Wild Places and Open Spaces

Our first day on the road proved exciting. Rolf and Marion led us out of town, then cut us loose to go off on our own. One of the first signs we saw had the following destinations on it: Toronto, Tamworth and Newcastle. We thought we were in Ontario again briefly! Jim did a fantastic time driving on the wrong side of the road, with me coaching….stay left, stay left….from the passenger seat. The only trouble Jim has is that there is no room to ‘gawk’, ie. they have little or no shoulders at the side of the road, so if one is caught looking around (like Jim likes to do) there really is no leeway and a couple of times I had to say gently….”watch where you are going!!”. Unfortunately, the first wild kangaroo we saw was road kill.

A nice thing we are finding is that there are rest stops every few kilometres…and nice ones at that. A strange thing is the speed limit signs – they go up and down all over the place – one minute we are going 100km/hr, then 50km/hr, then back up to 100km/hr all within what seems 200metres.

We have found that Australians are quite friendly, especially now that we are out of the city. A fellow at a gas station by mistake keyed in the amount we had to pay as $18.88 (the litre amount) rather than $23.01 (the actual money amount we owed), and when he realized it he said, “no worries, mate”, and he let us pay the cheaper amount! Then, we went into a hardware store to get an ‘o’ ring we needed for our camel back, and the fellow there gave it to us for free!

We put our car to the test on it’s first day….we drove on quite a bad dirt road for 50km up into the mountains. It did okay, but it has no guts. It gets pretty hot, then a loud fan comes on, but once it cools down again it is fine. We have since driven a full day in it and it is fine. However, we did lose a hubcap….but heard it fall off so we were able to grab it.

We have been told that Australia is in a drought (sp), but we somehow found rain. Our first night we stayed (for free I might add) in Barrington Tops National Park, and we got rained on. However, the weather was good until night fall, and then the fog rolled in. We saw many grey kangaroos and red wallabies – it is so strange seeing them just hop around wild! There are many beautiful, colourful birds as well – crimson rosellas, eastern rosellas, cockatoos, etc. and of course lots of Kookaburras.

As the fog set in, we came back to our campsite and both needed to use the washroom. Jim went into the mens and had to knock a palm-sized spider from under the seat, and I ended up having to use the mens because in my outhouse there was a centipede on the toilet paper that wasn’t moving for anything!! Because of all the wonderful creatures here, we take our shoes into the tent every night to avoid any surprises. Unfortunately overnight many creatures take refuge between the tent and the fly (tarp) so when we dismantle the tent we have to be very careful and shake things out well.

We also saw our first wild wombat….again, roadkill. Our first wild Koala….roadkill. Very sad. There are MANY dead wallabies and kangaroos on the road, and they are left to rot – no one comes to clean them up, and not much has been eating them that we have seen.

Anyways, must run. We are doing great, and are in Queensland now, as of about an hour ago….heading for Cairns on an interior road.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.