Dayboro to Bundaberg

Elissa had booked accommodation for the next night, in Dayboro. It was a small town just outside Brisbane, and accommodation was a little further out of town still. It was a small cottage on a Llama farm! The cottage was beautiful, the view was incredible, and we spent an hour feeding the llamas in the afternoon! Their keeper, Miguel, was a professional footballer for a while, with Barcelona, and we chatted at length about how much hard work it was, how controlling the teams are of their players, and lots of other things. The evening in the cottage was so relaxing - all of our worries about the car, and about everything else, disappeared. If you are ever in Brisbane, I cannot recommend Dayboro Cottages enough.

The following morning we drove to Nambour and The Big Pineapple. I am even more disillusioned with big things now. And we kept heading north, hoping to get most of the way to Bundaberg. By 5pm, though, we had no accommodation booked, and things were getting a bit scary. So we stopped at an internet cafe in Gympie. After an our online we had booked the following night's accommodation, but still had nothing for that night. We trusted our luck, so we drove north some more. In a tiny country town, half an hour further north, we found a room for the night. It was in a wooden shack with a corrugated iron roof, in the back of a pub. We paid our $40, and got ourselves something to eat and drink, and had a couple of games of pool. Some of the locals came and introduced themselves, looking more than a little unsteady on their feet. At about 9pm we made our excuses and left to watch Four Weddings in our room. Popping out to the loo later I heard some heaving noises - probably on of our friends from earlier.

Bundaberg was another three hours north, and at last we had driven clear of the rain that had dogged our trip so far. The Bundaberg Rum Factory looked a bit expensive to tour, though it also seemed to be the only thing in Bundaberg we had heard of. But we went to the Mystery Craters, holes in the ground that had baffled scientists for years apparently, and saw them. They were rubbish. It was one of those things that was so bad it almost made it enjoyable! We took plenty of tongue in cheek photos and moved on.

By this time the creak in the car was getting pretty serious, so we had it checked out by the Toyota garage. They told us it was the rotor guard, and we didn't need to worry. So we checked into the B&B, pleased to have our minds put at ease. The B&B was lovely, and the welcome was very warm, so we settled in and prepared for turtle watching that night.

Mon Repos is very famous for turtles, apparently. Every year, from November to March, turtles lay eggs in nests on the beach, and later hatchlings run down the beach to the sea. At Mon Repos we learned all about the numbers of eggs in nests, the survival rate of the hatchlings, the time it takes for turtles to lay eggs and their migration up and down the East Coast of Australia. We were put into five groups, and told that we would be called when a turtle had reached the beach and was preparing to lay. The previous night, they had had four turtles, and the last one had arrived at midnight. We were lucky. Within an hour, four turtles had made it to the beach. We were in group two, so we went out onto the beach to see our turtle, a 30 year old loggerhead. We sat behind her, apparently invisible to the turtle (and there were 70 people in our group) while the tour guide shouted instructions. As well as having poor peripheral vision, it seems loggerhead turtles are deaf as a post.

While we sat behind it, the turtle dipped her back flippers into the hole she had made, scooping out more sand each time, and at the end, really having to stretch to reach the bottom. Then she stopped, and the eggs started appearing. At this point we were OK to come round to the front of the turtle. Once she starts laying she's not going anywhere, even with 70 tourists standing watching. After the first ten eggs had dropped, I did come round to the front, and watched as she continued to lay. Her eyes looked watery, and she looked very old, and almost like something Jim Henson could have made. We all stood a few metres from her as she dropped 108 eggs into the bottom of the nest, over the space of ten minutes. Then she began to sweep the sand back into the hole, which lasted another half an hour or so. And then she patted down the nest, roughed up the area to make it difficult for predators to find her eggs, and turned to head down the beach. We followed, on our guide's instruction, and watched as the turtle slowly disappeared into the breaking waves. There was a round of applause and our guide said "Didn't we get a good turtle?".

The experience wasn't over then, of course - our turtle had dropped her eggs too close to the water to be safe against Queensland's recently temperamental weather, so we had to move them. We lined up by the nest and our guide dug out the nest again, and one by one, handed an egg to us, and pointed us up the beach to hr colleague, who had dug a new nest. By the time I got there, it was clear there were more eggs than people, so I was given four of them to move. Part of me felt very proud that I was instrumental in the future of four turtle hatchlings, but given the survival rate, there's only going to be one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of an adult turtle that I've helped to live, statistically speaking. Even so I'll keep my fingers crossed for my four turtle babies.

After the night at the B&B, and an enormous breakfast, Elissa and I headed to Bargara and a campsite. Our previous camping experiences had not been positive, so once we'd booked our spot, we decided it was time to invest in our own welfare. A Bundaberg camping shop gave us $130 worth of welfare in the form of an air mattress, a new, larger tent, a tarpaulin and a few poles and ropes, and we set up camp under a tree back at the campsite.

Never set up camp under a tree in Australia. Your tent will be covered in bat shit. Ours was. And you could hear it coming down all through the night! And the noise from the bats!

That said, the camping experience really got us in touch with nature. Mid afternoon, we discovered a juvenile bird, still learning to fly, had fallen into one of the trees we were using as shelter (ha!), and was making a lot of noise. We tried to feed it bread. No. We tried to pick it up. Definitely not. So in the end, I ushered it onto a stick I was holding, and lifted it back into the tree. It fell down again. So I tried again. And finally it edged up the trunk, high enough for Mum to feel safe coming to rescue it. They tried a few little hops, and then flew off into the distance. That, the possums, the skinks, the giant ants and the bats and there was more than enough nature for one night.

The rest of our stay in Bundaberg was less eventful. We found a lovely little beach with just the right amount of surf. We went to the Bundaberg Rum Factory and did the tour, and they told a tour group with many children in it how great it was getting drunk. We did the ginger beer tour, and met a hologram of some hard-working-talking yeast. You know, the usual. And we stayed in town a little longer than we hoped, while the car got properly fixed. A second visit to the Toyota garage, with a sicker sounding car, made the mechanics change their mind, and they kept it in for observations overnight. A few hundred dollars later and it was sounding much better, but we were thoroughly sick of Bundaberg. Rockhampton beckoned.