2010/11 Australia trip - Edmund Kennedy and Jourama Falls |
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The intention was for this to be a driving day to make some progress south but we soon saw a sign for Edmund Kennedy national park, just 2K off the road, worth a stop at least to make some tea. Kennedy was a British explorer speared to death by Aborigines, but nowhere near this park, so we don’t know why the choice of name.
We saw these two strange birds there: another stone curlew, the bush variety this time, and a pheasant coucal. According to our bird book the coucal is “skulking, rarely seen”, but we’d seen these birds all the way through Cape York though never long enough to get a picture. Sandie grabbed this shot but didn’t know I’d left the lens in the wrong mode, so it’s rather fuzzy.
The park was created to make a safe area for dugongs or sea cows, which are rarely seen unless you are crazy enough to be snorkeling. Above water the park is noted for its biting flies and mozzies so we didn’t stay long.
We ploughed on south on the Bruce Highway with the coast to our left and the green mountains of the Great Dividing Range on our right. We no longer saw banana plantations; nearly all the fields were growing sugar, with the occasional field of coffee. The coffee was a surprise as I thought it had to be grown in the highlands. It seems there are two kinds of coffee plants.
Our lunch stop was better. We could see a high waterfall from the Bruce Highway so we took the next 
turning, to Jourama Falls. I took the hike up to view the falls. It was not as impressive as I’d thought, a wall of rock with maybe six separate falls; this is the piece we’d seen from the highway. I met a New Zealander couple up there. He said the falls must be awesome during the Wet. I agreed but pointed out that we’d crossed the creek three times to get up to the falls, so we couldn’t have reached the falls during the Wet anyway, a common problem with these northern waterfalls.
The rest of the day was just a blast south to Proserpine, a sugar refinery town, where there was supposed to be some camping on the lake, but after we took a lot of trouble and driving to find the lake there was no campground there, just a lot of no camping signs.
It had presumably closed, so we then had a long drive in the dark down to the coast at Conway Beach only to find that the spot there was commercial, with more facilities than we really needed. We were lucky that there was some celebration going on, as we arrived after their normal closing time. It was however, one of the buggiest places we’d camped at so far.
Monday October 25th
We were away early after a quick stop at the beach. The campground was actually on a lagoon full of reeds and frogs, the source of all those mozzies. The beach looks out on the Whitsunday Islands, but the view didn’t look all that pretty at low tide. What didn’t help was the massive poster, telling us how to distinguish the four types of jellyfish which might get you, on a sliding scale between agony and death. Personal experience says you don’t even sit on a beach like that, let alone paddle or swim, so we moved on back to Proserpine and towards Mackay.