This trip was meant to be all about the coast – and by coast, we mean beach.  In particular, Airlie and Mission were in our sights and we were sailing in their direction.  Naturally, Airlie Beach was booked out but we’d been advised that a place called Dingo Beach, just a bit further north, warranted our attention.  Following our custom so far, which is that if anyone recommends anything we tend to do it, we headed for Dingo only to find that what was really meant was Hideaway Bay, even further along.  Turned out there was a (poor) pub at Dingo Beach but no place to camp for a few days.

Scarcely had we pulled up before a hockey-sticks type woman strode across to us to sell us some raffle tickets.  Her next gambit was, “Are you a shagger?”  Uncertain as to how to answer, I mumbled “Yes”, meaning to the raffle tickets.  In a BackRoads moment, we had stumbled upon the annual festival of the Shag Inlet Cruising Yacht Club.  A looong weekend of frivolities involving boats, drinks, fancy dress, Jimmy Buffet tribute bands, all in aid of prostate cancer research!  Looking back, we should have joined the club, donated lots more money, got a polo-shirt with Vice Commodore emblazoned on it and, of course, then donated even more money.  Every member is, in fact, a Vice Commodore and for me it would have been VC of Cremornepoint (all one word) as someone else was already VC of Cremorne Point.  Their home base was nearby Montes Resort, but they were obviously national.  We didn’t do margaritas but Lesley had an Aperol at the club on a beautiful evening and wisely, after the Shaggers had all gone.

Airlie Beach was within striking distance and is, perhaps, the major jumping off spot for the Whitsundays, which we were keen to see.  A combined ticket to fly-and-raft saw us jump in a small fixed-wing Skyvan A8 (someone will care) and fly out over the various islands all the way to the fringing reef and, on a great day, it looked genuinely spectacular from on high.  Lesley even got a photo of the so-called and much publicised Heart of the Reef.

Additionally, we also saw the most ambitious housing development in the world – alongside the airport runway they’re building houses with their own plane and/or helicopter hangers – amazing.

Next day, we jumped on a big RIB with a dozen other people and charged out to the previously over-flown islands with Whitehaven Beach being our furthest destination.  Not until, however, we’d snorkelled a bit in lovely clear water and hiked up a hill for spectacular views over Hill Inlet.  Whitehaven was indeed very white but we had it on good West Australia-based authority that the sand at Esperance is even whiter – a close call we thought.  In both places, the whiteness comes from silica which has some extraordinary reflective, insulating property so it never gets hot to walk on, no matter how blazing the sun!  The whole event was very reminiscent of those loathsome 4WD desert tours in Dubai, but we had a great time and didn’t get either violently ill or interminably bogged.

As we moved on further to our next camp at Alva Beach (the camp was nowhere near the beach), we found ourselves in the land of the Bowen Mango.  They even had a “Big Mango” which required a stop, a mango sorbet and yet another discovery.  Totally destroying Simon Marnie’s brain-fart, Mr Mango (Noel Meurant), had recorded that what we’d always called the Bowen Mango had also been called Kensington since about 1889, when its quality was recognised and its seed was jealously protected until a hard-pressed sister needed some cash.  Not just a marketing ploy or a culturally appropriate re-naming, the Kensington Pride has a long history.  And they’re delicious.  So there!

Alva Beach camp had the one redeeming feature of its own swimming pool which was a boon as the weather had turned warm and sticky.  Almost 30° but humid as all get out and it felt like time to do a U-turn.  We’d always said that we’d travel north until it got too hot/too wet and then turn around.  Any pictures?  Not really, but Lesley had her obligatory snake encounter while hiking – almost certainly a brown tree snake, so no worries.  In yet another demonstration of what could possibly go wrong, the booked-out state of everywhere had encouraged us to join the crowd and book-out our own collection of activities further up the coast, in particular a flight from Cairns to Adelaide (more of that later)!  The result was that we kept heading north.

With absolutely no desire to stay in Townsville, we booked a couple of nights at a HipCamp called Mountain Lake View which you’ll be unsurprised to know had a view of a mountain and a lake but was lovely for all that.  Quite a few other campers but lots of space, plenty of wallabies and firewood (separate thoughts, you understand) and only a few mosquitoes.

Whipping past Townsville, we aimed for Mystic Springs Golf Club, an unbelievably well-reviewed campground on the edge of a golf course, where camping was cheap, where golf was available on a fine country course punctuated by roos and wallabies on every shot, all at a very moderate cost and where cold drinks could be had at the bar and where pub grub was also available for the very brave.  And I haven’t even mentioned barefoot lawn bowls and a great swimming pool.  You can’t book, you can only stay three nights and I reckon there were 40 campers while we were there – all very sensible.

Our other key beach was Mission where the girl wonder was keen to stay – it was also near Tully which sounded nice!  We’d tried to book at the caravan park closest to the beach, had had our booking stuffed up and, as recompense, been assigned a beachfront site – hooray!  It blew an absolute gale, punctuated by rainy squalls, for the entire time we were there but it was still terrific.  Our next-door-neighbours pulled up stumps – due to the wind, not us, they told us unconvincingly.

Here for the best part of a week, we had beautiful if windy walks on the beach and hiked up Bicton Hill for lovely views out to Dunk Island.  We also ate at the No1 Chippy where we had the best fish’n’chips in all our travels around Australia – a big call, but Lesley’s Emperor and my Spanish Mackerel (the locals’ fish of choice) were cooked to perfection and cheerfully served with excellent (non-reconstituted) chips 👍👍.  Sadly, it wasn’t market week so we didn’t meet Mike’s sister and due to navigational incompetence on my part, we also missed the Rainforest School Spring Fair (and I bet they’re hippies). 

Possibly even better was our tour of the Tully Sugar Mill.  It’s the only mill tour available anywhere anymore – H&S at work.  You may recall that we’d missed the Sugar Shed at Sarina but this was surely much better.  We got to see the harvested cane being tipped out of those crazy little narrow gauge railway cages by an exciting inversion technique, watched it chopped up and crushed and steamed and boiled and centrifuged and tumble-dried until eventually, 14 hours later, raw sugar crystals came out and were dumped into B-doubles and carted off to a ship to be sent overseas. These days, none of the sugar produced in Tully stays in Australia except for a bit we pinched out of the centrifuge (safely, of course).

Two things stood out for me.  First, the mill has absolutely no waste.  Sugar comes out of the cane at 10% – one of those rail cages weighs 10 tonnes and results in 1 tonne of raw sugar.  All the other bits are used in some way, from the fibrous waste which is burned to produce all the power for the mill plus twice as much back into the grid, to the much desired “mill mud” which is trucked back to the farms for excellent soil enrichment.  Market gardeners love mill mud if they can get it, but it has to cool down for months before they grow their vegetables in it.  Even the chimneys weren’t bad – one was 80:20 steam:smoke; the other 100% steam.

Second, the main reason for burning the cane before harvest was much more about rats than any of the other creatures (snakes, spiders, toads etc).  Particularly in this part of the country (we were told), the rats carry leptospirosis which used to kill plenty of cane harvesters when it was all cut down by hand – and what hard work that must have been.  Very little cane is burned these days, as the process is all mechanised, but we did see a couple of big smokes which reminded me of the night sky being lit up when cane was grown all around the southern Moreton Bay shores (Beenleigh Rum, I guess).

A drive up Tully Gorge was less exciting, only because we couldn’t see much and a hydro plant got in the way.  Looked good for the white water rafting though.  Even less impressive was Tully’s Big Golden Gumboot reminding us that this is the wettest place in Australia – a complete dud!

Moving on, we parked ATGANI at the expensive Coconut CP in Cairns because we had a long awaited and delayed date with Knoxes and Kingsmills in the Barossa Valley to celebrate Doug’s 70^th birthday which was only 4 years ago – Covid etc etc.  It meant jumping a plane from Cairns to Adelaide.  It was brilliant because it was a direct flight.  It was scary because it was on the soon-to-be-divested Jetstar and we needed to check bags – what could possibly go wrong?