Tin Can Bay

Tin Can Bay is a fishing and boating village on a quiet inlet. The main tourist traffic comes for the fishing, as the beaches , which look attractive at high tide, reveal themselves as mud flats once the tide goes out. We came for a game of golf, and to check out the nearby Great Sandy National Park. We had also intended to do a day trip into nearby Gympie, but having been there last week from Imbil when we caught the Mary Valley Rattler steam train, we decided that it really wasn't worth a repeat visit.

The southern section of the Great Sandy NP stretches from Noosa Heads at the north of the Sunshine Coast to Rainbow Beach, a surfing and tourist town about 40km from Tin Can Bay. The park also covers Fraser Island, which spreads northwards from Rainbow Beach. We decided not to visit Fraser Island, but we did go and have a look at the car ferry. The car wash in Rainbow Beach had special cycles that washed and rust proofed the underside of your car, catering for all the beach driving done on the island and also the local mainland beaches. We stayed firmly on the official highways.

The Great Sandy NP proved to be slightly disappointing, as very little of it is actually accessible without embarking on a 5 day trek (or doing some beach driving), however we found a few short walks. The highlight was the Carlo Sandblow, a vast sand dune that is gradually marching inland, swallowing all vegetation in its path. The trek down to the edge wasn't too hard, but wading through the sand back up again proved a very tough test on our calves and ankles!

Imbil

Imbil is in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, about 40 km south of Gympie. When we first got here we thought it wasn't going to live up to its name, as the forecast was for showers and storms all week, however after some drizzle on the first day the weather bureau changed their minds, and it has been glorious sunshine for the rest of our stay. The main industry around here is timber, and Imbil is surrounded by forests and national parks, including the Imbil State Forest right on our doorstep. We have, of course, done quite a bit of walking, as well as spending time driving around the scenic countryside.

John will remember Imbil for his wildlife encounters. The caravan park we are staying at also has deer, and at some time in the past there have obviously been escapees, so feral deer now live in the surrounding forest. John was most surprised one night to encounter a full grown doe right outside the men's toilet block, luckily it responded appropriately to a gentle shoo. Not quite so pleasant was the leech that attached itself to John's foot during one of our forest walks. It somehow managed to slip through his sock to feast on his blood, swelling up to several times its initial size. The advice given in the national park brochure is to sprinkle it with salt, but lacking that we eventually got tired of waiting for it to gorge itself and drop off and Wendy rather squeamishly pulled it off with a tissue. The bleeding took quite a long time to stop, and after that John was much keener on the scenic drives than the forest walks!

The highlight of our stay was our day trip on the Mary Valley Rattler, a steam train that runs from Gympie to Imbil. The train runs along the line built in 1914 to service the towns of the Mary Valley. Services on the line ceased in 1994, but already locals were planning to run a tourist train service on the disused line. The Mary Valley Heritage Railway commenced operations in 1998 and has proved a popular attraction. One very interesting part of the day is watching the turntable used at Imbil to turn the locomotive around so it can do the return journey to Gympie. The engine only just fits on the turntable so the driver has to position it exactly, a feat achieved by the low-tech device of lining himself up with a piece of cloth tied to the railing!

Yarraman

Yarraman is a small town not much more than 100 km north of Toowoomba, and still up on the Darling Downs. It is not far from Kingaroy, famous last century in Australia as the home of peanut farmer turned Queensland State Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Queensland has come a long way since the days when Joh and the white shoe brigade ran the state like a personal fiefdom, but judging by the number of things in the area named after him the locals around here still remember him with a great deal of fondness. Peanut farming is still one of the mainstays of the local economy and we have enjoyed the local product, which tastes a lot fresher bought at the source rather than a supermarket.

The countryside here is very attractive, with rolling green hills, contented cows and lots of state forests and national parks. We have done several scenic drives, including a visit to The Palms National Park, a tiny patch of remnant rainforest filled with Piccabeen palms.

Yarraman at one stage was the terminus of a rail line, and there is still evidence around the town and surrounding countryside of the now-gone railway. The old station area provides the focus of an interesting town walk, and there is a tunnel about 40 km southwards that goes underneath the Great Dividing Range, joining the eastern and western watersheds. It is now home to a colony of bats, which didn't seem to appreciate our visit as hundreds of them flapped and swirled around us in the dark. Although none of them actually touched us you could feel the wind of their wings brushing just in front of you, we hurried through all crouched over and were very glad to get out the other side, it was a seriously creepy experience.

We also did a couple of other short walks around the township itself, including one which ran right past the back of our caravan park to the top of the nearby hill for a panoramic view of the area. The local market on Saturday morning was quite a disappointment though, with only a handful of stalls selling mainly second-hand tat rather than any fresh produce or hand made goods.

West of Yarraman is the Bunya Mountains National Park, with cool rainforests sheltering Bunya Pines, remnants of the once dominant Australian vegetation type with a history stretching back 200 million years. The national park is lush and green, with ferns, fungus and bubbling streams. Luckily the rainforest canopy protects the forest floor from the elements, as the day of our visit was cool and wet. We did several terrific walks, and although we could often hear the rain pattering on the leaves overhead little of it managed to filter down to our level.

Easter at Toowoomba

Once again we have come to Toowoomba in southern Queensland for Easter. We were here last year but given the weather then we decided that there were still things to see here, and we knew we could get a caravan site over the awkward Easter period. The weather has been much kinder to us this year and we have got several walks in.

Our first foray was to Mt Basalt Reserve, about 80 km south west of Toowoomba. The local map we had obtained from the caravan park was a bit 'artists impression thereof' so we had a bit of trouble finding it, but eventually we tracked it down. The reserve is only 10 hectares, so the walking trail wasn't particularly long, but we did a fairly sharp climb up each of two rocky peaks, being the remains of ancient volcanic plugs, to get a pleasant view of the surrounding rich Darling Downs farmland.

On Easter Monday we ventured south east to the Goomburra area of Main Range National Park. The 35 km access road was fairly narrow and we had to pull over every few seconds to pass the steady stream of campers, trailers, caravans and cars that were heading out so they could go back to work the next day (ha ha!). We chose to do a 6.5 km walk called 'The Cascades', which started out on an easy wheelchair friendly track before veering off to follow a creek upstream. What we hadn't twigged from the park brochure was that the walk didn't just follow the creek, it criss-crossed it at least a dozen times, and none of the crossings had a bridge. At first John managed to pick his way across strategic stones at each crossing, and Wendy, who is far less nimble, took off her shoes and socks and waded across. However, at about the third or fourth crossing John slipped off one of the rocks and went into the water up to his ankles, and Wendy got sick of stopping for 10 minutes every 50 metres, so after that we sacrificed our footwear and struggled across as best we could. The current was quite strong so even allowing for wet shoes we still had to cross carefully or risk being swept off our feet - wet shoes are one thing, wet clothes, camera and sandwiches are quite another! Our troubles didn't finish with the creek crossings, at one particularly muddy patch of the track Wendy tried to go around the bad bit and brushed through a nettle patch, ending up with painful nettle stings on her arms and legs. All in all the walk took us well over 3 hours to complete, which is an extraordinary amount of time for the distance. By the end we were wet, dirty and exhausted, and not even vaguely interested in the short walks to the nearby lookouts we had originally planned!

Apart from the walks we also played in the Easter tournament at the Toowoomba Golf Club, but neither of us did any better than last year. At least it meant we didn't have to stay for presentations!

Finally Moving on from Coffs Harbour

We've spent the last 2 months at Coffs Harbour making preparations for building our new house. Things have taken a lot longer than we anticipated (those of you who have built before probably won't be surprised) but we are hopeful that things should be able to proceed without us from here, so we're hitting the road again to explore any nooks and crannies of Australia that we may have missed in the last 3 years.

We're going to have to get back into the travelling mindset, as we'd quite settled in at Coffs, joining the golf club, the library and even the local bush walking club. Still, we're looking forward to seeing more of this big country before we settle down again.