Days 10-12: Driving down North Queensland, from Port Douglas to Airlie Beach and the Whitsundays – Part I

So, last we left you, we were at Port Douglas, a couple of hours from Cairns where we started our trip in Australia, so we had a chance to drive for a bit and familiarize ourselves with the “wrong side of the road driving” but our next stop was to be the Whitsundays, a few islands (well, 74 to be exact) right off the coast with supposedly pristine beaches and nice resorts, but to get there we would need to drive A LOT.

So we made a plan, drive south on the beach with a few stops:

1. Mareeba : a little town along the way to mission beach, the nice couple at the Port Douglas motel recommended we go see this place where they re-created a pioneer city (I can’t remember the name)

2. Mission Beach: a beach town along the way (may or may not have the Magnetic Islands next to it)

3. Townsville: another stop along the way to Airlie beach

4. Airlie Beach: the gateway to the Whitsunday islands

All in all, about 10 hours of driving, to which we dedicated 3 days.

That was the plan at least, we woke up on day 10, had a quick breakfast and hit the road. At the entrance to Mareeba we spotted a mango wine factory, our curiosity was piqued and we stopped. We tasted some of the sweet whites (Apparently you can’t make red wine from mangoes, go figure…) and we were pleasanstly surprised. So we bought a bottle of the dessert wine and kept it in our cooler and also added two more fresh mangoes to our ever increasing mango collection.

Our cooler and why we have a mango collection So this is not our first trip, the long time readers of this blog will know that about 6 years ago we went on coast to coast trip of the US. As we were starting this trip, we were fondly remembering some of the experiences we had on our previous driving trip. Here are some examples of the similarities we’ve noticed: * Everything closes too early - We talked about this in the past and although it’s far too extreme in Australia, we were talking about that when we were travelling the US as well * Bugs on our windshield – a crazy amount of bugs gets squished on your windshield when you drive long distances on the countryside in the US, so much so that it obscures the view after a while – we didn’t experience it before the US trip and really up to the Australia trip when we were reminded of the menace * Long drives and stopping at the rest stops and buying junk food from gas stations – I guess that happens on every long road trip * Listening to audio books – those who know us know how much we enjoy listening to audio books (and podcasts) but what you might not know is that it started in that US trip when we bough our first audio book at a Barnes & Nobles to see if it will be any good. We’ve been doing it since and have enjoyed listening to a few books on this trip as well * Lastly, the famed cooler – On the US trip we went into a walmart one day and bought ourselves a big old hermetically sealed yet foldable tub that, I believe, was designed to hold 96 beer cans (That’s how you measure cooler sizes in the US and in Australia) we bought a similar one here in Australia only somewhat smaller (probably 36-48 cans this time around). Among other food items, we keep our mango collection there. Why do we have a mango collection? Well, firstly, magoes in Australia are amazing so we just keep buying them and secondly, we keep forgetting to buy a knife so we keep buying mangoes whenever we see them but since we don’t have a knife we can’t really eat them…

So after the mangoes we drove down to Mareeba to go see a coffee plantation (because it was there) – we had some nice coffee, a small meal and a lot of free wifi, we went on a tour that was designed and produced by the farmer’s son. It was, let’s say, quaint. You go on a little bus that takes you around for about 4 minutes while the speakers tell you about the plantation with random 80’s songs playing for 15 seconds at a time and an overly caffinated driver that keeps going too fast for the tour makes the whole experience out of sync. This is followed by a movie that is followed by the credits which are the same name for all the roles you can think of in a peter jackson movies (the farmer’s son). It was fun – but more ironically fun I guess

After our coffee adevnture we decided to go see some falls we found in a book (Milla Milla Falls), the drive there was nice – Sivan occasionaly yelling at me to look at trees or mountains or lakes since she was driving, me refusing since one of us needs to look at the road, fun! The falls were nice but it was starting to get dark so we took our pictures and continued to head to Mission Beach.

We arrived at our hostel around 8pm, it was, for lack of a better word, “budget” – not too clean, not too nice – basically a tin shack but hey, we had our own bathroom (kinda, we shared it with some bugs and some other people’s hairs) but we overcame this and went to sleep.

We still have a lot more driving to do tomorrow…