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

The Ride of the Bakeries

Barcaldine is known as “Barky” to all and sundry, I suspect because no one can agree on where to place the emphasis (Bar-CALL-dine or BAR-calldine) and is home to the “Tree of Knowledge”; a kind of shrine for trade unionists and comrades alike, dating back to the Great Shearers’ Strikes of the 1890s. Some genius killed the tree off a few years back, unknowingly strengthening the legend and the degree of reverence.

                                                      Tree of Knowledge, Barcaldine

There is also a museum in the town that highlights the efforts of trade unions, particularly those working in the Queensland Civil Service. A photo of my great-grandfather Thomas Foley appears there as a union official and he later became a MLA in the Queensland Parliament (guess for which party). I hadn’t seen many photos of him but he was only the lead-up act to the main event - for in the display of the Golden Casket (State-run Lottery Agency) there is a large photograph of a group of staff who entertained the office at a social function – the men dressed as ballerinas and the women dressed as male dancers – and there – in the middle of it all – is my father – replete in ballerina costume – captured in time. Pappy rose in the ranks to be second in charge of the Casket by the end of his career, but while portraits of the old managers are displayed somewhat drearily around the board, they have to assume second place to my dad, front and centre of it all, dressed in drag.

                      My Dad's big night out as Prima Donna of the Casket Office

While Wagner may have composed “The Ride of the Valkyries”, I’ve been considering christening this leg of the tour “The Ride of the Bakeries”. Every town we go to ends up with a visit to the local baker's shop, courtesy of my brother-in-law Roy, who is especially partial to a cream-bun – and I must say there are some class bakers out in these little country towns. I savoured the sausage rolls at Cloncurry – only to be bettered by a little shop in Hughenden.

                                                       Roy - "Cream buns are num-num!"

Now Roy is like a complete entertainment system in his own right. I can watch him for hours and be thoroughly entertained. In Longreach for instance, my sister Mal was drying the dishes and dropped a knife, unbeknownst to her, into one of Roy’s sandals. Roy then emerged from the motor-home and put his sandals on, unbeknownst to him with the knife sticking out the side. He then proceeded to walk around the camp, much like Ben Hur’s chariot at the Colosseum. He’s lucky he didn’t slash a few caravan tyres in his travels. When finally discovered he exclaimed, “I thought my foot felt a bit funny!”

At Longreach we did the tourist things, visiting the QANTAS museum and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. It is a bit disconcerting driving into town and being confronted with the sight of a Jumbo Jet sitting there on the tarmac. We did a tour of a B-707 – I had never flown in one. It was decked out as an executive jet on the inside which was disappointing in one way but interesting in another.

                                              On board the QANTAS B-707 - luxury class

We also had a ride in an old Cobb & Co coach pulled by four greys and culminating in a gallop home in the Cobb & Co tradition. All good fun. Maurs rode on the top at the back, brother Tom along-side the driver and the rest of us buffeted around inside the coach. Reminded me of the old joke ...”Who’s wobbing this stage coach, dwiver? You or Mister Kelly?”

Leaving Emerald

Well I got my new tyre – and like all good tyre places, the guys kept me in suspense for as long as possible – “The tyre hasn’t left Rockhampton yet”, “It didn’t come in on that shipment”, “Didn’t I say Thursday?...”  When I first ordered the tyre Maurs noticed a sign in the window stating you could get frequent flyer points for each purchase made. She notified me of this golden chance to add 300 odd points to my collection. She reminded me – every day – sometimes twice a day – not to forget to pick up the points. In the end I cracked, “Leave off it will you, I KNOW about the deal! I CAN remember things!  I’m not stupid!” That afternoon I got my tyre. It came as a bit of a surprise as they had assured me in the morning that no tyre had arrived on the truck.  I came back to the van park to excitedly tell Maurs the tyre has finally come. “Did you get the points?” Well call me stupid! I guess me musta fergit in all my excitement! The aftershocks from the initial tremor have not quite died down yet...and Maurs rang through and made sure we got those points.

The other four in the group had packed their golf clubs and decided it was high time to have a crack. Maurs and I stayed behind to clear emails and generally have a break from those golfers! We expected them back around dusk. Dusk fell and the arrival of the night saw no golfers return. We eventually got a phone call – the bridge across the dam had been closed and they were stranded on the other side. We went up to the van park office to see if there was any info we could relate back. None except they would need to take the other route to the park – back through Emerald and out the other side. So the golfers took the long way home and limped in pretty late, any tales of glory on the course lost to stories of dodging around kangaroos in the dark. Maybe they should have stopped and listened to them! “What’s that Skippy? The bridge is down?! We’ve got to get home the other way?!”

With no luck on the golf course, the group decided to take their chances fossicking for gems at Anakie. I stayed to work on my contract so there were five eager gem seekers took off to meet some crusty old prospector who set them up with buckets and picks. A day’s hard labour yielded them a handful of colourful pebbles. Maurs worked hard totting those pails but they probably got better wages and conditions working on the Gulag for what came out of it. As they drove their weary backsides home, a small voice from the back seat (Roy) asked “Are we having fun yet?” Fun is in the eye of the beholder.

                                                      You've got a table full of...rocks

                                                  Maurs doing hard labour at Anakie!!

Now my brother Thomas has quite a set-up with his van and vehicle. They’ve got everything that open and shuts. But of course with technology comes a new complexity and things tend to go wrong. He’s had no end of trouble with his TV reception and the bluddy aerial – and he only wants to pick up the footy! Also his UHF radio went on the blink – he could hear us but we couldn’t hear him (not such a bad thing at times) – turns out it was his microphone. Next to go was the roll-out awning on his van – only to be told over the phone that it was a “throw-away item” – like how do you fix that miles from nowhere? Lucky he’s an even-tempered fella like myself or there would be upper-cuts flying everywhere. His technology has its advantages though and while the rest of us are freezing in the outback Queensland winter mornings, he flicks on his air-con system (the lights dim all over each town when he does it, it’s so powerful – we call it his thermo-nuclear device) and they wake up as warm as toast.

We’ve lingered in Emerald a tad too long – onwards to Barcaldine and Longreach!!

Stranded in Emerald

We touched down in Brisbane at around 6.30am and cleared Customs quickly so we were out on the streets and into the arms of my sister Mal and bro-in-law Roy “Diamondo” Groth. There was no time to waste as we made preparation for a combined family camping holiday with the Groths and my brother Thomas and sis-in-law Margaret. I guess we have all been so busy in our lives that it is sad to say that this is our first family holiday together. We plan to make amends for that over the next four weeks!

                                         The Caravan setting out to parts unknown - Day 1

With all the stuff we acquired in New York and Montreal, we had to seriously look at how the heck it was all going to fit in an already cosily outfitted camper trailer. One of us has organisational skills. I sat back and watched her in action. In fact after the re-pack, we had slightly more room than when we set out from Perth. We spent the first day on the road thinking, “What have we forgotten? Surely we must have forgotten something!”

Our first stop was Kingaroy – home of the peanut and the Bjelke-Petersens (that’s not tautology is it?) We bought peanuts from the aptly named “Peanut Van” and also did a tour of “Bethany” where Joh’s son John takes you to the highest point of the Bjelke-Petersen property and tells you the history of the area, the family and freely intersperses it all with anecdotes about his dad. Strong family resemblance there too. After you get back down to the homestead, you get the chance of a lifetime to have a cup of tea and a pumpkin scone with Flo who is now 91 and possessing of as many marbles as she had in the 60s. A good effort.

We did a day trip to the Bunya Mountains, which is a beautiful area full of rainforest and Bunya Pines. We walked down to Paradise Falls but motored everywhere else – it’s a pretty big place.

                                     Me, Maurs, Roy, Mal, Marg, Thomas - Bunya Mountains

Mal told us about some drapery store in a town called Munduberra that still used an old “flying-fox” system to send messages and money around the store – that last one in Australia! So off we set from Kingaroy through Murgon and Gayndah to Munduberra. We couldn’t find the Drapery so we asked the guy in the local Hardware Store. “Oh, that’s in Gayndah” he said. We weren’t going back that far to see some old coot fire a basketful of paper from the front counter to the back of the store. And whose fault was it that we missed it? Mal said, “It’s that bluddy Desi Groth’s (Roy’s brother) fault – he definitely told me Munduberra!” Or Gayndah perhaps?

On our way north we passed through Biloela. Maurs said, “I’ve heard of Biloela but I’ve never seen it spelt before...you’d think there would have to be a ‘w’ in there somewhere!” [For those not versed in Queensland pronunciation Biloela is ‘Bill-o-weel-a’]

We over-nighted at a “free” camp at the Wuruma Dam outside of Eidsvold (another classic Queensland-named town). It was recommended to Thomas by a friend of his. As we came over the hill to the camping area I was surprised at the incredible number of campers staying at free sites such as this – all packed in together getting away from it all! It was a lovely setting though with abundant bird life. From there it was on to Dingo for two nights while we visited the Blackdown Tableland National Park.

Wuruma Dam free camp - no power, no water and a 100 metre hike up a hill to the dunny - idyllic!

Dingo is a sparse little town and on the rainy weekend that we spent there, there was no room at the pub to have a meal (they were renovating the dining room that week apparently) and no store open. So we were on our own food-wise. The trains shunting vast tonnages of coal from Blackwater to the coast for export to China and India rumbled by the caravan park with such frequency that we didn’t even hear them after a while. Blackdown was not exactly a hidden treasure either – even though we travelled over obscure dirt roads in pouring rain, we got to “Gudda Gumoo” (that’s Aboriginal talk for Rainbow Waters) to still find it chock-a-block with 4WDs and people.

                                        Gudda Gumoo at Blackdown - 240 steps to the bottom.

                                                             Now THAT'S a blown tyre!

Also, on the way there I managed to blow a rear tyre – a fine effort on my part – and then I discovered that the spare was speed-limited to 80 km/h! Not happy! We then had to hobble over to Emerald to get a replacement only to find there were only 13 of these tyres on the Australian database and most of those were in Perth! There’s a generic tyre coming from Rockhampton as I write this but we’re stranded in Emerald for a couple of days whether we like it or not. Emerald has got to be one of the busiest little towns in Australia! There is traffic everywhere – and it’s not that big a town! I don’t think people actually work there – the entire population just drives around the town all day to keep the road numbers up. I want my tyre back!

                                 Maurs at the Emerald Railway Station (waitin' for the train!)

                     They're called Apostle Birds - because they usually travel in groups of about 12!