Graeme says the first thing to say is that we found Paradise. It was at Bowen. We all know about Mangos and Bowen, but that is not a fraction of the story. Bowen seems to be on a peninsular and has ocean and beaches on three sides. The first thing we found was the large fishing fleet in the harbour. Something to see. It is a big fishing town and Cod is the fish running at present. They go to sea for a week and come back in with the catch, which they export all over the World. The town has a big Aboriginal population, who all were lovely to us. They surely found the most magnificent place to live. The beaches were not easy to photograph, due to narrow roads and nowhere to stop with the van, so they were little “grab shots”, with Police everywhere, making sure nobody stopped where they shouldn’t. We’ll go back there again for a better look. Maybe around Mango time…….
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| Bowen Beach |
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| Dingo Beach on the way to Bowen |
By the way if you can find a banana here it is likely to be $17.00 per kg.
Fortuitously, we arrived here for the last weekend of the SDA Convention for the entire top northern part of Australia. We had no idea about it. So we joined in some of the meetings over the weekend. They have a big office there and a school and convention centre. The convention finished last night and today it was due to fill up again for some popular races which happen in Townsville every year and the town gets booked out, so no chance of us being able to stay on their site for a few extra days. The city has a population of 80,000. We enjoyed their amazing musicians and singers and learnt a lot of new songs. I spoke to the main song leader after the meeting Saturday night, and she is training to be a specialist in emergency medicine at Cairns Hospital. She is so beautiful and a wonderful singer, writer and song leader. She is joining Christian TV this year as a singer.
On Sunday 3rd July we took off for one of the national parks towards Ingham, which is the next main town before Cairns. We saw so many lovely things there and hopefully our pictures will show you some of the things we found.
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| Caught in the act |
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| Depression built bridge, around 1932 |
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| Jourama causeway |
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Jourama Creek in Paluma Range National Park
about 88 km North of Townsville |
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| Jourama Creek |
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| Little Crystal Creek Falls |
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| Little Crystal Falls |
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| Paradise |
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| Paradise |
On Monday 4th July we head west to Charters Towers, so here we go on the long adventure to Cloncurry, Mt Isa, and famous outback settlements on the way to Darwin. There are pretty big distances between each stop. I hope we can take in some of the national parks on the way. It will probably get colder for a while, before it heats up towards Darwin. We have actually had about 3 pleasantly warm days here in Townsville. The caravan park here is full of children. They seem to be friends and they are having a great time. I don’t know how the babies and little kids survive all the traffic coming and going, as the children have the control of the roads with all the wonderful things provided by the van park. They also have these “bendy boards” (skateboards, Graeme says) that they ride all over the place. I don’t think I’ve seen them before. They also have wonderful “buggies” for the kids to pedal and wonderful jumping “things” which are huge and they have a brilliant time having games on it and pushing each other off it.
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| Kids on push bikes at Caravan Park |
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