Townsville via Bowenwood

Today we left Mackay at about 9.30am and headed north to Townsville. It was a fairly easy drive although most of it was on single lane highway at 100km, not dual or triple lane freeways. We stopped along the way per chance at the seaside town of Bowen. It is the location for Baz Luhrman’s latest movie, Australia starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. There are white letters on a big concrete water tank as you come into town saying, “Bowenwood” Here is an article I found from the Courier Mail telling about it. http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21884967-5013015,00.html Fin tried to get a Beefy Hugh Jackman pie in the bakery but they didn’t have them despite having a sign up advertising them. They had photos of the staff with the crew & cast etc. And thank-you certificates from the company too. It must have been exciting in Bowen when they were there filming. It’s quite a nice little town and I can see why they used it.

We went over the Burdikan Bridge south of Ayr as well and I took a photo. Here are a couple of links to explain more about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burdekin_bridge

http://www.abc.net.au/northqld/stories/s1955534.htm

The country side along the way was full of cane fields at first then changed for a while to no cane fields but later more cane and it seemed even taller than before. Of course along with the cane fields comes the mills, train tracks and cane trains although they didn’t hold us up at all today. Sugar certainly is ‘life force’ for Queensland and in turn Australia being our second largest export.
As we approached the Townsville area we were struck by the mountains on either side of the horizon. I took some photos to show what we mean. We got to Townsville by about 3.30 pm, settled into our cabin then called Fin’s cousin Sharyn and arranged a visit to her. She was only 20 minutes away and Tom navigated there without any trouble. It was great to see her after all these years and to see her lovely house which she has been renovating too. She’s done a great job and even converted much of her electricity usage to solar. She has a huge mango tree in the backyard and ironically hates mangoes! Sharyn also had something that we haven't seen for a while – a sprinkler... and it was going! Yes, we certainly haven’t seen one of those in Melbourne for a while. No shortage of water here it would seem. Sharyn has a nice green lawn and garden and the bottom of my jeans got wet on her lawn! Another thing I was interested to see was the Cairns Birdwing butterfly chrysalises on a tree in the yard. They were huge compared to the little ones we get on the citrus trees at home from our Dainty Swallowtail butterflies. It would be wonderful to have such big, colourful butterflies going through their lifecycle right before my eyes in our own backyard! I have included a picture taken from Sharyn's backyard that shows a beautiful tree on the nature strip next door but when I asked her what it was she said, "A nuisance. It drops stuff everywhere." but I still think it is beautful and they were all over the place. That is one thing I noticed about being in Queensland; that there are more flowering trees and lots of trees with huge seedpods too.

Tomorrow we have an even shorter journey than today’s from here to Cairns.