Tag Archives: Travel

Port Douglas

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Sunday 29 September 2024 – With nothing formal on the itinerary for today, our plan was to explore Port Douglas, a town about 16km further North! up the coast – apart from anything else, we were down to our last half dozen Earl Grey tea bags. Before we went out, though, there was the small matter of breakfast, which would be served in the main lodge. Our accommodation was among the select group of cabins that were furthest away from the lodge,

so this entailed a 300-metre walk through the rainforest. It’s not a level walk, though, oh dear me no.

I realise that in absolute terms, the ascent is not daunting; it’s just that, somehow, it’s not particularly welcome as a pre-breakfast workout. We had our first wildlife encounter of the day en route, with a many-striped skink which could give Phoebe Waller-Bridge some useful lessons in side-eye.

Our second wildlife encounter was to see a bird taking a bath; I suspect that the bath was specifically set up so that punters like us could watch from the restaurant.

Later in the morning we headed towards Port Douglas, which is a mere 20-minute drive away. The scenery really makes it clear that one is in the tropics

and we passed a crop that we think is sugar cane,

although it looks different from the sugar cane we saw in Madagascar earlier this year.

Port Douglas is a compact town, with all of the major commercial activity concentrated in a couple of streets

and an architectural vernacular – corrugated iron roofs on a steel frame – speaks of the need to withstand cyclones (as did the signpost en route to the town pointing to a cyclone shelter).

There are many bars and restaurants

and, of course, the obligatory aboriginal art outlet.

On the town beach, there’s a wharf called Sugar Wharf,

which supports the probability that the crop we saw earlier was sugar cane. Its use for loading sugar cane ceased in 1957 and it’s now an entertainment venue.

We stopped in the town for a coffee at the Grant Street Kitchen, which is a bakery

proudly advertised around the town as “award-winning”. Jane said that her almond croissant was the best she’d had so far on this trip, and the place was very popular, with a persistent queue out of the door,

and an interesting selection of customers,

so the claim would appear to have merit. They clearly do a good line in pies, which appeared to be the meal du jour among people sitting outside.

Port Douglas is world famous in North Queensland for its market – every Wednesday and Sunday. It being a Sunday, we pottered over (it being very humid and hot enough, at 29°C, to put anything more energetic than pottering out of the question) to take a look. It’s obviously a flourishing concern.

Immediately neighbouring the market is a delightful little church, St. Mary’s by the Sea,

and behind the church, a tree which is remarkably laden with epiphytes.

We did our necessary shopping and headed back to Thala Beach. In the grounds, we stopped to examine something that had been pointed out to us on yesterday’s stargazing expedition.

This is not a small heap; let me show you the scale of it.

Believe it or not, this has been made by one pair of birds, orange-footed scrub fowls.

The male starts the mound in an attempt to woo a passing female by showing off his nest-building skills; the pair then continue building and managing the heap each breeding season. If all goes according to plan, she lays eggs in the heap, which is big enough to foster internal warmth from rotting down and thus incubate the eggs. Once they’ve hatched, the chicks then dig their way out. This strikes me as being like something out of the Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen sketch: “We were evicted from our hole in the road. We had to make do with a pile of rotting leaves.”

The rest of the day passed in blissful idleness; we have two days of relentless tourism coming up and one has to build up one’s reserves, after all. Stay tuned to find out exactly what these two days of tourism actually entail.

Farewell, Brisbane; heading North! to Port Douglas

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Saturday 28 September 2024 – The last couple of days haven’t been photo-worthy, because we’ve spent them talking to friends, rather than seeing new sights.  Yesterday was our final day with Phil, Christine, Bella and Lilli the Cavoodle; the day before was our chance to catch up with Dell and Richard, who have a delightful place on a 5-acre patch in Anstead, some 20-odd kilometres west-sou-west of Brisbane.  Richard and Jane were colleagues in the early years of this, our third millennium, and, again, it was a pleasure to discover that they lived near enough to make it relatively easy to meet up. Meet up we did; they treated us to a lunch which featured excellent food but, sadly, the only occurrence of indifferent service we’ve encountered in all of our travels across Australia. Whatever her back story was, the lass who served us gave out the strong vibe that she was there under protest. It didn’t, however, spoil the meal; and it was a real pleasure to catch up with Dell and Richard, see their splendid house and be impressed by the work that Richard puts in on knocking the area into shape and keeping it that way; an excellent day out.

Our plans meant that we now, and somewhat sadly, had to leave Brisbane and head up to Cairns.  Before I close the file marked “Brisbane”, though, there is one more set of photos to show and discuss, stemming from a visit we made a couple of days ago to the lookout on Mount Coot-Tha, a 220m hill which is just 8km west of central Brisbane and therefore offers a great view over the city.

(The smoke on the right of the picture above was from a fire at an abandoned warehouse; no-one hurt, apparently, except possibly the insurance company.)

Phil and I have been to Mount Coot-Tha every time I’ve visited him (this is the third occasion); on the previous visit, in 2001, I had with me my first digital camera (for the record, a Canon Digital Ixus) and I took a photo of the view. Not a brilliant one, as it turns out, but one can get enough out of it to compare how it was then

to how it is now.

There are a couple of building identifiably the same in each.

Quite some change, eh?

To supplement these, I had also got aerial shots of the city from the plane: 2001

and 2024.

The two photos were taken on different sides of the sharp bend in the river, but again show how much development has happened over the last quarter of a century.

Enough, already, of Brisbane, then: time to move on. For the second time in a row, Virgin Australia failed to bugger us about and we had an uneventful flight to Cairns, where Avis had a nice Toyota Camry (Hybrid, naturally, dahling) waiting for us. We had a leisurely one-hour drive to the Thala Beach Nature Reserve, past beautiful turquoise seas

and arrived there with time to have some of Twinings Finest  Earl Grey and relax before dinner. Thala Beach looks like a fine place; one approaches through a coconut palm plantation

and I can vouch for the quality of the bar

and the restaurant, which provided a great meal, a hint of some of the wildlife that we hope we’ll be able to see – and, of course, photograph –

(Google lens says these are cormorants. It’s wrong, I’m sure; I hope we’ll find out the truth in due course – we suspect they may be Helmeted Friarbirds) and some nice colours as the sun went down.

After dark, we participated in a stargazing session led by a lady whose great enthusiasm and obvious grasp of the subject didn’t quite offset her very irritating delivery style. I got my first decent view of Saturn through her 10″ telescope, along with a view of a globular cluster. I tried for photos, but I just got a picture of these stars, you know? On the way back to our cabin, we saw a cane toad,

and we’ll have a chat with reception about reporting it, since it’s such an invasive and dangerous creature.

Tomorrow offers us a day at leisure, and plan A is to visit Port Douglas. Apart from anything else, supplies of Earl Grey are running low, but I suspect that we’ll probably, or even obviously, go for a walk there. Tune in later to find out.

 

Paddington, Barely

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Wednesday 25 & Thursday 26 September 2024 – Our departure from Belrose was also a departure from my habit of taking a taxi to the airport.  Lorraine and Paul warned us against trying to convince a taxi company reliably to send someone into the northern wilds of the Sydney suburbs, so we took our first-ever Uber. We had a very pleasant drive with, at the wheel, a lady who was a Brisbane native and who was therefore able to give us a few thoughts about Things To Do In Brisbane. The traffic was a little heavy, and the journey to the airport took about an hour, but we arrived on schedule, with plenty of time before our flight’s departure; and in a thankfully undramatic departure from their established norm, Virgin Australia got us from Sydney to Brisbane without any form of buggering us about. My friend Phil was waiting there to take us to his place, which is in Red Hill, the area of Brisbane next to one called Paddington.

I’ve talked before about connections; thus far it has only been about those formed with fellow travellers.  The one between Phil and me is a lot deeper; we have been friends since babyhood. His family emigrated to Australia in 1967 as “ten pound Poms” (a phrase our Uber driver was so young that she’d never heard it, by the way), but Phil and I stayed in contact by letter over the years and met occasionally, as time, location, circumstances and finances dictated. Right from the first time we met again, which was in 1974, it was clear that the friendship had survived; that encounter, and every one since, has been a source of great pleasure.

Phil has a lovely house, which was originally a Queensland workman’s cottage and which, in true Australian fashion, was transported in one piece to its current location. It’s “upside down”, meaning the bedrooms are on the ground floor and the living space upstairs, and this makes great sense, given the usually hot Queensland climate; the downstairs rooms are the cooler ones, and it leaves a grand upstairs deck. Rather magnificently, the deck has a tree growing through it,

which provides shade for those sitting out on the deck with a glass of something cold, which was us, quite a lot of the time.

The Red Hill/Paddington area is an interesting one to walk around and so, for the first couple of days, and, with Phil and his insightful commentary, that’s what we did. Obviously.

The Queensland workman’s cottage vibe is something that is evident over the whole area that we strolled around.

Most of them are well-maintained and in very good nick and some

have been quite considerably extended.

There’s a variety of approaches to decor, from nice paint jobs and interesting roof tiles

to more elaborate flourishes on the larger buildings.

As well as the timber cottages, there are more substantial constructions

and some nice use of street art on the outside of some.

This, for example, is the local cinema

and it’s not just the front of the building that’s been decorated.

If you look at the left hand picture above, you can see that the area is not necessarily flat and level.  The gradients of some of the hills are simply breathtaking,

so walking about is akin to a major workout at times,

but the area’s location does mean that you get some superb views over downtown Brisbane.

So steep that handrails are needed to help you walk up it!

Among the many coffee bars and restaurants there are some interesting shops

Short Bach and sides?

and other little artistic touches.

The trees lining the roads make the streets very attractive,

and there’s one majestic specimen which is at the top of a hill

making one (OK, me) grateful for the shady seats in which to take a breather – and watch the laughing kookaburras which had come to laugh at us.

In the centre of Paddington there’s a building which used to be a theatre

now repurposed to house a huge variety of stalls selling antiques, bric-a-brac and a whole variety of other things.

Some angles give away the theatrical origins of the building – you can see the proscenium arch here.

Some wag in the local authority had had the idea to make a “Kooka Trail” around the area, presumably intended as a distraction for kids, but also valuable for the entertainment of passing photographers.

though I prefer the real thing, which we saw in various places, including near Phil’s house.

Apparently, kookaburras have been absent in recent years, and they’re only now making a reappearance. I like them, so was glad to be able to see (and hear!) them.

After two days and 11km of walking around this delightful part of the city, it was a pleasure to be able to sit on Phil’s deck with a glass of something cold as the sun went down

This describes our first couple of days in Queensland. We had two more days before heading even further North! and I’ll tell you all about it – some other time.