Shute Harbor, the town in Queensland where we are house-sitting, is not the easiest destination to travel to. There are no direct flights from Perth, forcing us to take a layover in Brisbane. Finding the cheapest flight on the red-eye of course, we flew out around midnight and arrived in Brisbane at 7am. Hearing Brisbane is a great city, and the fact that there is a train that travels from the airport into the city, we thought we would plan a full day to explore, opting for the 10 hour layover. Landing in Brisbane, we were completely exhausted. I guess 6 weeks of drinking and staying up late, followed by a red eye with maybe 2 hours of sleep will do that to you. Well, will do that to us anyway. Deliberating what we should do for a solid 2 hours, part of being a Gladstone I guess, we chose to stick in the airport. Exhaustion and rainy weather made sleeping in the airport quite an easy task and we spent the day taking turns sleeping and reading our books. It was much better than we expected.
Ron picked us up at the tiny airport in Proserpine, showing up in a typical tropics attire. For some reason I still have the image of the people waiting for friends and family, dressed in airy button downs, shorts and flip flops with their skin dark shades of brown. Walking through the doors of the airport, we were welcomed with a wall of heat and humidity, slightly reminding me of the July nights growing up in the midwest. Sticky. Right out of the gate, it felt fantastic, just where we needed to be.
Ron and Cathi have an amazing home in the Whitsundays. Owning the house for some years, they renovated last year and have been living here since May 2010. Converting the once walled in, small windowed home to a large single room similar to a studio setting with 270 degrees of windows from floor to ceiling. Simply ideal. There is a kitchen that then turns into the sitting area with a television for movies (no tv thank goodness) and around the corner a bed. There are walls to enclose to bathroom and washing machine. The porch wraps around most of the house with an upper sitting area that overlooks the islands and harbor for a beautiful place to have dinner. That is if you can deal with the mosquito's and other possible insects that will join you. The view out the windows is the harbor to the right, islands to the left and rolling hills of the national park straight ahead. Only neighbors on our left who come for a few days over Christmas and the rain forest on our right. They really know how to pick a perfect location. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the infinity pool out back as well:-) Life is good.
Now what do we do to fill our days you might ask? Do we get bored? No car to explore and the nearest town in 10 miles with a few hills to overcome in the process. No jobs. Nowhere we have to be or anything we have to do. How do we possibly fill all of our time? Well, we definitely do not get bored. And the times I do get bored, I actually enjoy the feelings that boredom bring as when on bikes for an extended period of time, there is no time for boredom. There is too much involved with riding for a lifestyle; waking at 6am, break down the tent, packing up, make breakfast, ride, stop for lunch, ride more, find a place to sleep, set up camp, make dinner, and before we know it, it is 9:30pm. So boredom is ok and I am soaking up every minute of it to be honest. It also doesn't hurt that we have kayaks to explore the islands, projects around the house, bike rides, hikes through the rain forest just by walking out of the door, fishing off the coral reefs that are right below the house, and cooking in a kitchen! We both love to cook, so we spend a good portion of our nights preparing dinner and drinking wine (when we can find deals that is. Australia is expensive. To give you an idea, a 6 pack of Corona is $18. And thanks for the American Peso, that puts a damper on our budget). It's really a lovely lifestyle.
Because of the extreme humidity and heat, often reaching 100+ degrees with 80% humidity, we are constantly jumping into the pool to cool down. I can't imagine living here without one. They also have a salt watr pool rather than chlorinated, which makes it even better. There is not much worse than reeking of chlorine day in and day out. Between dips in the pool and all of our activities, we read a lot of books and soak in our surroundings. We have even been able to find a bit of helping out with the neighbors. Our days our filled.
Now the wildlife. I have only talked of all the pluses of being here. The insects and animals are a completely different ball of wax. The grasshoppers body alone are longer than our fingers with antennas twice as long, spiders the size of our hands, green and brown ants that cover the decks and the palm trees, over 90 species of poisonous snakes, poisonous spiders, and cane toads larger than our feet. Now, the opposite of that, the spiders are simply beautiful. They often alternate a color with black and make amazing webs that extend between huge gaps across trees. When the sunlight hits them perfectly, it is one of the most beautiful sights. And watching them attack an insect that gets caught in their web is amazing. March flies are very common here, and we have learned that if you kill one, it actually attracts more. There is only so much annoyance and being bitten that I can take, and one day I had had enough. We kept killing them as they arrived and then throwing them into a spider web that sat above the pool. I believe we did this for about 2 hours, throwing the big fly into the web and then watching the spider scurry to the source and start the webbing process. It was unreal. I guess this is how we spend some of our days too:-) Back to the beauty. There are bright green tree frogs that we have actually had mating in the pool and then laying about 500 eggs. The female carries the male on her back, lays the eggs and then the male sticks around until nightfall. Fascinating. The butterflies are everywhere and every color you can imagine. We pick passion fruits from the yard and cut down fresh coconuts (such a task to get into them, but Ryan has almost perfected the machete bombardment).
The scarier animals here are the crocodiles. Although we can't swim in the ocean because of the deadly stingers, I simply would not go in purely because of the crocs. Some reach the size of 15 feet and have been known in past years to sun themselves across the way on the sandy islands. Between the crocs and the sharks, I do not really prefer the water. Ryan doesn't seem to think twice, maybe I'm just a scardycat.
Fishing the other day, catching some beautiful and delicious coral trout, I had a 6 foot reef shark go after my line. Wow, that scared the crap out of me. A fairly large shark in extremely shallow water right at the rock where I was standing. Talk about exhilarating. When we fish, we almost always see sea turtles, sting rays and 2-3 foot sharks a stone throw away. Nature at it's finest.
We will be in this house until the end of March when we start riding our way down to Sydney. Catching a flight May 3 to Hawaii, we will have about 40 days to find our way to Sydney. As much as we love being here and are enjoying the luxuries of everyday life, it will feel good to once again sit in our saddles and explore a bit of Australia through the eyes of the bicycle.
Ron picked us up at the tiny airport in Proserpine, showing up in a typical tropics attire. For some reason I still have the image of the people waiting for friends and family, dressed in airy button downs, shorts and flip flops with their skin dark shades of brown. Walking through the doors of the airport, we were welcomed with a wall of heat and humidity, slightly reminding me of the July nights growing up in the midwest. Sticky. Right out of the gate, it felt fantastic, just where we needed to be.
Ron and Cathi have an amazing home in the Whitsundays. Owning the house for some years, they renovated last year and have been living here since May 2010. Converting the once walled in, small windowed home to a large single room similar to a studio setting with 270 degrees of windows from floor to ceiling. Simply ideal. There is a kitchen that then turns into the sitting area with a television for movies (no tv thank goodness) and around the corner a bed. There are walls to enclose to bathroom and washing machine. The porch wraps around most of the house with an upper sitting area that overlooks the islands and harbor for a beautiful place to have dinner. That is if you can deal with the mosquito's and other possible insects that will join you. The view out the windows is the harbor to the right, islands to the left and rolling hills of the national park straight ahead. Only neighbors on our left who come for a few days over Christmas and the rain forest on our right. They really know how to pick a perfect location. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the infinity pool out back as well:-) Life is good.
Now what do we do to fill our days you might ask? Do we get bored? No car to explore and the nearest town in 10 miles with a few hills to overcome in the process. No jobs. Nowhere we have to be or anything we have to do. How do we possibly fill all of our time? Well, we definitely do not get bored. And the times I do get bored, I actually enjoy the feelings that boredom bring as when on bikes for an extended period of time, there is no time for boredom. There is too much involved with riding for a lifestyle; waking at 6am, break down the tent, packing up, make breakfast, ride, stop for lunch, ride more, find a place to sleep, set up camp, make dinner, and before we know it, it is 9:30pm. So boredom is ok and I am soaking up every minute of it to be honest. It also doesn't hurt that we have kayaks to explore the islands, projects around the house, bike rides, hikes through the rain forest just by walking out of the door, fishing off the coral reefs that are right below the house, and cooking in a kitchen! We both love to cook, so we spend a good portion of our nights preparing dinner and drinking wine (when we can find deals that is. Australia is expensive. To give you an idea, a 6 pack of Corona is $18. And thanks for the American Peso, that puts a damper on our budget). It's really a lovely lifestyle.
Because of the extreme humidity and heat, often reaching 100+ degrees with 80% humidity, we are constantly jumping into the pool to cool down. I can't imagine living here without one. They also have a salt watr pool rather than chlorinated, which makes it even better. There is not much worse than reeking of chlorine day in and day out. Between dips in the pool and all of our activities, we read a lot of books and soak in our surroundings. We have even been able to find a bit of helping out with the neighbors. Our days our filled.
Now the wildlife. I have only talked of all the pluses of being here. The insects and animals are a completely different ball of wax. The grasshoppers body alone are longer than our fingers with antennas twice as long, spiders the size of our hands, green and brown ants that cover the decks and the palm trees, over 90 species of poisonous snakes, poisonous spiders, and cane toads larger than our feet. Now, the opposite of that, the spiders are simply beautiful. They often alternate a color with black and make amazing webs that extend between huge gaps across trees. When the sunlight hits them perfectly, it is one of the most beautiful sights. And watching them attack an insect that gets caught in their web is amazing. March flies are very common here, and we have learned that if you kill one, it actually attracts more. There is only so much annoyance and being bitten that I can take, and one day I had had enough. We kept killing them as they arrived and then throwing them into a spider web that sat above the pool. I believe we did this for about 2 hours, throwing the big fly into the web and then watching the spider scurry to the source and start the webbing process. It was unreal. I guess this is how we spend some of our days too:-) Back to the beauty. There are bright green tree frogs that we have actually had mating in the pool and then laying about 500 eggs. The female carries the male on her back, lays the eggs and then the male sticks around until nightfall. Fascinating. The butterflies are everywhere and every color you can imagine. We pick passion fruits from the yard and cut down fresh coconuts (such a task to get into them, but Ryan has almost perfected the machete bombardment).
The scarier animals here are the crocodiles. Although we can't swim in the ocean because of the deadly stingers, I simply would not go in purely because of the crocs. Some reach the size of 15 feet and have been known in past years to sun themselves across the way on the sandy islands. Between the crocs and the sharks, I do not really prefer the water. Ryan doesn't seem to think twice, maybe I'm just a scardycat.
Fishing the other day, catching some beautiful and delicious coral trout, I had a 6 foot reef shark go after my line. Wow, that scared the crap out of me. A fairly large shark in extremely shallow water right at the rock where I was standing. Talk about exhilarating. When we fish, we almost always see sea turtles, sting rays and 2-3 foot sharks a stone throw away. Nature at it's finest.
We will be in this house until the end of March when we start riding our way down to Sydney. Catching a flight May 3 to Hawaii, we will have about 40 days to find our way to Sydney. As much as we love being here and are enjoying the luxuries of everyday life, it will feel good to once again sit in our saddles and explore a bit of Australia through the eyes of the bicycle.
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