29-06-2003. Our next destination was Ingham, quite a way further south along the coast. We woke early at the lay-by near El Arish where we’d spent the last few evenings, determined to get a good start we tried to quietly slip out of the rest area as quite a few other campervans had turned up overnight. Our van however was having none of it and after three loud backfires, a huge pall of smoke and lots of revving, succeeded in waking up the entire site. As you can imagine this didn’t help us in the popularity stakes! We slunk off and continued south on Highway 1.
After a brief stop in Mission Beach we reached the outskirts of Ingham by late afternoon. We’d stopped for lunch a little further up the highway at 5 Mile Creek, where we watched turtles and eels in the water as we ate our sandwiches, we also had the now obligatory Tim-Tam with our coffee – they’re great! We’d called Des and Jenny to say we would be in town and we followed their directions through Ingham to Abergowrie, where their Sugar Cane farm lies. It was great to see them both again, plus to see the cane farm we’d heard do much about. Jenny showed us the pets, including Tuppy, a purebred Dingo, whom they’d found abandoned as a pup. After seeing wild Dingoes on Fraser Island and having to be so careful when they were around, it seemed strange to be able to stroke up and see it up close. They really are the most beautiful animals, with a great temperament, but you can see how much more alert she was than a normal domestic dog. That first night we ate Mud crab, which Des had caught a few days earlier, wow - it tasted amazing after the food we’d been eating in the van – my Campervan curry excepted of course! We stayed a few days with Des and Jenny and they took us all around the area, showing us how the Cane farm operates and how they use the land around the farm. We had a great few days. The highlight though came the day before we left, Des owns a small light aircraft and offered to take us up for a flight. We flew from the grass strip on his land and in-turn he took us both on a flight around the area as the sun was setting – it was just incredible. He even let me take over the controls for a while, something I hadn’t done for around ten or twelve years since I was in the Air Cadets, needless to say I was pretty rusty – although personally I reckon I was just like the Red Baron – maybe not eh! Another strange thing in Abergowrie is the Italian cemetery, which is actually a popular tourist spot. There are incredibly ornate graves in there made specifically for people who are not even dead yet, so they can be next to their families – how bizarre is that!
From Abergowrie we backtracked slightly, as we’d managed to catch hold of Mario while we were staying with Des & Jenny and thought it would be great to drop in and see him, especially while we were so close to Ingham – seemed a shame not to. En-route we drove to Wallaman falls, the highest single drop falls in Australia and much more impressive than the dammed Barron Falls in the Atherton Tablelands. Mario’s family own a huge Sugar Cane farm ‘Burnside’ which literally runs as far as the eye can see, Mario oversees the operation - a huge undertaking. Mario insisted that we stay a few days with him, which was great of him being so busy. As with our stay at Des and Jenny’s, we got a VIP tour of the plantations plus a ride in the Cane-Planter and chance to see the Harvester in action. Sarah even got to ride around on the Quad for a while, nearly shaking the teeth out of Mario and me as we hung on the back for grim death! We also got to see an area being being cleared to create a new paddock for planting and also a wetland reserve. It involved back-burning a huge area of land, it was an awesome sight, the flames and smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, blacking out the sun and the heat was incredible. Ahead of the wall of flame, eagles and hawks would swoop down and snatch small animals escaping the fire. Sarah and I drove Mario’s Ute as a support vehicle, following the workers up and down the edge of the back-burned area in case they needed anything; at least we managed to be of some use! Our only regret was not having our camera with us, as the pictures we could have snapped of the fires and the men working would have been fantastic. We left Mario’s a few days later, he insisted on giving our van the ‘once over’ after we’d told him about the problems with the oil etc, he really is a top guy.
From Burnside we headed back to Ingham then turned south again towards Townsville. We spent the afternoon there looking around the Museum of Queensland, which contains many of the artefacts recovered from HMS Pandora, (the ship sent to detain the mutineers of HMS Bounty) wrecked along the coast nearby. We spent that evening close to Ayr in another lay-by and set off early again for Rockhampton via Mackay. We stopped en-route to pick up a couple of hitchhikers, two young lads just out of school, who’d ended up sleeping on a park bench! because they couldn’t get a lift down to Airlie Beach the previous night. They looked half dead and slept the whole way down to the Airlie turn-off, they were so grateful that we stopped; it turned out one of them was from Nottingham – small world eh. That evening we found the best lay-by yet; it had a pub - bring it on!! Needless to say we had to have a few beers before hitting the sack. From ‘Rock’ we took the scenic route along the coast via Emu Park before picking up the highway again near Gladstone. By nightfall we found another lay-by close to Gin Gin where we met a Turkish guy with a small Jack Russell named Jack, I’m not joking when he told us his own name was Russell – I’m sure he caught me smirking.
We’d decided that we’d try and race on to Manly to catch Nick and Kerry before they left for England. We thought it would be nice to see them again. We’d managed to get in touch with Kerry and between us thought it would great nice surprise for Nick, so we decided to all keep quiet about it. Plus we’d seen most of this stretch of coast already on our way north so we wouldn’t really be missing anything. We covered an amazing amount of distance in our old van over the next two days, pausing only in Noosa for a while which is a really nice place. We made Manly a day later, by chance we took the long way around the harbour and spotted a pod of dolphins in the bay, which was as flat as a millpond. We caught Nick and Kerry taking a walk along the jetty and gave him our ‘foghorn’ call across the harbour, he sort of stopped when he heard it, looked around then spotted us, we could hear him laughing over the water. We spent the next few days with Mary and Cheryl where Nick and Kerri were staying; it was great to see them again. We were really glad we made the effort to push on to get to Manly. However, the 9th came around pretty quick and we all went off to Brisbane airport to see them both off. We were sad to see them go, but at least it would only be a few months before we were bumping into them again on home turf.
|  | 
|
