Australia & New Zealand

Australia & New Zealand
Part I - Australia, Part II - New Zealand

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Trip Preview - Queensland (Part 7 of 7)

And here we have the much-anticipated conclusion to the 7-part preview - wrapping things up in Queensland. As you know, the story began with me landing on Australia Day in Sydney and flying up to Cairns. Trolling around the web for worthwhile images over the holidays, I came across two that I had to include - from snopes.com of all places! Yes, the same site that clarifies urban legends had two images that made sense for this. The first is an image from Australia Day (OK, it was from the other end of Australia in Perth, but it still fits). Yes, this is a real photo - a wide angle photo digitally altered to reduce the red of the fireworks on the left, but wow! Fireworks on the left, lightening to the right (and a barely visible comet in the middle). Amazing.

The second is a good reason that Alex and I will not be on the Great Barrier Reef. Now this one is photoshopped, but it is a fun way to get things started. No, we are not afraid of sharks (more specifically, fear of sharks would be the last reason to avoid the Reef), I am just wondering what a toddler can do on the Great Barrier Reef. If we can figure it out, we may go out there. I'm not scuba certified and Alex is enough of a handful on land.


By the way, many of the photos we've been looking at to this point (that I have not attributed) are from Google Earth. Just Google Earth a location and you get many photos from that place. This one below is a Google Earth image of the Gold Coast.


Now where were we? Ah yes, we were sitting on the beach for a week, resting up for the final sprint - the home stretch of the trip. We were in the northern part of New South Wales working on our tans and getting into the rhythm of being in one place for a few days. If we get antsy, we'll leave a day or two early, but I doubt it.



Anyhow, we will cross from Tweed's Head, NSW into the Gold Coast & Brisbane, Queensland. The Gold Coast is a stretch of beach resort cities. In some ways it is culturally a cross between Vegas and South Beach - glitzy, trendy, maybe a little shallow - but a cool place without a doubt and the home of many beautiful resorts. There are five resort towns on the Gold Coast - all smallish villages with beautiful beaches and loads of big resorts. We will stay up here at least one night. This really does resemble the stretch of upscale beach communities North of Miami: Ft. Lauderdale, Palm Beach, etc. From what I can tell, it may not have some of the breathtaking natural beauty we've seen in much of Australia, but the beaches & resorts are fantastic and the communities are new and vibrant. Many people have come here on vacation and said "why do I live in __ with higher unemployment, expensive real estate and cloudier weather? This place is booming, housing is cheap, and jobs are plentiful." Equating Queensland with Florida just makes sense - and I guess that's why I am doing it for a second time (I just realized I said something about it in Part 1 - I am nothing if not repetitive).


I am starting to feel bad about equating everything in Australia with somewhere in the States. Let's be clear here, Australians do things differently than we do in America. More often than not, it is similar but not the same. I use these comparisons to make things sort of fit with how we look at things in the States, because (frankly) the drivers that make some hot, humid, resort destination like Queensland boom are the same ones that make Florida boom. If we all forgot the technology for air conditioning today, people would start moving away tomorrow around noon. I half expect to find that Brisbane residents have Melbourne accents the way so many Miami residents sound like they grew up in Brooklyn (oh wait - they did grow up in Brooklyn).


Let me take another aside here. From somewhere around East Gippsland, we've been running between the coastal mountain range and the coast. The mountains are mostly low risers, but create a nice backdrop for the coast. So ever since Sydney, I have been driving on the left facing North,with mountains on my left and water on my right and the sun in my face.

Digressions are over, let's get on with it. Just north of all this "cool stuff" on the Gold Coast is Brisbane (image from Google Earth again). Brisbane seems like a really good city to visit as well. Again, the natural beauty is not off-the-charts amazing, but it is a good sized city, it seems to be quite walkable, a river runs through it, and sharks swim in the river (back to my violent animal theme). While it will be sultry and humid, it will be populous, offer a variety of food options, and bring me back into the world of traffic. It could be like a cosmopolitan version of Jacksonville or a Miami where Latinos are replaced with Asians... I have no clue but Alex and I will take a day or two to figure it out. Everything about Brisbane is inviting (at this distance) and sultry. There are a few hot (literally hot) cities on this itinerary: Cairns, Darwin, Broome. The thing is that most are tiny towns worthy of note primarily because they are remote, kind of like Kailua Kona or Key West. Brisbane is the last of the legit, decent-sized cities on this tour (Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, and Brisbane qualify on my scorecard).
The real shame here is that after Brisbane, we are looking at maybe 5 days to zip up the coast. As I've said, Queensland is a really nice place, but time is not on our side at this stage. After really jamming from Cairns to Melbourne (about 7000 miles in about 25 days), we dramatically slowed down the pace from Melbourne to Brisbane (1300 miles in 25), but we'll have to kick it up a bit for this last part to cover the last 1000 miles in 5 days (no worries).

One place we'll zip to is Beerwah. Aside from a name that is enticing to those of us who like beer, it is the home of the Australia Zoo, Steve Irwin's wildlife zoo. Best I can tell it will be a great place to go and you just know it has plenty to keep Alex's imagination inspired (or maybe that's just me). Since Steve Irwin was such a fun, energetic, engaging guy - pretty much the opposite of world weary & sarcastic - I expect his zoo will be something to see.
This misty image from near Beerwah is also from Google Earth. From there, we will continue north towards Fraser Island. I have heard great things about this place: a big natural park - lots of wildlife, great for camping, and so forth. Here's the thing: there is a big difference between hiking a beautiful, wild island with adults and hiking anywhere with a toddler. Maybe I'll feel different after 2 months in the bush with Alex, but I really don't have any plans to be out of earshot (or line of sight) from the parking lot when it involves a 2-year-old and a jungle. For that matter, let me put to rest any suspicion that we'll be camping across Australia. We'll stay with a roof over our heads every night. I think a string of roadhouses & motels will be plenty interesting on our tour without pitching a tent or meeting any more flies or mosquitoes than necessary. In conclusion, as things stand, Fraser Island is worthy of mention but it will not be on the agenda.

That's nice, where will we go? We will pass through and stop by at an assortment of towns, beaches, and national parks as we go deeper and deeper into the Deep North. While none really have big populations, the folks who have named these places just north of Brisbane deserve credit: Gympie, Noosa Heads, Gin Gin, Seventeen Seventy (huh?), Biggenden, Doolbi, and Eurimbula all caught my eye. Perhaps the coastal Queenslander town-namers could have some sort of playoff with the ones naming everything in the southwest corner of Western Australia. Queensland would win for comedy, but Western Australia has them beat on tongue twisters. Further up the coast, this name creativity apparently peters out and the decent sized towns en route to Cairns have names like Gladstone, Rockhampton, and Townsville.


Best I can tell, the only thing that changes as we go from places like Gympie to places like Rockhampton (aside from the smirk on one's face at seeing "Biggenden wishes you a big grin" or whatever) is that the water gets dangerous again. Somewhere around the Town of 1770, those beautiful beaches re-acquire our friends from parts 1, 2, & 3 of the series: box jellyfish and saltwater crocodiles. Same gorgeous beaches, same idyllic clusters of palm trees, more heat & humidity to make the water enticing... but I suspect we'll be done with lounging on the beach.


To me (at least) "Rockhampton" sounds like some upscale village you would expect to find in Connecticut or outside of London, England with stone fences in front of large houses - not a sweltering bend in the river where crocodiles and bull sharks compete for the river's bounty. Note to anyone from this part of Queensland: I mean no disrespect, but if you would like to swim in the Fitzroy River, you can be assured that I will not be there to crowd you.




Townsville (images above again from Google Earth) is the last town before Cairns. Actually, it has more people than Cairns. As you can see above, they have a Children's Waterpark on The Strand and it seems like there is more where that came from. I don't mean to harp on this, but is "Townsville" the most vanilla name possible? It looks like an attractive city and I think I will enjoy visiting it. But "Townsville"? The name just screams "committee". Since I don't actually know the history, I will share my undocumented, unprovoked, unsubstantiated conjecture on how the name came about. If anyone has a better or more fact-based story for it, I am open to suggestions, but just seeing the name here is how I think it happened. This town had a name like Coombalingaroo, but they discovered there were already 6 towns in Queensland and the Northern Territory with that same name and mail was always getting mixed up, so they needed to rename it. There was a guy who founded the city, built it, owned most everything, and they figured they would name it after him: "Smithtown". But a lot of people did not like the ring of that and preferred "Smithville". Well the place was divided and they formed a committee to find a compromise. Somewhere along the way, Smithvilletown and Smithtownville were suggested, but nobody liked either. Then Smith's son piped up, saying "why don't we just call it 'Smith'?" Aussies are not fans of tall poppies (those who call attention to themselves), so the panel voted unanimously to call it Townsville.
Now, the other curveball I could think of would be if the place was named after someone named "Towns". If so, the question is if the town is named after some imperious-sounding British guy (Chester Eustace Wentworth Towns IV) or someone with a more "casual" name ("Stumpy" Billy Towns). As for me, I am going with it being almost named after someone like Smith.


















And that brings us to Cairns (images thanks to Hilton Cairns - the place where I am staying at least on the first stop). After this little circuit of the continent, I think we will enjoy returning to a familiar place and getting a good night's sleep. If it is anything like the Doubletree in Torrance, the hotel staff will fall in love with Alex (they asked about him for the rest of the year after I had to drag him along on a business trip in Feb '07). Depending on when we get into Cairns, we may be able to either retrace any especially cool experience from January or hit anything that we did not have time to get to (or the weather prevented) the first time. Regardless, I will pull that car back into the Hertz returns and have the camera ready as the guy reads the mileage counter. Yeah, free unlimited miles. Over 10,000 of them. That's right.


It is a little early to get sappy about all that I have learned and gained from the travel, since I have not left yet. One thing I can say is that since the notice went out in my company that I'm leaving on this trip (about a week ago), it has really hit home that this trip is coming really fast - three weeks from now and we are gone. That's as indulgent as I will get for now.


Getting back on track, we fly down to Sydney on March 23rd and fly on to San Francisco on the afternoon of the 24th, arriving the morning of the 24th. Time travel - you just can't beat it. Oh, and we'll miss out on the US Presidential Primaries - yeah, every reader just got a little more jealous with that. Well, this concludes the plan. I will post a couple other items between now and our departure, but if you like what you see, you can look for the posts every day or two starting at the end of the month. ("Good on ya" if you've already saved this site as one of your favorites).

2 comments:

Elitza said...

This looks like an amazing trip! You're convincing me to make my way there someday soon. And kudos for doing it with a two year old - inspiration for a travel junkie who's worried that a nomadic life might not be the best idea for starting a family :-)

Anonymous said...

Three things:
1. I love the Townsville story - sounds perfectly plausable
2. I disagree with the last statement that "every reader just got a little more jealous" because you'll miss the US Presidential Primaries. From what I can tell your readers include people from all around the world, and hate to say it, but most of them are not all that interested in US politics
3. Boy, am I happy you are blogging and not blabbing all these stories - what a time saver for me ;-)