We left Airlie Beach after the cruise to begin our long journey southwards to Brisbane, from where we are due to fly to New Zealand in a week. After an overnight stop just off the Bruce highway, we headed inland to see some of Queensland away from the coast. The drive was amazing, with hardly any cars on the road we felt like we were properly in the "outback"! We also saw many wild animals that we would definitely not have seen on the main highway.....roos, a huge (squashed) snake and some emus.
We arrived in a non-descript place called Marlborough, back on the Bruce Highway, where we stopped for the night in a $40 motel room (bargain!). The next day we decided to stop in Rockhampton to purchase another camera and to triple back-up our other photos to prevent another lost-photo panic situation! After buying a sparkly new, GPS-enabled, waterproof, dust-proof, shock-proof (& hopefully John-proof) camera, we stopped for a coffee to sneakily charge the new battery and then it was back on the road.
We headed to Agnes Water and Town of 1770, which is where Captain Cook first landed in Queensland in ....1770! After a quick walk on Agnes Water beach, where we watched people surfing, we headed to 1770 and found the Captain Cook memorial. We had a lovely walk along an almost-deserted beach, interspersed with rocks. The water was really calm as the beach is partway between the open sea and a river estuary. We were thinking of camping, however the dark rainclouds approaching convinced us that it was worth another night in a motel!
The next day it was slightly less rainy so we decided to go to Deepwater National Park to camp on the beach as we'd heard you could watch nesting turtles after dark there. Unfortunately, from Agnes Water this meant a huge detour south as only 4WD vehicles could access the park from the town. The road we were driving along kept warning of floods but each creek we passed was well below the level of the road. We eventually reached a small flood but our Hyundai Getz gamely took on the waters and we got through only to be confronted with a much deeper flood. A local guy in a V8 ute pulled up behind us and informed us that we might get through this flood but definitely not the one after that....or the one after that (our Aussie summer was starting to seem almost as wet as the UK ones... though a lot hotter!). So we abandoned the idea of heading to the park, retraced our steps to the main road and headed instead for Bundaberg.
It happened to be Australia Day, and it was lovely to see all the Union Jacks on people's cars and in their front gardens....shame they spoiled it by putting it onto a background of weird stars. The sun finally came out for the afternoon and we went for a walk along the coast from the Mon Repos turtle hatchery, where we booked tickets to see the turtles nesting and hatchlings making their way to the sea tonight.
We woke up this morning to black clouds and it has been raining most of the day. However, this presented us with the perfect excuse to visit the very famous Bundaberg Rum Distillery, an excellent indoor attraction! We had a tour of the distillery and tasted the molasses used to make the rum, and then the finished product itself. We tried some of an $80 reserve rum, a red rum and a rum liquor before we remembered that someone had to drive and we should stop there! Tomorrow we're back on the road south.
