Day 27: Airlie Beach

We packed up camp at Paronella Park in the rain and continued our journey south. We gave our Cape York map to a young bloke called Darcy, from Phillip Island and exchanged stories about Fraser Island and Cape York. It's funny the impressions you form about a place from reading the tourist books. Darcy though you needed to navigate via GPS to find the right track to Cape York, and he set us straight about Fraser Island.

We drove to Mission Beach and saw the devastation of cyclone Yasi. Houses either had a shiny new roof, a blue tarp on the roof or no roof at all. It seemed that few houses escaped the cyclone. We could see trees with new growth that had clearly lost all of their leaves, and several big gum trees and palm trees were broken off at the top.   We saw a cassowary along the roadside near Mission Beach. They are quite big, similar to an emu, however they have brightly coloured feathers and a blue head.

Smoko was at Ingham, and we had a quick lunch in Townsville. We stopped at the big snake in Ayr, and Queensland has got a lot of 'big' things.  The strangest of all 'big' things was the 'Big Mango'. 

We had a quick look at Bowen. Bowen was an interesting place, we stopped at Queens Beach, which is a beautiful beach (but you can’t swim because of crocs, sharks and stingers), then drove around to the wharf where the film Australia was made.

We ended up in Airlie Beach and set up camp for a couple of nights. Helen got sandfly bites as soon as she got out of the car. Sandflies are mean. You can't see them, and you are bitten before you even know what has happened. And once you are bitten, they start to itch. It's not too bad at first, but on the second day the itching is almost unbearable.