We left Cape Trib Sunday night about 2 weeks ago now. Plan was to drive the beloved wicked (our "cowboy delux" camper van) down to the "Whitsundays" a collection of beautiful, lush and green islands that sit smack dab in the middle of the great barrier reef, about 800 KM south of Cairns.
The drive itself included certain challenges, we had gotten fairly used to the whole 'driving on the wrong side of the road' thing in NZ, but it can be a very different experience on narrow coastal roads in the middle of a tropical storm... A few of you have commented in e-mails and phone calls, that you had heard of flooding and massive rains in NE Australia, let's just say that we can confirm that these events took place. We did have a bit of a discussion about what would be the best approach to take, if/when we get stuck on a flooded road (we saw up to about 30 cm / 1 foot of water on the roads at times) within a croc zone - do you get out and try to push? Or do you just wait for the water (and potential crocs) to go away?!
We reached our weather low point near "Tully", a place we got to late at night Sunday and where we decided to camp for the night, because we just couldn't take it anymore. After a good night's sleep we ventured out for breakfast, only to discover from the local tourist info material that we had in fact spent the night in the place that has officially been declared 'Australia's Wettest Place', suffering the largest amount of rain per year :) -- Ironically it was bright and sunny that morning, however I must not forget to mention that Tully is also the home of "The Large Gumboot" - the Australians seem obsessed with large objects to be placed at the town entrance (the large squash, the large mango, the large you-name-it) an interesting fact which Carmine had kindly informed me about back in Seattle.
The further south we got, the more the weather cleared and we drove through landscapes that surprised us by looking more like African Savannah (or what we would expect that to look like I should say, never having been..) than 'the outback' - something that was later confirmed by one of our Whitsunday sailing mates, who had just come from the Kruger National Park in SA. Not entirely unexpected probably given that we were driving along the coast and that this region was formerly known as "the wet tropics", a name they recently changed, which is probably a good thing for the local tourism industry...
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