden sand. We saw some sea birds, which I had expected, and a live snake, which I had not. Bearing in mind that there are no non-poisonous snakes in Australia, I kept my distance but still tried to get close enough take a good picture of it, of course.

Our walk on the beach was very restorative after a day of driving, and afterwards we watched the news on TV while eating a light dinner. Our hotel had a used book exchange, so we exchanged a couple of our old books for some new ones that we could read in odd moments in Yeppoon but also on our long way back home. We figured on a two-day drive from Yeppoon back to Brisbane, an overnight in Brisbane, a daylong train trip from Brisbane to Sydney, two nights and a day with Neville, bless his heart, and finally the ungodly long flight back to Los Angeles and ultimately Washington to end our journey.

Monika:

Walking across the lawn and down the dune led us directly onto the beach. It was low tide and we walked along the water for an hour watching our shadows get longer and longer as the sun slowly set over the mountains.


 


 

Copyright 2009 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Prolog Map of Australian Walkabout Epilog

May 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31
June 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30

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