On the road in Oz

Our road trip in Australia has been much more of and adventure than we ever imagined.

On leaving Cairns we were unsure what to expect on our drive down the coast and it came as a very pleasant surprise. The Bruce Highway, which is the road we are anticipating taking most of the way (floods permitting), is excellent, very light traffic, single carriageway with notified stretches of dual carriagway for overtaking, which appear at frequent intervals. We were anticipating driving about 350 kilometres to Townsville but the driving was so easy we decided to continue for a further 100kms and arrived in Ayr for the night. We stayed in a motel which had a very strange bathroom - it had a floor to ceiling frosted window which I am sure anyone outside could have seen through. John offered to go and look from the outside but I decided that ignorance was bliss and so continued without knowing.

At Ayr the scale of the flooding ahead of us became apparent and we were unsure how to proceed. One option was to lie low for a few days, wait for the water levels to subside and the roads to reopen. So, after a short journey, our next stop after Ayr was at Airlie Beach, the launching point for the Whitsunday Islands. We were quite surprised at Airlie Beach as there was very little beach! It was very much a tourist/holiday resort. To compensate for the lack of beach they had built a rather lovely swimming pool complex just by the ocean which was surrounded by a false beach and grassy area with palm trees, really nice. It seems to me that the reason for Airlie Beach to exist is to transport people to the Whitsundays. We stayed overnight in a motel which had clearly seen better days. The owner said that they had relied upon coach tours, and they were large enough to house and feed coach loads of tourists, but since the advent of cheap air fares the trade had vanished. We felt rather sorry for them as it was apparent that they would not last much longer, certainly without having a radical rethink about their customer base.

Looking at the news in the evening, it seemed that things were not going to improve quickly enough for us. We decided that we were just going to have to go for it and set off on the Friday to drive inland to avoid the closed roads and floods. We headed off south, down the coast to Mackay which at the time seemed to be relatively clear and out of danger, this has since proven not to be the case and they have had dreadful flooding. From Mackay we knew the road south was blocked so we turned inland towards Emerald, (it may help if you have a map of Australia at your elbow) which is a 390 kms journey. We stopped there for the night, again a rather strange place as are many of the Australian Motels!

That day we had covered 513 kms in total.

Emerald had been cut off but reopened the previous day so leaving it we knew we were one step ahead of the floods and it became obvious that we were going to have to go even further inland to ensure we stayed safe. We headed off due west into the outback until we reached Barcaldine, then south to Morven and then east again until we reached Roma. That day we covered 892 kms, a bit of a haul and as you can imagine we were really tired but were reassured we had done the right thing when we watched the news that night. The tragedy which was unfolding was beyond everything. This was brought home to us by the people who were in the next room who had been evacuated from their own home due to the floods and had no idea when they would be able to return.

Most of the places where we have stayed have not had the internet so we have been using internet cafes. The Roma motel, too, had no internet but it was also Saturday night and the only internet cafe had closed for the weekend. We were not, therefore, able to check the current road situation, however the previous day the road reports had said that roads were now open at Miles and Dalby.

So off we went to Miles and found it a lovely place - it has a Library that is open on Sunday with internet facilities - just what we wanted. And then at Dalby the cashier at the fuel station said that the road through Towoomba to Brisbane was open. Great!

Our plan had been to make it to Bli Bli to see friends. Bli Bli is North of Brisbane and we were initially confident that this area was going to be OK. Unfortunately, from Dalby the rain was just tumbling down, very very heavy and at times it was difficult to see where we were going. It was only once on the road that we realised we could have been wrong and could be heading into trouble. So we made a quick decision to head south from Brisbane. Again, I think we made the right decision as I am sure you will have seen on the TV all the problems that Brisbane is experiencing, with more to come as I write this Blog. Since we travelled that road they have had the most awful floods again; Dalby submerged and Toowoomba devastated by a flash flood, we were so lucky to get through unscathed.

However, we did get through and made it to the bottom end of the Gold Coast, a place called Tweed Heads and a very nice motel called 'Las Vegas'. And then on to New South Wales, to a place called Coffs Harbour and a not so nice motel. The driving became so much easier and it was difficult to see that there had been such problems and also impossible to appreciate the devastation which was taking place behind us. But it was still raining, the floods have followed us south into NSW and a place called Grafton, near Coffs Harbour, which was fine when we passed through, has had the most enormous floods since then, it is all just so awful.

From Coffs Harbour we carried on down the coast, we are now taking our time, doing a more reasonable mileage each day and appreciating our surroundings. We have had much better weather and have gone off our main route from time to time to explore the surrounding country, much more as we had planned to do for this trip. What I can say about Australia is that they have a lot of trees and most of these are huge. We went through some very odd places, if you win a competition and the first prize is a house in Jericho, decline, I won't say more. We were looking everywhere to see if we could see Kangaroos, they must be very shy creatures as to date we have only seen a handful and John seems to see most of these although I did see three Emus. You can see we have turned to nature for our entertainment just recently.

From Coffs Harbour we went to Taree and from there on to Wollongong which is south of Sydney. The last couple of days have been great. We have driven through the most wonderful National Parks, stopped and enjoyed wonderful sandy beaches which stretch for miles in every direction and watched very fit young men surfing the waves (a bit of a treat for me). John has spent many a happy few minutes sizing up the girls who accompany the surfing chaps so that is fair... I think!

So far this trip in Oz has been eventful, at times too eventful. We have been very fortunate and I am very aware that a lot of people have lost everything, and some even their lives, so whingeing about the weather is inappropiate. We are just being very careful and making the very best of what is a less than perfect current time.

I hope the next section of the blog is written in happier times for many of the people here.