Bowen – 316 km

Last night there was a lot of cheering, yelling, and general noise from packed crowd at the bar/restaurant/TV room near the office of the caravan park. It seems the annual rugby (we think) match between Queensland and New South Wales was taking place and all the Queenslanders were in fine form cheering for their team – who, by the way, won (having been informed of this by a gleeful lady at an info center). We had been seeing the maroon flags all over and now know why. Once the game finished all the noise also ended as all the happy fans sauntered back to their trailers to continue celebrating their victory.

As the tide was out when we got up we decided to have another walk along the beach and see if there was much in the tide pools. We did see a recent shark sighting sign but no sharks or crocodiles or anything else exciting like that!

The theme of today was sugar cane. We drove for the entire day through huge cane fields, some seeding out, some just cut or needing cut. Many of the fields have a “cane train” system where these little basket like cars are pulled by a small engine on narrow gauge tracks. There were machines harvesting the cane and dumping it into these baskets. Three of the towns we went through have cane refineries. The aroma is a very pleasant sweet smell that I assume you would get used to if you lived there. We are not sure what all this sugar cane is used for but assume a pretty big percentage is for hard liquor.

 

The town of Sarina even had a cane toad model at the start of the town as their mascot. Someone had draped the Queensland team scarf around its neck to celebrate last night’s victory.

One of the rests stops was right beside a cane field so we went over the wire fence and had a closer look. You could get lost in there if you weren’t carful, never mind the snakes that might be lurking there (Norma’s not sure about that part, Doug was disappointed there weren’t any). We decided to sample a piece and it was pleasantly sweet.

We have continued to follow the Bruce Highway to the Diamond Coast here at Bowen. We opted for another campsite on the ocean as it will probably be our last. We went for a walk along the beach and came across two fellows pulling their golf clubs with a bit of difficulty, across the sand. They had been at the local golf course, which we walked on the beach to check out. There was a different kind of hazard on the greens, the masked lapwings busy picking something off the grass, we assumed it was bugs.