Over the last two days we have driven approximately 650 km from Bowen to Gl adstone with an overnight stop ar Carmila.
Before leaving Bowen, we stopped in the main part of town at Jochheims Bakery for a coffee and brekkie roll. This place is something of an institution in Bowen as all the time we sat at an outdoor table, we could see that the queue for ordering extended out the door.
There are a large number of murals in Bowen that illustrate various historical elements of the town and this is one of them.
Just 70 km down the road, we came to Proserpine. It is obviously a sugar town and local service centre. It exists to process sugar and consequently all the narrow railway tracks in the district lead to the sugar crushing mill which is situated to the north of the town. It is a kind of “cinderella” town because, in the past 50 years, the area to the east – the Whitsundays – has boomed as a tourist destination while Proserpine survives on sugar and on the presence of its airport.
We continued south, driving past enormous fields of sugar and mountains in the background. The highway south of Proserpine was rough and very patched. I assume that it has degraded due to the torrential rain that this area experienced a couple of months ago. We could see surface water in many areas across the landscape.
The manager of the caravan park at Bowen suggested that we should visit Eimo Point when we reached Mackay. There is a pub on the headland from which you get great views along the coast and out to the Whitsunday Islands. It was closing after its lunch service when we arrived but we could see some very nice beaches.
South of Mackay, we made a detour to see the coal loading terminal at Hay Point. This enormous industriial facility is a 50:50 joint venture between BHP and Mitsubishi Development. The terminal is capable of handling more than 55 million tonnes of coal for export every year.
It began operating in 1971 with a single coal loading berth. A second berth was added in 1975. In 2006-07, a two-phase $256 million expansion project increased the terminal’s capacity. A third expansion further increased the terminal’s capacity in 2010 including improvements to improve resilience to weather events. It handles coal from all the five coal mines in the Bowen Basin.
To balance our driving distance, we stopped over at a tiny town called Carmila. It is a sugar growing town with a BP Service Station, a small number of houses, a little pub and a ten-room motel. We were quite surprised that a little motel in a nondescript town could be so comfortable. We enjoyed our one-night stay there.
About the only place to eat was the little local pub. When we arrived, we found it buzzing with locals having a drink after their working day. The dining room was more like an old fashioned parlour with large tables and heavy chairs. The major activity for the night was the pub’s raffle in which the second prize was a cooked chook. I missed hearing what the first prize was. After a long conversation with the woman who ran the pub, Jill walked out with her own momento – a pub mug with a photo of the pub on it.
On the second day of our travels, we left Carmila and soon found a cafe on the highway at Flaggy Rock which had a nice billabong behind it (probably a previous prawn farm) and an unexpectantly nice bacon and egg burger. The coffee was good as well.
As we travelled further south and around Rockhampton, the country changed fromm sugar to grazing country. Most of this part of our travel was quite boring with nothing of interest standing out. I’m glad that I could put our car into ‘driving assist’ mode where it adjusted itself to the speed of the traffic in front of us and stayed in the centre of the lane. It almost drove itself for most of the way.
The only point of interest along this 190 km stetch before reaching Rockhampton was the little town of Marlborough. While travelling north on this trip, and our previous trip, we have stopped at the roadhouse there, thinking it was the complete town. While we were having dinner one night in Port Douglas with our friends Rod and Kate, they gave us some information that educatred us about the real location. of the town. Off a road that loops back to the highway is another road that crosses the train line and leads to the real town. Thanks to Rod and Kate we found a park where we could stop for a coffee and the pub and post office.
We were somewhat amazed, as we continued to our overnight stop at Gladstone, at the number of coal trains that we saw during the day. The railway line to the north, and to Gladstone, is very active. Each train was very long and hauled by multiple locomotives. This coal was all bound for export, so there must be a very big hole somewhere in this area form which it has been dug over the last few decades.
Gladstone, our stopping place for tonight, really feels like a genuinely industrial city. The large power station, the huge port, the Queensland Alumina operation to the south of the city, the Coal Terminal, the Cement Works and the Gladstone Ports Corporation all make it one of the most substantial and commercially successful ports in Australia. More than 100 million tonnes of cargo of over thirty products pass through the port each year.
The lookout at Auckland Hill gave us an opportunity to see a panoramic view over the port as well as an opportunity to see just how much of an industrial centre Gladstone is. The port has a total of four wharves and the Auckland Point Wharves handle imports of petroleum products, magnate, copper slag, break bulk cargo, cement gypsum, LP gas, caustic soda, containers and general cargo.
To end the day, we checked into the the first luxury hotel in which we have stayed for many nights. We’ll look forward to a nice dinner in the restaurant after finding so many closed in other places where we have stayed.
