Korora Lookout

Today's adventure included daddy. He was able to come along with us because it is Sunday, a day to be spent enjoying family time.
Ellie got into the swing of the adventure by dressing up as Wonder Woman, wearing a tiara and bringing along a star topped wand and a length of rope.  This supposed 20-30 minute walk from Sealy Road to Korora Lookout was going to take a bit longer than that for us.

Moving at Ellie pace, we left the car park after reading the interpretive sign and climbed down the slate steps to a service road.  The walk is fairly easy going as it is essentially along a service road that has been built to maintain a radio tower.  We will get to the radio tower shortly, but first we had to let all of the other walkers past as we had some serious exploring to do.

The track runs on a ridge above some houses, so you never really feel like you are terribly far from civilisation.  In fact, part of the road seems to double as access to a house as we passed a drive way and letter box.
The walk is made more interesting by the addition of some artistic sculptures created by a local indigenous artist.  There are no interpretive signs accompanying the art, nor a name to let us know who created the pieces.  But, none the less they are very good, particularly the  first one.  It is a vertical piece of wood, carved into wavy patterns, with rusty iron and a lizard.  Because this walk is all about telling the aboriginal dreaming story about the black goanna

The first half of the walk is as much a wander through a natural art gallery as it is a nature walk with tantalising glimpses of sparkling blue ocean.  Just past the half way point we come across the radio tower.  Now this edifice should be an ugly blight on an otherwise beautiful walk. But a fence and the associated buildings have been painted in stunning art work.  The paintings tell some of the story of the black goanna....Ah yes, that WAS what this walk was meant to be all about.  The painting is bright, colourful and very beautiful.

Not long past the radio tower an amazing vista is revealed.  The whole walk reveals small tantalising glimpses, but the real prize is the view from the lookout.  On the edge of the lookout is an attractive wooden platform where you can stand and soak up the gorgeous coastal view. Or you can sit and enjoy the vista in a more relaxed fashion.
Behind the viewing platform is another sitting area, one where you are encouraged to linger and to listen to the story of the black goanna on the message stick.  Here a recorded message tells the dream time story in both gumbangir and English, complete with traditional aboriginal music as its  backing track.
It is well worth a listen.

The way back is just straight back along the track, the way you came......Well for most people, that is.
For us, however, we had Wonder Woman with us. And Wonder Woman hadn't had a chance to use her rope yet.  So at regular intervals we had to stop and connect the rope to a tree  so that our little super hero could 'climb' up the rope to the tree.  When that game wore thin, it was time to tie up daddy and run away.  This second game got us back to the car pretty quickly, as we had to get to the top of the steps before daddy got himself untied.

Having come this far up Sealy Road, we had to go the extra mile, as it were, and visit the amazing Sealy Lookout and Sky Pier.  The Sky Pier affords a terrific view over Coffs Harbour, whilst ever so gently swaying with the movement of the people on it.  We found more interpretive signs and some fabulous areas to have a picnic.  No BBQ's, so definitely bring your own packed lunch for this stop.
Once again, Miss Wonder Woman was in full super hero mode and had to tie up daddy. Once to the Sky Pier itself and once to a big tree in the bottom picnic area.
Then she decided it would be more fun if daddy tied up mummy (this didn't half look totally weird to the other visitors) and then when mummy called out help, Wonder Woman Ellie would come and untie mummy and rescue her.

After all this excitement, spectacular views, cool art works, and escaping from bad guys; it was definitely time to head back down the mountain and home for lunch.  It is always a good idea to bring a stash of gold coins with you so that you can buy bananas and avocados (when in season) from the road side stalls on Bruxner Park Road.  We picked ourselves up a big bag of lady finger bananas for three dollars.

Thursday, Adventure day. Sawtell Lookout

Ellie has decided that she loves to have adventures.  Particularly like the ones that we had on our family trip to Tasmania.  The idea of walking through the bush, exploring the plants and picking flowers is very appealing to her at the moment.

And if walking gets a bit tough and we need help to keep the momentum going, there are plenty of fairy tales that we can adapt into games.

Ellie spends a lot of time on the ipad and has an amazing repertoire of all the traditional fairy tales plus all the modern classics and popular movies and TV shows.  Far from stifling her creativity, the ipad has opened an enormous world of many genres and she spends the majority of her non ipad time immersed in some self concocted fantasy land.  A land inspired and built out of all of the content that she has been consuming.

Today's Adventure was Boambee Headland.  We drove up to the Sawtell lookout and parked our car  at the top.  A bit of inclement weather was rolling in but this did not deter Ellie.  We put on jumpers and walked down the track towards the sea.  As we got to the bottom of the downhill section it started to rain.  I asked Ellie if she wanted to go back to the car.  She said no.  So then I asked her which way she wanted to go: left or right.

She chose right.  So we walked down to the wooden platform above Murray's beach.  Had a photo, and a look at the beach, then turned around and went back the way we came.  Ellie was not interested in exploring beaches today.

We followed the path around the lower edge of the headland.  It is a well defined path built out of sturdy pavers. On either side of the path lots of seaside heath and weed plants were growing. Walking was slow as Ellie explored each different flower and picked a selection from each one that she entrusted to me for safe keeping.  Each park bench we came across we had to sit on in order to power up for the rest of our journey. The rain settled and the sun gradually came out and started to warm us up enough so that we could take off our jumpers.

The view on the sea side was spectacular.  The waves crashing into the craggy rocks and heaving of the sea was glorious to behold.

As we moved around the corner, away from the sea and walked towards the entrance of Boambee creek the vegetation surrounding the track became more dense.  There were less wild flowers to pick, but Ellie's imagination kicked in with games about the big bad wolf waiting in the forest for little red riding hood; and of course, the three Billy Goats Gruff as we crossed a small bridge on our path.

We made it to the lower car park in time to meet a woman walking back the way we had just come.  Ellie, still in full fantasy mode, declared that the woman was a Vampire, ahhhh!

She discovered the cliff faces and immediately wanted to climb them.  There was a small copse of trees that she had to explore, loving the idea of entering the deep dark forest. She dearly wanted to climb the trees but found out that they were covered with green moss and were slippery.  A small pile of sticks heaped up like a campfire inspired her to add more sticks and then try to rub sticks together to make a pretend fire.  We then had to cook sausages and marshmallows using twigs that we had collected.

Once the bitey mosquitoes found us, we decided to leave and climb the road way back to the top of the lookout. Climbing hills on roads made for cars wasn't too much fun until we played Little Red Riding Hood again.  At one stage a man in a car pulled over to see if we were alright.  I guess we looked a bit strange.

At the top of the hill we discovered the two water towers and imagined how much water they would hold and what it would be like to go swimming in one.  We decided that you would have to be a very good swimmer, because the bottom of the tank is a long way down and the water would be very very deep.

All of that adventure made us very hungry, so we set up on a picnic table and ate our lunch.  It must have been lunch time because so many other people drove up in their cars and ate their lunch at the lookout too.

After enjoying the view, and finishing our lunch, we knew it was time to go.

I wonder what our next great adventure will be?

Red Claw

We reluctantly moved on from Mackay and started what really marked the beginning of our grand adventure, heading west into central Queensland, the gateway to the outback.  This was the bit that I had been looking forward to, heading towards unchartered territory.  As it turned out, you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere unchartered in Australia, indeed, anywhere even particularly far from civilisation.  I didn't know that then, though.  This was still yet to be discovered on the eve of our exciting adventure.

Again, my diary entries are fairly ho hum.  I noted that we had lunch at Nebo on 14 April. I described it as a small historic town. I wrote that we had passed mining shanty towns along the Peak Downs highway.  I certainly remember seeing fully laden coal trains thundering toward the coast to fill all of those waiting tankers that we noticed lurking off the coast at Mackay and Rockhampton.  I do remember remarking at the time that it was like we (Australia) were desperately digging up our coal and exporting it to China as fast as we possibly could.

On the night of the 14th we camped at Teresa Creek Dam. The only things I noted in my diary about this location was that there was mobile phone reception behind our tent, a spot light and that there were many drunk campers, loud music and revelry.  I can't now remember why I put a reference in about a spot light, but I do remember the bit about the only mobile phone reception being behind our tent.  This was not definitely to our advantage, as it wasn't us who used the opportunity to catch up on mobile phone calls, but every man, woman and child in the place. As is always the case with mobile phone conversations, they are never quiet as it seems necessary to yell down the phone.  We found ourselves privy to many private conversations over the course of the night, I wish that I had written some them down!  I am guessing by the revelry and loud music, we decided that even at $5 a night it wasn't worth hanging around, so we continued onto Lake Maraboon to stay at Fairbairn Dam.

We stayed at Fairbairn Dam for three nights and tried out a bit of fishing and hunting for redclaw.  Both Evan and I made diary entries about this.  Redclaw is a kind of yabby and is delicious.  people come from far and wide to trap redclaw, after tasting it we could see why.

Steve and Evan caught a Red Claw today. They put Alan's Opera House trap in Fairbairn Dam last night and retrieved it this morning.

Steve got abused last night by an old codger who thought he needed a lesson in campsite etiquette. Fancy driving through the campsite at 7.30pm!  Steve seems to have a way of upsetting people. 

Evan's Entry:

One day dad and Harry went down to look at good places to catch big red claw.

Late at night me and dad put in the red claw trap

In the morning we took the red claw trap out and there was a red claw.

The next night the whole family came. Dad threw the red claw trap about twenty yards.

In the morning me and dad went down and pulled out the red claw trap. 

And instead of one red claw there were..............................................................................

three red claw.