After last night’s eating excesses we awoke with quite full bellies so decided not to bother with breakfast this morning. This meant that we were able to get off to something of a flying start and we quickly enough head out towards ‘Rocky’. On the way there we took a bit of a stop off to have a look at an attraction called the Capricorn caves. This was to be a guided cave tour so we had to have a bit of a wait but a quick cup of tea and we were soon enough being called up for our tour.
The name of the caves comes from the fact that the caves and Rockhampton itself lie close to (or on?) the Tropic of Capricorn. We have already passed over this imaginary line round towards the bottom of the Earth three times now so it is becoming a bit like an old friend on the Australian leg of our trip. The caves were quite good, perhaps not exactly full or stalactites and ‘mites as the cave visit that we had already done on the Western coast of Oz but very good just the same. At one point, in the Cathedral cave our guide put some opera music on in order to illustrate the quality of the cave’s acoustics. Throughout the caves there were a good few bats about the place the ones we could see were the Micro bats but Ghost bats also inhabit the cave system albeit infrequently. The Ghost bats are quite strange as they are whitish in colour and their wings are almost transparent, so you can see their bones giving them their somewhat gruesome name.
Here at the caves you could also go adventure caving but I am not so sure that my good wife would have thanked me if I put our names down for it. Like a good many of the cave systems you come across, in all parts of the world, what you see is just the access that the public are given, many of the caves stretch very much further in some cases miles and miles of caves even lay undiscovered but this does not particularly impress my wife so it was time to be heading on … lol!
So we left and continued on towards the coast. First stop was a place called Rosslyn Marina and here we had a bit of a wander about taking a couple of photos of boats we would like to own before we came across a little fishmongers selling fresh fish, so here we bought ourselves some fresh mackerel for tea … mmmmm – and put that in little our ‘fridge’ (aka the icebox)!
From the marina we drove the short distance to Emu Park where as we went on the War commemoration walk we came across some rosemary so I picked up a bit. On the walk we saw a memorial to Captain Cook called the Singing Ship, very novel!
Going back to the van we bought ourselves some food and had an impromptu picnic by some trees where the Black Parrots roosting in them were kicking up quite a fuss, noisy bleepers!
Once nourished we made another drive to Rockhampton, one of the bigger towns in the area and we had come here to visit the town’s zoo. Now for some strange reason – possibly our good selves – we found the zoo quite difficult to find as Australians seem to use ‘the force’ (or GPS!) to get everywhere we however had to use their roadsigns which are nonexistent and somewhat crap! It turned out that their zoo was within the Botanical Gardens, signs that we had obviously not followed, but when we did get there it was all very nice and colourful with lots of birds flying about and kicking up quite a din.
The zoo was quite small but it was also well within our budget being that it was free! Here we saw the Chimps being fed and the zookeeper here really seemed to have an affinity for the apes. He fed them yoghurt on a plate and some of them ate using a spoon, showing their ability to use tools. We also saw our first Koalas and Dingos too but even better or more unusual or so we thought, were the Wombats. These look a bit like small hairy pigs but with a face not unlike a koala and these little fellas burrow themselves underground – very strange. The one which had come out to entertain us lay on its back with all its legs splayed outwards and having a poop, well I never! It was hardly ‘Britain’s (or Australia’s) Got Talent’ – or was it?
Our campsite for the night was a bit outside of a place called Gladstone and a bit of a way still to go so, zoo visited, we headed off towards it. Gladstone is home to a huge mining operation and as we drove through the place it seemed that there were industries on all sides of us. When we reached our resting place we got talking to an older fella who tried to explain to us ‘thee best way to experience Oz’, I thought somewhat wistfully, ‘if I had a dollar for every time someone said this’ … lol! Later we dined on the mackerel which I cooked in tinfoil with the vegetables and it was one of the best meals we have had whilst travelling in Oz – simply delicious!
Our Excellent Adventure! 