13th June 2010 - Cairns to Townsville/Ayr

Distance travelled: 465 kms
Cumulative distance: 15,655 kms

We left Keith and Wendy's place in Clifton Beach at about 7.30am as they were heading off for their morning walk with the dogs. We'd had a great couple of days with them, they were charming hosts (Keith charming???). We went through Cardwell which is pretty little town on the coast near Hinchinbrook Island. The road from Cairns to Townsville is a good bike riding road with plenty of turns and fast straight bits. The views from various lookouts on the way were quite spectacular. We reached Townsville around 1 pm. Colin and I parted there; Colin went to Ronnie Johnstone's house and I continued on to Ayr to Ross and Vicki's place. Vicki had swept the carport especially for me so I parked my flyblown bike there. Ross was running around watering his cane and I spent hours on his computer trying to organise a campsite in the Carnarvon Gorge NP. I managed to book a site that was at the end of a 11km hike so I quickly cancelled it. The only other place I could find with accommodation was the Carnarvon Gorge resort. The rooms started at $196 a night so that was out. Colin managed to find the Takarakka bush resort which had campsites and was located near the entrance to the NP. I managed to miss that one in my google search so was relieved as tour organiser!!! Vicki invited Elaine and Barry round for dinner and we played cards until late.

Colin caught up with Alby at the race track at Townsville. Alby had high-sided coming out of the pits and ended up in hospital with broken ribs so he was reduced to being a flag marshall. Colin also met Mike Hewitt, the guy he sold his Yamaha racing bike front wheeel to. Mike had bought a much modified 1972 TD3 Yamaha but needed an original front wheel and many other parts to restore it. Colin had bought a genuine front wheel and brake in 1972 to fit to his CB450 Honda and brought it to Australia. Through Alby Mike offered to buy it and when he fitted it to the TD3 he was inspired to go ahead and restore the rest of the bike. Mike invited Colin to come to his factory and see the finished bike. It was immaculate and Colin posed in his Phil Read replica leathers. Phil won the 1972 250cc world championship on such a bike. Unfortunately the bike wouldn't run so Colin couldn't have a spin.

12th June 2010 - Cairns

Distance travelled nil

Today we had planned to go on a reef cruise, but Colin found some obscure weather warning from the Bureau of Meteorology for strong winds and big waves off Cairns. He even checked it the local BOM office. So the cruise was off. However the day dawned calm and sunny and we walked the dogs with Wendy and Keith with hardly a cloud in the sky. Throughout the day Colin checked back to the BOM but the strong wind warning was still there - this became known as Colin's wind - akin to what usually is found in the bog!

So after we had coffee at Palm Cove with Keith and Wendy (Colin had 2 lattes he was so latte deprived) we had to decide what to do. It was too late to get onto a cruise so we decided to do the next best thing and visit Jim and Marion Stewart in the Cairns marina and dream about sailing around the world. With that course of action decided we walked back to the house and had a Wendy big brekky. This took a fair time and Colin called Jim to say we would be coming at 11am if that was OK.

The brekky was certainly big and Keith and Wendy's pace was suitably leisurely befitting their retired status, but Colin was getting a bit toey when it was still going on at 10:15. He decided to initiate the closing of the brekky phase by clearing some of the dishes and in the process dropped a knife into the pool. Keith tried to retrieve it but it stubbornly refused to be picked up. Later that night Colin contemplated skinny dipping and diving for the knife but thought better of it. He would leave the knife there to remind Keith of our visit as he suspected that it would never be retrieved.

The boat Jim and Marion were sailing was called Balu which means bear. It was a green 40ft steel hulled sloop and was well appointed for ocean sailing. There was an ingenious self steering mechanism hanging off the stern but still they never let the boat sail unattended and took turns to steer all through the night. The jib had an electric driven roller reef and they mostly sailed using the foresail alone as they ran down wind nearly all the time. They had also to store a lot of extra fuel in tanks lashed to the handrails to ensure they had a safe range under power. It turned out that Marion grew up in the same town in Essex as Wendy! - a small world indeed. The topic of pirates came up and they hoped to get into a convoy of small vessels in the Indian Ocean before running up past Aden into the Red Sea which is the danger zone. They were brave people indeed.

After we left Colin asked to stop at a newsagent that stocked interstate papers to pick up a Friday's Age so he could do the cryptic crossword. Keith innocently asked Colin to give him an example of a clue and how to solve it and Colin worked out the answer to 1 across "Tree whose leafy edges appear in teacup's brew" was "eucalypt". After he explained how this answer was derived Keith decided he wanted no more to do with cryptic crosswords.

Colin and Alan were dropped off at a small zoo near W&K's house and checked out the crocodiles and the real live Cassowaries. Colin picked up a bag of food for the kangaroos as well. However by this time of the day they had been fed all day by the tourists and were generally uninterested in any more tucker. We found a suitably menacing croc and a colourful Cassowary.

We had a barbeque that evening and Alan, Keith and Colin watched a rugby international between Australia and England. Colin encouraged Keith to mute the sound during the frequent add breaks so he could continue to work on the crossword undistracted. But during the play we were all riveted as the game which in the first half looked like a rout by the Australian back line then became quite tense when England forced 2 penalty tries due to their stronger scrum.

Colin's off to Townsville tomorrow while Alan will go onto Ayr. They will meet up hopefully in Emerald the next day.

11th June 2010 - Clifton Beach to Cape Tribulation

Distance travelled: 260 kms

Cumulative distance: 14,511 kms

After a great nights sleep at chez Scanlon we hit the road for Cape Tribulation around 8.30am. Colin had called the tour company in Port Douglas that does the all day reef tours to get details of prices etc. He also called the bureau of meteorology to check on the weather for tomorrow. There was a strong wind warning for the area so we decided not to book the trip.The road north to Cape Tribulation travels next to the beach for some time. There were a number of locations where we could pull off the road and admire the view. This is a great motorbike road with lots of twisties so the tyres got a workout on both sides. It was not particularly quick as there were quite a number of grey nomads chugging along with their caravans in tow. We took the ferry over the Daintree river. There was a man driving a Jag who took exception with us riding to the front of the queue. When we got off at the other side he floored the Jag and went racing past us. We expected to find him splattered on the rocks on one of the many corners but didn't see him again. Must be a local and knows the road backwards. The road wound its way along the coast but you couldn't see the beach because of the tropical vegetation. The weather was overcast and we had a few spits of rain but nothing serious. Just before we got to the cape we stopped off at a hotel on the beach side for lunch. It was a buffet that was pretty light on choice. After lunch we headed for the cape and nearly missed it as we started heading up a gravel road. There was a rainforest walk to various viewing areas and we tagged along with a tour group to pick up descriptions of the various plants. Unfortunately because of the overcast conditions we didn't see it at its best. On the way back to the ferry we visited a Rainforest Discovery Centre which has won lots of Eco awards etc. It is a complete rainforest environment with boardwalks etc to view it from. There is a tower which looks out over the canopy from which you are meant to be able to see the birds that live there. Nothing moved .... we saw absolutely zero birds. Colin took a picture of an information panel with all the birds that are supposed to inhabit the forest. We are going to photoshop them into our photos. In the evening we took Keith and Wendy to a local restaurant in Palm Cove. The food was fantastic and certainly beat the heck out of what we had been eating at the roadhouses etc so far on our trip.

10th June 2010 - Undara to Cairns

Distance Travelled 300 kms
Distance to Date 14,251 kms

We woke with the birds. Colin was sure one of them sounded like Neddy Seagoon from the Goon Show. There was a heavy dew and that was an indication that the humidity was increasing as we approached the coast. We packed up quickly and headed for Mount Garnet for brekky. It was a sunny morning but cool and there were clouds on the eastern horizon. We reached the Kennedy Hwy and turned north and the weather turned for the worst. Soon we were in thick fog and the temperature dropped to 17 degrees, our chilliest of the trip so far. By the time we reached Mt Garnet it had started to lift as did the temp.

The countryside was changing into farms instead of cattle stations and after Ravenshoe we were riding through rain forest on the edge of the dividing range. Colin had texted Morag to find out the name of the crater they had visited in 1981 as it was much better than Mt Kalkani. It was called Mt Hypipamee and was a gas vent with clean vertical sides as there was no blast debris. The rain forest grew right up to the edge and even down the sides and there was a water at the bottom that lead into an underground cave system. It was very pretty and we also stopped to have a look at Dinner Falls on the way back to the car park.

At Back at the car park as we approached the bikes a German gentleman hopped out of his van and asked who owned the BMW and Alan and he went into the now familiar sycophantic rubbish about how good Beemers were even though Colin tried to point out the features of his Honda VFR.

The country now opened up and we were riding through a wide valley with mountains on all sides. Our aim was to get to Kuranda for lunch and then to Alan's friends Keith and Wendy in the afternoon. Kuranda was very commercial with lots of shops and Colin selected a cafe that served pizza for lunch over looking the valley. We then walked down to the railway station and it was much the same as 1981 with flowers and plants growing all over it. The steam trains had gone though. As we left the station a man came up to us and asked if we were from N. Ireland and struck up a conversation. He then started to ask Colin where he went to uni and what he studied and asked out of the blue "are you Sam Bateman". He turned out to be Jim Stewart. Colin went through Queens University with him in 1970-1973 and he had recognised Colin. It took a while for Colin to piece together in his mind who Jim was but he had actually been talking about him after our Coral Bay snorkelling debacle as Jim was a very keen scuba diver at Queens. Jim and his wife Marion were sailing around the world in a 40ft steel sloop which was moored in the Cairns marina. He had managed to retire at 50 on a full pension. Alan and Colin were green at this news and said they would contact them with a view to meeting up the day after next.

We then visited the Barron Falls which are probably one the most spectacular falls in Australia even when not in flood and then took off for Cairns. We had to ride a twisting road down the escarpment onto the costal plain and this was quite a challenge as we hadn't seen a twisty road since Albany. Keith was out walking his two huge dogs Roger and Ruby when we arrived but soon arrived to let us in. Alan knew Keith and Wendy in the Bahamas and later in Sydney. They are both artists and their house was festooned with their work. The evening was spent reminiscing about the Bahamas and other amusing events.

We plan to ride tomorrow to Cape Tribulation and then go on a reef cruise the day after. Its nice to enjoy home comforts which we haven't had since Broome.

9th June 2010 - Undara resort

No distance travelled.

We had a "bush" breakfast cooked over an open fire in the bush at the Undara resort!!! There was billy tea or coffee as well. The women cooking it kept telling us to eat as much as we wanted and I realised why she was so keen when I paid the bill ... $22.50 each!!! It was pretty cool overnight and in the early morning. Jumpers were the order of the day.We decided to go on a couple of excursions. Colin went on a four hour excursion to four lava tunnels and I went on a two hour one to two tunnels. This whole area was inundated with lava from several volcanoes 190,000 years ago. The flow went all the way to the coast some 160kms away. Because the flow was slow the lava at the surface cooled and solidified whist the lave underneath kept flowing and thus the tunnels were created. Our guide was about 90 and he had bow legs. I reckon he was riding a horse in the wet and dried out that way. He gave us a ball by ball commentary on the lava tunnels and the surrounding bushland (savannah). All very interesting but a bit too much detail for me. After lunch we rode our bikes to the Kalkani crater. This is the crater of one of the volcanoes that created the lava tunnels. We walked round the rim and checked out the views over the countryside. The crater itself was full of vegetation so was not particularly impressive. It last erupted 20,000 years ago and doesn't look like it will do so in the next 20,000 years. On the way back to Undara I videoed Colin riding on the gravel road. He stood on the pegs for about 30 seconds looking a bit shaky. I can't check out the video until I get to a more powerful computer than this little notebook as it it in High Definition. Colin in HD ... the mind boggles.

8th June 2010 - Normanton to Undara

Distance travelled 457 kms
Distance to date 13,195 kms

We recovered the bikes from the dog compound and packed them up. The dogs were useful guarding the bikes but they kept Alan awake all night talking to their mates down the street. Alan has had a thing about barking dogs ever since he was a teenager and came roaring out into the garden in Belfast one day after a hard night on the turps, lifted the ear of our family dog, which had been barking rather a lot , and yelled "shut up" into it.

We had breakfast at a little cafe down the street which was nice except that they made Colin's coffee with one of those ubiquitous coffee making machines that used some foul powdered milk. Colin had the gall to go back and ask them to make it with Nescafe and use fresh milk. Alan expressed the desire to have a look around the town before we left but there wasn't much more than what we saw the evening before. The exception was a huge bronze statue of a crocodile called Khyrs. This was claimed to be the largest croc ever shot in Australia and measured 28ft 6in (8.7m) and estimated to weight over 2 tonnes. The big excitement in town was happening at the weekend when the annual Rodeo was on, reputedly the biggest ever. There would be a circus, boxing tent, rides and a big market as well as the bronco riding and bull riding.

We heard the whistle of the Gulflander as we left town - the Gulflander is a strange little train that runs from Normanton (nowhere) to Croydon (also nowhere) for an unknown reason. We dashed down the highway to catch up with it but gave up when we found out it only ran to Croydon on Tuesdays. The first 150 kms to Croydon was across the channel country which was very flat and had lots of swamps and billabongs due to the recent rain. We filled up in Croydon and found this warning at the petrol pumps.As we filled the bikes the sound of a radio wafted out of the garage workshop playing jazz and I was reminded of the movie The Great Gatsby and the service station in it.

The countryside changed after we crossed the Gilbert River east of Croydon. The vegetation was more dense forest than we had seen for a long time and the place became much drier. The Gilbert River was very wide with a single track bridge across it and a small water flow under it. The road we were on was called the Gulf Development Road and was built to open up the cattle stations dotted along it. Building it cheap was the order of the day and single track seal and bridges were still common. We stopped in Georgetown for fuel and lunch at a RH run by a Japanese couple. They had a very comprehensive shop for such a place and Alan got his dental floss and I got some more Aspro as I was nursing a cold.

The land changed again after Georgetown and became hilly and craggy with a fairly uniform woodland cover. We found out later at Undara why this was so. The volcanos 150kms away covered the granite hills with a layer of basalt as far Georgetown. This basalt cap was uniform and lead to a uniform vegetative cover. The road was getting worse at this stage with long single seal sections which were breaking up badly. The road was gradually being rebuilt to dual lane standards and we were stopped for roadworks several times.

Alan had managed to get us a booking at Undara Lodge in a safari tent. They were fibreglass and canvas igloos with two beds in them and a light. There were also old railway carriages converted to bedrooms available at a much higher price. We had come to Undara Lodge to see the Lava Tubes which are large tunnels through the basalt formed when the lava cooled on the top and bottom allowing the continuing flow to pass through relatively well insulated. Alan booked a couple of tours for the next day. We had dinner in the resort restaurant which was fairly ordinary but no big surprise. There was a talk after dinner where one of the guides gave a slide show on snakes and other poisonous stuff that inhabits the bush. We all learnt how to treat a snake bite with a compression bandage and the difference between this and a viper bite that can't be treated: scary stuff.

7th June 2010 - Mt Isa to Normanton

Distance travelled: 506
Cumulative distance: 13,506

Yesterday Colin discovered his luggage rack had fractured so he organised a local welder called "Stick-it" to fix it at 8am this morning. I was forced to have breakfast at MacDonalds as I misunderstood the eating arrangements and Colin had already feasted on the Irish Club's special breakfast prior to having his luggage rack fixed. We eventually left Mt. Isa at 9.30 am and headed for Cloncurry. The road was like Pitt Street as it was wall to wall caravans and trucks. This is the main road east from Mt. isa to Townsville on the coast so I guess that's why it is busy. We eventually got past all the traffic and headed down the open road. There was a memorial to Burke and Wills at the side of the road and Colin did his duty and took a photo. He has been really good at taking photos all through this trip probably because I didn't bring a camera and have had limited success with my video camera. The scenery on this leg to Cloncurry is quite interesting with small hills and the road cutting through them to provide a vista across the plains. The scrub is all green due to the recent rains. All the rain in this area runs back to the Lake Eyre catchment thousands of kilometres away in central Australia. It takes months to reach Lake Eyre and most of the rivers and creeks here are dry now. We refueled at Cloncurry the town where the Royal Flying Doctor service started and headed north for Normanton. Halfway there there is a roadhouse called Burke & Wills which is well set up with plenty of shade and restaurant and bar. It is the junction of the Cloncurry to Normanton and Burketown to Julia Creek roads. This is what is called Gulf Country the largest shire in Australia; 68,000 square kms and 26,000 people!! We had lunch at the Burke & Wills roadhouse where we met three bikers from Adelaide going in the opposite direction to us. They were heading back to Adelaide via Alice Springs etc. The weather is getting warmer as we head north and by the time we reached Normanton we were expiring with the heat and quickly changed our riding gear for shorts etc.
Our pub did not look too inviting but the room is great. Down the road is the Purple Pub which has some sort of dodgy reputation. We are having dinner there.