North to Karumba

                           Gus having a beer with all his mates in the Cobbold Gorge bar

I should say something about the weather. Now being deep winter you might think that you’re cold and you’re probably right. We get cold too. Early morning the temperature dips down to around 5-10C but it’s Tee Shirt time by 9.30am and we’ve been picking up 28C most afternoons. No clouds, just blue sky and wafting little breezes. Dat’s de weather report (not quite in official Bureau language)! The northern Australian winter climate is just superb.

                                                          Cobbold Gorge swimming area

Equally, Cobbold Gorge where we have just spent five days is superb. A resort built on a cattle station out in the middle of nowhere and done really well. We’ve toured the Gorge, walked the walks, swum the pool, canoed the dam, read the books and had sunset drinks at the bar. Very relaxing lifestyle.

Maurs is becoming very keen on fossicking and we went to a place called Agate Creek looking for...agates. It was the first time on the trip that I actually had to use 4WD as we bounced around searching for a prized agate. I don’t really know what a prized agate looks like so I looked for “rocks with character” – some of them may be agates, I don’t know. As the bloke who showed us around O’Brien’s Creek gem field told me, there are malachites, azurites, pyrites and leverites. The important one to recognise is the Leverite.  “Leverite where you found it, it’s a rock!”

                                                      Maurs - happy in a dry creek bed

Now heavily weighed down with Maureen’s gem findings we limped in to Croydon and spent a day and a night there.  Croydon is an old gold town, now almost defunct. However the locals have a great sense of history and have retained a lot of the old mining precinct as a really interesting display, including a lot about the Chinese community who stuck it out in quite harsh conditions, both physically and socially. And there are still traces of them within today’s community.

We went on through Normanton to Karumba on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Normanton didn’t ring any of our chimes at all. We circled the joint three times but couldn’t even convince ourselves to buy a coffee there. In fairness it was a Sunday and so some places were not open, but what was open wasn’t flash. Karumba however had everything we needed and we stayed four nights, mostly relaxing, stalking the local wildlife and going for long walks. We did watch the sunset a few times at the local pub on the point, which is almost de rigor I believe.

                                                  Something wrong here? Not a thing!!
The place is full of Mexicans who every year throw their Toorak tractors into top gear and haul their massive caravans up here for months at a time. It’s tough to get a space at a van park because of all these aged itinerants. They were all forlorn when we got there as the winds were wrong, the tides were wrong and it was too cold so the fish weren’t on the bite at all. All they could do was clean their equipment and wait for “happy hour” every night. There were whingers and there were white trash trailer park snobs, but we met some really nice people too. I think I’ve got enough material for a lengthy discourse on people who inhabit caravan parks, but that will have to wait for the end of the journey. There are some cool stories.

                                              Home-made prawn rolls - now that's a lunch
We’re done in Karumba. Having said the fishing was crook, there was no shortage of prawns, crabs, barramundi and other fish for sale and Maurs and I took advantage and supped on seafood for the entire time. Now, we’re turning south west and heading for Lawn Hill where we will continue to be out of mobile range and possibly out of Internet range too, but we hear it is a spectacular place to see.

What to do around Mt Surprise

We took a drive out to Copperfield Gorge on Sunday. Off the highway it’s about 45 km of rough old country road with a few water hazards along the way. We also had to dodge around copious cattle (they big in North Queensland) and a couple of roos but it was well worthwhile – very pretty gorge with clear as crystal water. Just opposite stands the Einasleigh Pub, the most prominent building in Einasleigh, and an absolute oasis for the locals who work in this remote area.

                                                               Copperfield Gorge

Today we drove out to a fossicking site about 40 km north of Mt Surprise. We dug and sieved and ate dust all morning and for our trouble found about six pieces of Topaz and a bit of coloured quartz. It’s quite satisfying, finding your own bits of jewellery, but I just can’t imagine the life of the old miners who trawled through these areas on foot in search of their fortune, because here I am, back in camp, parked by a swimming pool under a cool shade, showered clean, nursing a cold soft drink, and typing on the Internet (not that this is a bad thing!)

                                 Retirement shouldn't involve going back to the salt mines!!

                                                     No Topaz escaped Maurs' scrutiny!

Tomorrow we leave for Cobbold Gorge, about 200 km away. We hear it is pretty nice there. We’ll let you know.

Getting back on the Highway

At the moment we are sitting in North Queensland in a little town called Mount Surprise and the biggest surprise is that there’s no mountain called Mount Surprise to support the town’s good name – just a small hillock that would make Nepalese tourists hysterical with laughter, if we ever had any Nepalese actually touring around here. The town is small – about 70 people – but a steady stream of tourists bulks up the numbers through the winter period. We came here to see the Undara Lava Tubes, which are a remarkable piece of natural engineering that I had heard about years ago but never got to. They are quite spectacular and it’s hard to do them justice but here are a couple of images that Maurs took on our tour.

                                                       Cave dwellers at Undara

                                             The Lava Tubes are quite spectacular

That’s a long way from Da Nang where I last blogged and no, I won’t try to link in the tunnel tours that you can do in Vietnam with the Lava Tubes – Undara is way more spacious – you could drive a tank down one of these babies. We came here via Melbourne where we didn’t do much at all except hang out with the family and catch up with the McBrides for a lunch at the Windsor Hotel on a bitterly cold Melbourne day.

                           John and Trish trying to look warm at the old Windsor Hotel

We then flew to Townsville where we didn’t do much at all except catch up with friends, walk along the Ross River and get our camping gear back together for the resumption of our next adventure. However I should thank Jetstar for hosting possibly the most annoying child on our flight back there. This kid cried and whinged for the entire flight with a constancy you rarely encounter. I well know that if continual whingeing was an Olympic event that the Poms would wrap up the gold but gee, this kid would have certainly made the Aussie team.

          Cousin Laurie and Gary being kind to the turtles by giving them bread

We’ve been trying to get a new spare tyre after we discovered our spare was a “get you home” only variety that limits you to 80 km/h and disintegrates if exposed to prolonged sunlight. We finally got one last Friday but it necessitated at 450 km trip from Mount Surprise back to Townsville and then back again the next day. Just for variety we travelled a bit north into the Atherton Tableland and then down the coast from about Innisfail to Townsville. Heading that way we saw the effects of what Cyclone Yasi had on the vegetation, even 18 months or so after the event. It was a good one!

We spent the night with my cousin Laurie. He must live in the most sociable street in the world. The neighbours regularly stoke up a bonfire in one of their front yards and sit around for drinks and a chat of an evening. We went down to such a gathering and it was all going wonderfully until the guy’s sprinkler system engaged and doused us all in jets of cold water. There were wet people running everywhere for a while there, including people in dressing gowns and fathers trying to shield their pram-bound babies from the deluge. He said “I activated it today but I wasn’t sure what time it was set for.” Well let me tell you Len, it’s set for 7.13 pm! That’s when my watch stopped working.

                                   Neighbourhood lawn gathering - does your street do this?

We're going back to Mt Surprise where the neighbours ain't quite so "sociable"....

Da Nang Me, Da Nang Me...

The flight to Singapore was uneventful, apart from noting that there is always one person (usually a guy) who demands their full economy-class real estate entitlement and flings back their seat to the max immediately the seatbelt sign goes off, remaining in that prone position until instructed to straighten up for meals and landing. Maurs had one such individual in front of her and consequently had difficulty even seeing the TV screen she was at such close quarters with it. There was a bit of retaliation though on this occasion and a few whacks in the back of the seat might have alerted him to go a bit easy as he was dealing with no ordinary woman – this was the Maursinator!! One stern look from her and he could end up just another pile of crumpled bones in her fossil collection. “Oh that! That’s Pax Extendbackerii Toofarus. They became extinct because they couldn’t adjust to reasonable social behaviour. They’re related to Thoughtless Bastardus that died out around the same time.”

We over-nighted in Singapore, taking taxis to a couple of big shopping Malls and discovering that the only bargains to be had were for the “Petite” sizes among us, of which there were none. Getting back to the hotel became interesting – on Friday night in Singapore at around 9.30pm the taxi supply tends to dry up as demand goes through the roof. We queued for 15 minutes and considered ourselves lucky - Donna and Craig had a 45 minute wait for their ride home.

We flew Silkair to Da Nang with an unexpected stop at Siem Reap in Cambodia (well it wouldn’t have been unexpected if one of us had read the ticket more closely). Donna had requested “Gluten Free” meals and both Singapore Air and Silkair interpreted this to mean thick rice cakes with no topping for snacks. She had enough rice cakes to build a scale model of the Ankar Wat temple by the time she got to Da Nang, as rice cakes wrapped in gladwrap look about as appetising as a house brick.

By the time we resolved our Visas and got out of the airport it was early evening and we chugged through the streets of Da Nang watching people making their way out for a good Saturday night – lots of big open-air cafes along the beachfront – and lots of motor scooters. “Are there many traffic accidents here?” Justin asked our driver Lah. “Lots” he replied. Apparently there are 28,000 road fatalities per year in Vietnam, mostly scooter drivers. There are few rules and many opportunities.

         The Resort's Long Bar on the beach (well, part thereof...it's a really loooong bar)

Our hotel - the Intercontinental Resort -was about 45 minutes from the airport and it is just in another world altogether. It is sheer opulence with a wow factor as you walk from reception to the fishing boat-shaped funicular railway (the Nam Tram) that ferries you up and down the hill that the resort sprawls over. The rooms are luxurious almost to the point that you half expect someone to tap you on the shoulder and say “We’re on to you sunshine, now hop it.” It’s an unfinished work though and in another 12 months it will be sensational. The beach is beautiful and clean although the sand itself presented us with problems. It holds in the summer heat. It got me first as I slopped down for a swim – hot – very hot – but as I increased my speed it only meant that a stream of molten sand started to flip up my bum and back as my thongs dug in deeper. I know there weren’t clouds of steam coming off my feet as I hit the water – but there should have been.

                      The Nam Tram...a little resort surprise when getting around

                              The resort from the other end of the little bay that it nestles in

It then got very slap-stick when Craig lost one thong in the sand during his journey to the water. He couldn’t retrieve it because the heat of the sand afforded no linger-time so Donna and then Maurs tried to help. They looked like a bunch of failed Fijian firewalkers hot-footing it over the sand until Craig eventually located the buried thong. We now treat the sand with respect.

                                              Da Nang sand - looks fine...burns mercilessly

The currency of course is the Vietnamese Dong and you get about 20 thousand of them to the Aussie dollar, making some of the bills eye-openers for us. Our first dinner saw me signing off for a cool 5.5 million Dong. I may have a touch of the vapours when I get the final hotel account.

                                     A private beach BBQ for six...that also cost a few mill!!!

                                                         Donna and Renee beachside

We took a day-trip to Hoi An, which is a delightful little town south of Da Nang.  It has a much more sedate feel than other Asian towns, not so many cars and bikes, quaint buildings, nice cafes and a reputation for tailors. Justin and Maurs took advantage of that and had some outfits made up. Pretty well same day service although I imagine suits could take a day and a half!

                                                        The Japanese Bridge at Hoi An

A final note about the climate and the people. July is mid-summer and it’s HOT! The odd storm floats around the ridges but overall provides no relief from the heat and humidity. The Vietnamese compensate by keeping in the shade and having ice-cold coffee drinks that are heavenly - and the local beer (Larue) helps. The people are just beautiful – smiling and polite, lots trying to master English and make a better life. Just like Americans (...the bit about trying to master English anyway).

Townsville - the Ancestral Home

Maurs and I had spent seven good years in Townsville in the 1970s so driving into the place should have held no surprises. We pulled over for lunch at a little roadhouse just outside of Charters Towers with the unlikely name of the Burdekin Duck – good tucker too – and down the range into Townsville – and onto the Motorway to my cousin’s place. Motorway? That wasn’t here the last time we looked. Actually everything about Townsville seemed to have changed – and for the better. The old place has turned into a very liveable little city, with an array of parks, a rejuvenated Strand, and a restaurant strip over in my ancestral area of South Townsville that is just excellent.

                                                 The Water Playground on The Strand

                                     Moments later...it was tempting but we remained dry

It was just great to catch up with my cousin Laurie. He’s quite mature now, at eighty-something, but still as sharp as a whip and possessing an attitude to life that is inspirational (for me at least). He was quietly nervous about his house passing muster from Maurs and Mal, but he stopped short of laying out two pairs of white cotton gloves to assist with their inspection. We spent a brilliant couple of days with him and even caught up with my dad’s brother Keith who, at 90, remains one of the funniest guys you will ever meet. It’s hard to catch up with him though, because he’s well known as the stud of his retirement village and so has “commitments” apparently. We had to book.

                                 Keith the Stud, photographed during a break from "duty"

Laurence expressed some interest in getting one of them new fangled iPads and so we went to a busy shopping mall to check them out. I drove, Laurence gave directions. Apparently in Laurie’s octogenarian world it is perfectly allowable to go up one-way streets the wrong way and particularly recommended in shopping plaza car parks – and admittedly we did survive and we got prime parking. We found a counter full of iPads and we were poking away at the screen (as you do with iPads) when suddenly Mal burst into very loud song right next to us. She had found some music on one of the iPads – Soul Sister to be precise, by Train – and she cued it up and started belting out the lyrics at the top of her voice. The sound that she produced was like she was singing with really tight headphones on, where you can’t correct for the flat notes of which there were numerous. The effect that she achieved was remarkable – stopped everybody within 30 metres in their tracks. We were stunned. She looked up at us and said “What? I sing this with my granddaughters!” It was a proud performance – a monument to the free spirit – but if she does it again Laurie and I intend to be at least 30 metres distant the next time.

                                          Laurence and Maurs dining in South Townsville

The upshot of all this is that we re-evaluated our original plan to drive down to Melbourne, opting for more time in the Queensland sunshine, so we left the camper and vehicle in Townsville, caught a cheapie Jetstar flight to Melbourne (not counting the overweight baggage bill!), and spent a week with Donna and Renee before taking off to Singapore with all in tow (six pax in total). You see we wanted to check out what the Returd Highway looks like inside Vietnam!

Maurs marauds among the Dinosaurs

Richmond Queensland touts itself as the epicentre of Australian dinosaur country and many people are drawn there to ogle at the town’s fossil collection and the life-sized models of what these creatures must have looked like. I don’t want to inflame the palaeontologists any more than I have but on what basis did they choose the skin colours?

The good folk at Richmond also offer a dig site just out of town where one can fossick for their own fossils and we duly went out there to dig – none more determined to do so than our Maurs. She was made to fossick! She has the necessary determination and the patience to sit and fiddle and prod and poke until the fossil eventually surrenders to her. The rest of us adopted the search policy of whacking a rock twice with a hammer and if a perfectly framed fossil didn’t appear, move on and whack another rock. As it turns out, Maurs’ tactics proved the most effective.

While the rest of us fossicked in the rocks that others before us must surely have rejected, Maurs spotted a pile of rocks that had just been bulldozed by workmen gathering road fill. She eventually found pay dirt (although we didn’t quite recognise what it was) but she had to withdraw when the workmen came back and started loading the trucks. They left but the dozer driver kept puttering around, preventing Maurs from pursuing her find. And that got her mad! That driver was lucky he didn’t get a screwdriver embedded in his back tyre. As it was, she woke up cursing him for two nights in a row after our expedition.

What Maurs had found was sections of the jaw of an Ichthyosaurus (according to the people at the fossil centre) plus a couple of vertebrae. If she had have been able to get back to that pile of rocks she might have extracted the entire saurus. That driver doesn’t know how lucky he was!

                                                      "Hey, gimme my jawbone back!"

The rest of us did not come away empty handed. My sister Mal showed me a promising rock she had collected. I said, “That just needs to be cleared away a bit,” at which point she started bashing it with her hammer. “NOT WITH A HAMMER!” I said, “With a small brush!” “Well, if you’re going to get cranky,” she said, and walked off.

The Grothy Entertainment Machinerolls on - Roy relocating the washing at night

We then travelled through some pretty ordinary countryside to arrive at Charters Towers – a town that holds a lot of significance for our family. Charlies Trousers (as it is known) was the birthplace of our mum. Our grandfather Herbert Forsdike was the ambulance superintendant there but died of a disease that he contracted in 1919, leaving his wife Sophie with four kids and no income (our mother was nine months old). That was the start of a rather harsh episode for Sophie. Herbert was buried in an unmarked grave, which we managed to find along with another baby Forsdike who only lived 16 days – we didn’t even know about him. At the old ambulance centre, we found his last hand-written entry in the station’s daily log in April 1919 and then a rather poignant entry in May indicating that the staff had taken time off to attend Superintendant Forsdike’s funeral. Mal has been right into compiling the family history so she came away with a lot more material. We both came away a little bit closer to our maternal grandfather, whom we never had the chance to meet.

                                                      Exploring Charlies Trousers

Next stop – the Foley kids birthplace – Townsville.

Dinosaurs and Minerals

My bro-in-law Roy suggested we stay with his mate Mick when we got to Winton and it turned out that this was a good move as Mick and his wife Tammy ran a nice little van park complete with night-time entertainment in the form of bush poets and roast dinners– all good fun. He also took us out in his minivan to see the famous footprints of the dinosaur stampede that occurred 90 million years ago out there. Now getting there involved going over a fair bit of rough road and dodging the fauna on the way. There was a lot of road-kill out there and unfortunately Mick added to it slightly when a small lamb dressed in camouflage gear (fleece was coated in the local dirt and so difficult to see) made a vain dash across the road...unsuccessfully. The gay banter inside the van dried up precisely as the “bump” was felt and for the next ten minutes there was no talk at all. Thomas received a bruise to his upper arm in the shape of five fingertips as Marg witnessed the impact. This was nothing of course, compared with what the lamb felt.

                        Mick settling himself after the "Silence of the Lambs"

Actually the road noise from the van and the rough track made any talk inside the van quite difficult, to the extent that any interesting information that Mick uttered had to be relayed to the back of the van seat by seat. As we passed a road intersection Mick told me that up that road was a “jump-up” (mesa) where they filmed the French version of the “Survivor” TV show last year and that it was in the summer when it was up to 48 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately my sister Mal in the back seat got the message that last summer there was a car accident up that road and they found a French survivor in 48 degree heat wearing a jumper.

As for the fossil museum at the end of the road, it was really interesting, even intriguing, how a bunch of dinosaur tracks can be captured in time like that. The palaeontologists have concocted a theory about it all happening in a short space of time as a herd of little dinosaurs were stampeded by a big predator on the muddy bank of a water-hole – but my question is, what happened the next day that the footprints weren’t over-ridden by other dinosaurs coming down for a drink? Or the day after that? Oh well, I was never cut out to be a palaeontologist (I can only spell it thanks to Bill Gates).

                                The Great Dinosaur Stampede of Minus 90 Million Years

From Winton we drove on to Cloncurry and Mount Isa. We spent three days at the Isa to take in the sights. The highlight was the mine tour where our host Bill showed us what it was like in the early days of mining silver, lead and zinc – the hard way! Bill was a tough old bloke with an absolute passion for mining and a great sense of humour to boot. And, you got to dress up like a miner too. As we were issued our gear Mal put the boots on and asked Bill, “Excuse me, are these shoes supposed to be heavy?” Bill almost had apoplexy. I’m sure that sort of question wasn’t asked when Bill first started out in the mining game.

                                                        Gee those boots are heavy!

We did strike gold at the Isa – in the Buffalo Club. Roy suggested we play Keno while we dined and blow me if we didn’t pick up $80 in prize money. Buoyed with success, we tried it again the next night as we dined at the Irish Club and yep, another $80 came our way. That’s where the rich vein ran out as no further attempts at the game have resulted in any of our numbers coming up. So ends my career as a high roller.

That was our last night together as a group. Tom and Marg are heading for Lawn Hill in the Gulf country – he’s been trying to get there for three years but circumstances have yet to be kind. The rest of us are heading for Richmond...Queensland!

                                                  Frozen solid by the Mt Isa winter winds
Footnote: If you got this far through the blog, you're entitled to a surprise. Maurs and I are going to be grandparents. We just found out that Renee and Justin are expecting - bub is due in January. We're pretty thrilled and it looks like the Returd Highway may need to pass through Melbourne around that time.
Ciao