Day 14: Mackay to Home Hill (15/06/12)

¿Que? I hear you say, where is Home Hill? Patience, dear reader, and all will be revealed. 

Do we really have to go on? You're kidding me!

Roof down, chairs stowed away, cupboards closed, rrrready to go!

But wait, before we go, wasn't this caravan park on a beach?

And another opportunity to tempt the saurians

Sand and palms and a wall to keep the big waves out.

Putting the message across

Caravan Park, Mackay

Yes, that's us, enjoying the winter sunshine....

We left Mackay with the intention of making it most of the way to Townsville so that a short Saturday drive would get us there for the weekend. So off we went, choosing Bowen as our lunch spot. We were now well into the region of the Whitsundays and the signage along the road gave copious evidence of that. There were other, more disturbing signs, too. Those nefarious Queenslanders had usurped some Tasmanian icons. Just north of Mackay, we found Mount Ossa and Mount Pelion, the latter a measly 380 metres high and the former even less. Could it be that Queenslanders are so afraid of Tasmania’s bracing weather that they import the names of Tasmania’s great mountains and put them on a couple of their own second-rate hills?

Shaking our heads we drove on to Bowen. (Well, we didn’t shake our heads all the way to Bowen, as a) that would have looked very silly and b) Bowen was still more than 100 kms away and we would have gotten sore necks). Perplexion did not leave us, however, because we were looking forward to a short stop in Proserpine, only to find that we must have passed it unnoticed! Not worrying too much and with heads unshooked, we sailed into Bowen. This turned out to be a most pretty little town with ultra-roomy streets – even the side streets would have been useful as main street in a reasonable country town. I could glide around in circles with the caravan in tow and never even get close to the kerbs! We drove to the Esplanade and had lunch on the grass. What stood out in Bowen was the extraordinary clarity and colour of the light.

Our lunch spot in Bowen

The Bowen Jetty

Port Denison Sailing Club, Bowen

Having consulted the information on Bowen, we found that it had hosted the filming of Baz Luhrman’s Australia. So we rubbernecked around: Oh look, there’s the hotel! And we have never even seen the film....

A sunken boat?

Dirk on Queens Beach, Bowen

Okay, they serve as flood protection, but why would you have concrete wagon wheels in the first place?

Monster sandbags

Joke's first bits of coral

Mistress of all she surveys...

Finally we set course for Home Hill. It had been recommended as a free camp spot by people we had met at St Lawrence. It is basically a suburb of Ayr on the southern side of the Burdekin River. It boasts a small shopping precinct and behind it a railway station, with its own road running about half a kilometre alongside the tracks. When we got there, fairly lateish in the afternoon, we were relegated to the far end, as the place was full of caravans and campervans. The Home Hill people had built a communal amenities block with showers and toilets. What they got out of it was people stopping for a meal, petrol, a trip to the supermarket and the like. Only two small, but interesting in their own way, negatives. Every couple of hours, someone in the surrounding farm area would set fire to a cane sugar field. One of them, at night, was upwind from us and the caravan was covered with stringy bits of ash in the morning. The other negative was that we were parked about 10 metres from the railway line. In the late afternoon that was kind of interesting, but the 1 am, 3 am and 5 am trains, well they weren’t wearing rubber wheels, and the drivers had all had new horns for Christmas.....

Along the line at Home Hill

Home Hill free camping area

Burning sugar cane - interesting when it is not upwind!