Driving from Cairns - Melbourne
 

Hi there!

Sounds adventerous but we're planning to take 6 - 8 weeks driving down the east coast from carins to melbourne as part of a year away. Stopping in Brisbane and Sydney and re-hiring cars.

we'd love suggestions on our itentary...firstly we've planned and hired a car for 10 days to go from Carins to Brisbane.hopefully this will be long enough to take in:

1 night Townsville
1 night Mackay
1 night rockhampton
2 nights Airlie beach
2 nights Town near Fraser Island (can't remember name)
1 night Noosa
2 floating days

Then we drop of the car in Brisbane.

Rehire and spend an estimate of 5 days travelling from Brisbane to Sydney.

Taking in Byron Bay and Port Stephens with a couple of floating days.

Rehiring in Sydney and then taking 4 days to travel to Melbourne down the coast...

We're then thnking about working in Melbourne for 6 months..so hopefully during this time we can travel the Great Ocean Rd, see Tasmania etc., during weekends or breaks off work..

I'd really apreciate if you could comment on our intinary for both feasibility and suggestions on where we're spending our time and indeed what to do with floating days.

Also what tips on driving and what to expect on the roads..luckily being from Scotland we're used to left hand driving!

The only place we've visted before is Sydney, in this trip we've been up to the Blue Mountains..all the rest is new new new!!

Thanks in advance and apologies if I've mixed up the destinations as I'm thinking from memory.

Cheers

1 night Townsville
1 night Mackay
1 night rockhampton
2 nights Airlie beach
2 nights Town near Fraser Island (can't remember name)
1 night Noosa
2 floating days

OK - Drive from Cairns to Cardwell after you have spent some time driving around the Atherton Tablelands ( you don't say how long you will be in Cairns) or drive from Cairns via the Tablelands down to about Cardwell somewhere. Take the boat over to Hinchinbrook Island and spend the day or 2 on it.
Drive from Cardwell through Townsville ( hot, dry and uninteresting in my opinion) to Airlie Beach - this will be a full day's drive so start early. get some nice accommodation at Airlie Beach OR one of the islands when you arrive as you will see lots of accommodation on a last minute special around.
Spend whatever time you want there and perhaps you might find that this is one of your extra days, especially if the weather is nice. If you are a boatie you can rent a boat and do the area yourself around the many lovely islands and bays etc.
Forget Mackay as its only about 1 hour or so south of Airlie Beach but instead perhaps drive from Airlie Beach and turn off and head towards Eungulla Gorge National Park and wander around there for a few hours before heading south again. The next 3 hours drive is about as boring as you can get and so is the city of Rockhampton so I would go as far as you can that particular day nearer to Fraser Island. Remember that en route there are many old Queensland Pubs and most of them have very cheap, clean and interesting accommodation for about $35 Au per night. Ask to see the accommodation as no-one would expect you to take it sight unseen. Also great meals in these pubs too.
Depending on the time of year you are doing this you could check whether its the turtle breeding season because if it is then a small detour into Bundaberg en route to Fraser Island to see the turtle rookery at Mon Repos is worth the trip. If you are interested in geology then there are also some strange and ancient holes ( name escapes me) there too.
You might as well take out the town near Fraser Island and just stay in Noosa because you can get to Fraser from Noosa as its only a hop, skip and a jump away.
When heading down from Noosa drive from Nambour up to Mapleton in the hinterland and do the loop up there along the range to Malany and then down to Landsborough taking the Glasshouse mountain drive which will take you through Beerwah where, if you are interested, is Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo - it is worth a visit.
Brisbane is a nice city but there is not a lot of interest for tourists with perhaps the exception of Southbank, a river ferry trip and maybe a trip over to Morton Island.
Take the Highway from Brissy about 75 klms to the turn-off at Sanctuary Cove / Tamborine /Oxenford drive and drive up to Tamborine Mountain where you should spend a couple of days making this your central point for visiting all the sights around here ( I live here and am happy to give you my email address and you can then email me direct and I can give you more information about this area etc - [email protected]. I can also point you in the most interesting roads and places enroute to Byron Bay.
Anyway hope this helps you a bit. Liz]

Sounds like a terrific trip you're planning. On the way south from Cairns, it's worth stopping at a place called Paronella Park at Mena Creek, about 1-2 hours south of Cairns. Check their website, really different sort of tourist attraction.
Also if you have time, Mission Beach is lovely, gorgeous beach opposite Dunk Island with a villagey atmosphere, couple of great restaurants and a few nice places to stay. It's just off the main highway.
We got some really good deals at Airlie Beach to stay at one of the islands by just turning up and checking the ads in the main street, Airlie Beach has a pretty lousy beach but a nice man-made lagoon swimming area, full of backpackers, the islands are lovely, even for a couple of nights. Fantasea ferries run like buses, you can pick up a timetable or check their website. To give you an idea, South Molle Is was about 20-30 min by ferry from Shute Harbour which is 10 min drive from Airlie and where all the boats go from. The town near Fraser Island is probably Hervey Bay.
We just stayed over Christmas at Pambula Beach Holiday Hub caravan park, right on a beautiful beach, terrific facilities, you can get all sorts of different cabins or camp and the park is full of kangaroos! Merimbula, 5 mins drive further north, is where all the shops/restaurants are and is also a nice stop.
Not sure what sort of work you are after in Melbourne, but here are some sites you might find useful:
www.seek.com.au
www.mycareer.com.au
www.careerone.com.au
Make sure you have the right visas to work or you may get turned away when you arrive in Australia, they can be quite strict.
Driving in the cities here will be similar to the UK, the roads between main cities are mainly 2 lane (one each way), you can often get stuck behind a slow moving vehicle but they have 'overtaking' lanes every so often so you can pass safely. You will see lots of dead animals,such as kangaroos, on the roads, be careful driving at dawn and dusk which is when a lot of native animals are active.
Hope this helps with your plans!
Kay

Hi sam_x - Janese has covered most of the Cairns - Brisbane stretch but can I suggest a deviation after you leave Cairns. Spend most of a day on Atherton Tableland and go on to Undara Lava Tubes in the nearby outback - you can overnight there in restored railway carriages or permanent tents. the next morning take a 2 hour tour of the lava tubes (you're in the outback here - plenty of live kangaroos) - you must take lava tubes as tour - they won't let you just wander in. You'll need to double back a bit on same stretch of road, but the tubes are worth it. Take the scenic Palmerston Hwy down to Innisfail - you're then close to Paronella Park mentioned in previous posting. If you can afford the time for one night at Mission Beach, do it. Magnificent beach and you might see cassowaries in the wild. Also suggest trip out to Magnetic Island from Townsville - ferries run all day - several good beaches - koalas and wallabies - don't take your car over - vehicular ferry is expensive and there's a good little bus service on the island.

Hi,

Thanks so much for all your ideas. We arrive in Cairns on the 9th of March (not long now) and we're planning a 5 night stay before we emabrk on our road trip!

Liz, I'm not sure if thats the right time of year for the turtles in Bundaberg? Please let me know though as we would definatley be interested in doing this if so.

Kay, mission beach also sounds like a plan and we never considered this before so thanks for your advice.

Pat, how long will it take to detour to the lava tubes from Cairns..would we just need the one night to get from cairns stay over and then drive to Cardwill via Paronella park? Sounds interesting but I'm worried we will start trying to pack too much in!

Thanks again for all your help

Hi Sam - Undara Lava Tubes are about 4 hours from Cairns - when you leave Cairns head south to Gordonvale and take the Gillies Highway to Atherton Tableland. It's a twisting, steep road with about 250 bends but is more scenic than the Tableland route via Kuranda. Have a look at Lake Barrine - you can take a short boat trip around and maybe have lunch at one of the little cafes in Yungaburra which is close the Curtain Fig Tree. Head out towards Ravenshoe
- Undara Lava Tubes is another 2 hours on the way to Mr Surprise. Road is sealed now all the way to Undara. This is the bit of road you'll have to double back the next day on to Ravenshoe, then take the road to Milla Milla and take the Palmerston Highway down to Innisfail. Try to fit it in - it is worth it.

Sam_x, if I may jump ahead to the last part of your trip, the drive from Sydney to Melbourne..... Australia is blessed with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to its coastline. By the time you get to southern New South Wales, the so called Sapphire Coast, you already will have seen more gorgeous beaches than you can shake a stick at.

If you're setting out on your journey from Cairns in early March, I'm not sure when you'll reach the Sapphire Coast. I was there in the southern hemisphere summer, when it was great for swimming. I have no idea what swimming conditions would be like by, say, late April. The scenery would remain lovely nonetheless.

The stretch of coast from Bermagui down through Merimbula all the way to Eden is lovely. A few miles inland from Bermagui is a very small, cute, old town called Tilba Tilba. If memory serves me correctly it's been designated as a heritage site.

Another nice stopping place on the way from Sydney to Melbourne is in the far south east corner of the state of Victoria, specifically a little town called Lakes Entrance and the nearby Ninety Mile Beach.

When you're in Australia, keep an eye out for the war memorials. Even the smallest town, say a place like Tilba Tilba, has one. Australia (and even more so New Zealand) lost a staggering proportion of its young men in WW I. Anzac Day (April 25th) has deep meaning to Aussies and Kiwis.

Lonely Planet publishes an excellent guide to Melbourne. There is enough there to keep you occupied with excursions every weekend for six months.

Melbourne's winters do tend to be a bit grey and drizzly (although you can luck out and get some nice days too). Coming from Scotland, I don't think you'll find outdoor Melbourne too cold.

You may find indoor Melbourne too cold, though. We didn't find Australian standards of heating to be anywhere close to Canadian ones. It was ironical to shiver in a country that was supposed to be WARMER than ours.

The pity of the overcast skies is that they really do affect the appearance of the ocean. The Great Ocean Road, for example, really does look different on a sunny day from the way it looks on a cloudy day.

However, Melbourne also has a good number of indoor places that are interesting. You can do the indoor stuff, like the excellent art gallery for instance, when the weather is dodgy, and you can do the outdoor stuff when the weather is good.

Hi Sam
this is a cut and paste from the Queensland Newspaper about the turtles so you can judge for yourself if its for you:

Children find the turtles at Mon Repos turtle rookery fascinating.


78 Mon Repos turtle rookery, Bundaberg
John Wright
28feb03
Researchers at Bundaberg's Mon Repos turtle rookery have collected a few tales over the years, some of which make you wonder how these extremely sensitive marine animals have managed to survive the stress of their annual breeding cycle.



One story you hear is that in the days before turtle-watching was tightly controlled, the poor adult animals were besieged by marauding mobs of tourists from the time their flippers hit dry sand to when they crawled back exhausted into the water.

In one night, the story goes, 27 turtles which came up on to the beach at Mon Repos were rushed by an estimated 2500 people. All but one of the turtles returned to the water without laying eggs, clearly stressed and/or disoriented by torches and camera flashes.

This wasn't much help to a marine animal which, even in optimum breeding conditions, produces on average only one out of a thousand hatchlings which will survive to maturity.

Fortunately, the open-slather era on turtle watching in Queensland has long gone, replaced at Mon Repos with a ticketed beach access system designed to protect the turtles while satisfying the demands of a very busy little seasonal eco-tourism sector.

Mon Repos is one of the two biggest loggerhead turtle rookeries in the South Pacific and the biggest on the eastern Australian mainland. This means that in the November-March nesting and hatching season, the 2km-long beach is a magnet for tourists ? about 30,000 a season or up to 500 people a night in the peak holiday season.

The downside about this is that although you can buy a $5 ticket for a very informative, park ranger-escorted turtle-watching tour, you have to get in line to buy it ? the queues at Mon Repos start well before dusk ? and you might have to wait hours on a first-come, first-served basis before you get on to the beach.

Turtles don't do their thing to order and might not put in an appearance until well into the night.

Access to the Mon Repos Conservation Park at night, when most of the turtle activity takes place, is through the park's information centre, an interpretative facility which at peak times is very busy. Volunteers help to staff it, but how they keep hundreds of adults and children happily waiting for hours is a mystery, even with the diversion of turtle slide shows and videos.

It seemed to me on a recent visit with my children that the centre was stretched and could do with an upgrade. The composting toilets weren't up to the job and stank appallingly.

We were lucky, having been assigned to the first group of turtle-watchers, and a loggerhead was sighted crawling out of the water and making for the dunes about 7.20pm ? much earlier than expected, because turtles tend to leave the water at or near high tide, and that wasn't due for hours. The next one, we heard, appeared about 10pm.

The rangers take out groups of about 70 people a turtle, which sounds a lot but seems manageable. The group congregates on the beach some way from the turtle, gets a briefing on what to do and what not to do ? stay close together, don't take photos until such and such a time, and so on ? and, eventually, is allowed to observe from close quarters one of the sights of the natural world.

Of course, spending an hour looking at a turtle's backside dropping white, leathery-looking objects into an egg pit in the sand might not fascinate everybody, but children find it especially mesmerising. I have seen it several times and can recommend it at least once.

Of more interest, peripherally, is the real-time research being conducted in front of you by rangers and volunteers who set to the turtles with tape measures and notebooks, and who give a running commentary on what's happening.

"Folks, we get between five and 10 turtles a night on the beach at this time of the year," a friendly female ranger says. "We've had 185 so far this season, most of them loggerheads and some flatbacks. Loggerheads lay 120 eggs on average." We were told years ago that artificial light disoriented nesting and hatching turtles, which was one reason why residential and other developments behind Mon Repos beach were banned.

But I found myself wondering this time what the loggerhead in front of me felt about the camera flashes, the torches, the reflected light from digital cameras and videos, the noise and the press of the gallery around its pit in the sand.

How do they cope with the intrusion?

According to tourism body Bundaberg Region Ltd, the best way to maximise enjoyment from a Mon Repos experience is to visit the park outside the main school holiday period, which from now on means in February and March. The number of visitors falls off during this time and waiting times are reduced.

It seemed to me that tide times might make a difference to waiting periods, too. Choosing a night when high tide isn't too late is the way to go, but if you have patience and children who aren't too demanding, any reasonable wait is usually worth it.

If you're really keen on turtles, you can buy a season ticket at the Mon Repos centre for $28 a family or $12.50 an adult and $7 a child (5-15 years) which, allowing unlimited ticketed access, is good value.

Getting to Bundaberg from the Brisbane region has been easier since the introduction of QR's Tilt Train service, whose frequent return services to Rockhampton make a long weekend in Bundaberg over, say, Friday and Saturday nights, a comfortable proposition.

The Tilt Train ? one of the best tourist trains in the world ? covers the Bundaberg run in four hours and 20 minutes, with convenient mid-morning departure and mid-afternoon arrival times. The return economy fare from Brisbane is $112.20 for adults and $57.20 for children (4-15 years).

Bundaberg does not have a lot of major tourist attractions outside its turtles but there's enough to occupy yourself with over a weekend. They include some fine beaches.

My own pick of the city's family-oriented attractions are the turtles at Mon Repos, fossicking the tidal pools at Bargara or other rocky beaches, an hour or two at the riverside Alexandra Park and zoo close to the city centre and a walk and lunch at Ann's Kiosk in the Botanic Gardens.

John Wright travelled to Bundaberg with the help of Tourism Queensland, Bundaberg Region Ltd and Queensland Rail. He stayed at Kelly's Beach Resort, a backpacker-oriented resort at Bargara.

Just the facts: For information about Bundaberg's attractions and beach and other accommodation options contact Bundaberg Region Ltd. Tel: 1800 308 888.

For information about turtle-watching and the Mon Repos Conservation Park telephone the park rangers on 07 4159 1652 (Mon Repos) or 07 4131 1600 (Bundaberg). Queensland Rail: tel: 13 22 32.