2010/11 Australia trip - Retrospective |
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Retrospective
So how did the holiday measure up? Let’s talk about Cape York first. The scenery surprised us in that so much of it was savannah, similar to the rest of central Queensland, and much less rain forest than we expected. The guy who back at Kaputar told us that anyone looking for scenery, animals, and birds should go no further north than Cooktown was right, but there’s a mystique about a place that’s wild and barely populated. We were glad we’d gone but we will probably not repeat the trip, even though there are many even wilder parts of Cape York still to be visited.
The roads were about as rough and corrugated as we expected, though perhaps we were surprised at how tired we got from the battering through the steering wheel and seats. We had to admire how well the Troopie took it. It is what it was designed for: an outback workhorse.
The bugs were much less than we expected in the north and we sat out most evenings with all the doors open. We couldn’t do that in the south, and that was a real surprise.
The heat and humidity were OK inland but were about as bad as we expected on the beach at Punsand Bay and Seisia, similar to what we experienced in Darwin on our 2002 trip.
We had a lot of emergency gear on board, winch, Maxtraxx, and satellite phone, that we never used, but we view that as a success. The objective was to get to interesting places, but be able to get out again if things went wrong. We were lucky that we hit the floods in places where they weren’t too much of a problem.
The rest of the trip was much as we expected: except for the rain. The most frequent comment we heard from the locals was that a creek or river was supposed to be dry at that time of the year but was now roaring from recent rain. The rain was great for waterfalls and flowers and bugs, but it caused us some diversions and wet clothes and cameras and some exciting water crossings. I’m finishing this letter in January 2011, and, as most of you will have heard, the flooding in Queensland has dramatically worsened, cutting the state in half, and causing great damage in many of the places we visited: Emerald, Rockhampton, Bundaberg.
John and Edna had planned a holiday in Queensland, but instead have gone in the opposite direction, to the South Australia coast, hoping for some dry days. We wish them some good luck.
My last surprise was when I shipped our rented satellite phone back to Florida. We’d paid about $40 for it to be shipped to us, plus a few dollars for import taxes, so why did it cost about five times that to ship it back? Some of that was tax, but most of it was due to the Canadian branches of American companies gouging the Canadian public, not a new phenomenon.
I note that I have some blank space at this end of the letter and, as Sandie always complains that there are few pictures of me, and even fewer of me doing something normal, here I am in Girraween during Happy Hour. Looks like my cup needs filling.