noosa to the whitsundays

Noosa to the Whitsundays

bundaberg

Bundaberg could have passed us by if we weren't so hungry and there was a Subway on the corner, but after Childers we really needed to do some washing and, well, Bundy had a laundromat. So while in Rome... we drank Bundy, at the Bundaberg Rum Factory.

Even at my absolute most drunkest, oblivious state I still can't drink Bundaberg rum, and Mandy and Neil aren't far behind, so it wasn't a big excitement for us to smell the molasses fermenting.

The smell was worse than the bread factory in South Yarra, and they had this massive room filled with vats of rum fermenting - the condensing vapours were 78% proof, so if you breathed in hard enough for long enough you could get drunk. Which is about the only way I could get drunk on Bundy rum. Then to top it all off, they give you free drinks. Lucky they make ginger beer.

driving to aeon

Sometimes in Australia the distances look small on maps, but are really, really long. We are getting so used to this, that when on the Bruce Highway we decided to pop into Emu Beach and Yeppoon for lunch - an 80k round trip. Which is fine, but between Yeppon and Mackay there isn't a lot. But we did learn that the white dots on the map meant towns less than 200, which means there's probably not a lot there. Here are some bored driving pics.

:Mandy and Riss cruising	:Neil contemplating the theory of relativity

:Subtle Queensland advertising	:Rusty hiding from the Big Crab

claireview

So far the official dunny budgies AEON* town. The town is only marked on the map as having less than 200 people (we reckon about 20). The camping grounds weren't on town water, and we were abrubtly told that there are no restaurants in Claireview and dinner was being served at 6.30 and it was rissoles and vegies (boys get three rissoles, girls get two).

The Claireview locals are what Neil politely calls 'salt of the earth', but Mandy likes 'Claireview, where the ferals meet the locals' better. One of the bearded locals had what looked very much like a red bellied black snake slithering around his arm, but he said it was a yellow bellied black snake (which no one seems to have heard of).

We whittled away the time playing the official Royal Flying Doctors board game, which involved lots of headwinds and tailwinds and because Neil knows a lot about wind he won.

Claireview in all its glory.

*Ass end of nowhere.

Last updated: 12th December, 2001