One beach to another (Apr. 3/09 - Mon Repos, Australia, mileage 450km)

We were up with the sunrise this morning and on our way by 8am. The road took us through the holiday town of Emu Park (complete with road signs warning of emus crossing... didn't see any) and some gorgeous vistas out over the beaches and headlands below. The next big town was Rockhampton, which is the beef capital of Australia and lies smack on the Tropic of Capricorn. It seems like years ago that we drove across it heading north that day in Namibia... with our friends from Africa, having just spotted our first zebras, and waiting in the sun after the truck caught on fire. That was on the opposite side of the world, but at the exact same latitude. Crazy.

Forests and farmland extended south past Gladstone, where we saw a hilarious road sign that was trying to tell people of a series of kilometer markers ahead that you can use to check your spedometer against. But their shorthand gave us an entirely different image: "CAUTION - SPEEDO CHECK AHEAD". I thought for a minute that someone had finally started to crack down on the use of banana hammocks. Gotta love Australian slang!

We took a side trip out to check out what the seaside town of Agnes Water was like. This area basically marks the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, so as a result the coast from here south gets the full force of the Pacific's waves, undampened by the reef. So Agnes Water has eastern Australia's northernmost surf beach, and we had our first dose of watching the beach bums trying to ride the point break surf in to shore. The beach was even complete with a ponytail-sporting lifeguard dude with his jetski and rescue board who took a break from his job now and then to do push-ups on the sand. A few miles down the road is the strangely named town of "1770", which marks the first spot that Captain James Cook came to shore in Queensland in May of that year.

A rain storm took us by surprise as we continued south to Bundaberg, as we hadn't seen rain since Lombok. We had read of a little spot just outside Bundaberg called Mon Repos where large numbers of loggerhead turtles come ashore to nest each year. It's actually possible to go down to the beach at night to watch the females lay their eggs in the sand or watch the little babies emerge from their nest and make a run for the sea. But we soon found out that the hatching season had just ended when the big cyclone last month wiped out most of the nests. There's a nice campground park next door to the research center on the beach, so we picked a shady spot beside the sand and set up camp. It was still somewhat early but we had gone far enough for one day, and this was a pretty sweet spot. Ocean spray wafted over the campsites on warm sea breezes, and big pounding waves rolled in onto the wide, clean beach. A strip of sand dunes and patchy grass separated the beach from the foreshore, and numbered stakes in the sand all the way down the beach suggested that nests and turtle activity are monitored for research. We took a walk down the beach and noted lots of empty turtle egg shells, some in clusters where the pitted sand of the nest was clearly visible. In a couple spots, the numerous parallel tracks of newborn turtles could be seen emerging from a spot in the sand and then heading straight for the water. We figured that the tracks must be no more than a day or two old, as such delicate tracks would be erased by the wind quite quickly. So maybe some of them are still hatching afterall. Whatever the case, I hope the little guys made it out to sea safely. Their endangered species counts on it.