Travelling away from a region that is tropical and contains large scale mountainous rain forests was never gonna be a dry experience but the weather over the last couple of days has been something else. The locals have tagged it anti-cyclonic gloom !! With this said it kinda made our decision to opt for the bus to start the first leg of our journey south.
We left Cairns at dawn with an 8 hour road trip to complete. The bus picked up fellow travelling folk at Gordonvale, Innisfail, Mission beach and Tully. All a bit same, same but different if you get what we mean. Tully being famous as the wettest town in Oz and to celebrate this fact the town has positioned a 7.9 metre high wellie boot in it's centre (7.9 metres being the amount of rain which fell in 1950). As it happened our brief time in Tully and come to think of it the whole 8 hour journey, it was pretty wet!
These lands are sugar cane country. As far as you can see there are fields and fields of it. Narrow gauge railtracks line the main roads, these link the vast fields to the sugar mills which is the first thing you spot when you enter Tully. Her chimney smoking silently as we passed through. Ahhhh smell the molasses! Most of the sugar produced goes into the production of local rum.
We had a change of drivers at Townsville, which looked more like Doomsville Let's just say the place could do with a bit a work.
The pull for Airlie Beach world over is getting out on the water and seeing the Whitsunday islands. But not when it's cloudy as hell, raining horizontally and blowing a choppy 30-35 knots. So after sharing Airlie Beach for one night with a zillion partying schoolies (the oz term for a school leaver) we headed for the Bruce highway to continue our journey south.
The bus ditched we picked up our new ride, a bronze Hyundai Glitz. She looked like a roller boot on these roads. She's probably one of the smallest cars on the road downunder, belting speaker system though. Rucksacks brimming from the ridiculously tiny boot the drive down to Rockhampton (Rocky) was like a drive across Bodmin moor, in January.
To our right the mist bouncing off the Great Dividing Ranges and to our left the storm clouds rolled in from the barrier reef. Who'd have though it hey, the land of the sun shade and stubby cooler getting rain and sheet grey cloud stretching out for some 1000 kms. All pretty rubbish really. But fear not, us Brits are masters in this situation as these sorts of conditions are two a penny in the land of the inclement weather. The show 'always' goes on.
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