Heading South

After 2 days mending fences, building cages and feeding bats we left the bat hospital and moved on heading south. The southern part of the Atherton Tablelands was beautiful but rainy so getting out of the rainy part of Queensland was our goal. We continued until we arrived at Mission Beach. We spent the night on a camping site just in front of the sea! After a wet night (we had a leak in our camper-van which made us wake up in the middle of the night thinking we had weed the bed ;-) we woke up the next morning with a sunny view of a beautiful huge abandoned beach! Wow! The down side was that the showers and toilets were full of beetles and bugs, but we survived!

The next day we spent the night at Paluma National Park. We parked our van near a stunning swimming hole in the middle of nowhere! Close to nature.... and so close! Enjoying a beer after dinner, sitting outside contemplating the stars, our australian neighbor comes along to tell us that he just nearly fell over one of the most poisonous snakes of Australia! The Taipan is a brown snake that grows up to 2.5 meters and is very fond of small mammals (thank god we are big ;-). He says to use a flashlight when we are walking around and to be careful when we go to the toilets because it was heading that way. Oh and by the way, there is also a cane-toad hopping around (cane-toads are big venomous toads that eat the bugs that destroy the sugarcane, but there is no other animal that can kill these toads so they reproduce themselves and now they are a huge plague. The australian government even pushes you to kill them if you see one). And that is what our neighbor did! He hit the toad so hard with a rock that it just laid there squashed! I was shocked! Welcome to Australia I guess! ;-)

Now we are back in the civilized world, in Townsville to be exact. It is the biggest city in northern Queensland and you would think that with 170.000 people living here there should be something to do but... on Saturday, Sunday or Monday, it doesn't matter, the streets are empty, most of the buildings are abandoned and only a few shops are open. Only “the strand”, which is a kind of an esplanade near the beach, is nice and almost beautiful. Having spent here almost three days, we are happy to leave tomorrow for a diving trip of 3 days. The boat leaves tomorrow night at 10 pm and by the time we get up in the morning we will already be at the great barrier reef where we are going to do 8 dives. On the third day, heading back to Townsville we will dive 2 times on the Yongala wreck... Let's hope everything goes well, I already got my stash of seasickness pills prepared! Lets hope they work (stresssss ;-)!!!

Paronella Park

Tyto Wetlands