Yeppoon
After a big final day of cleaning the Bargara house and repacking the trailer, we returned to our Baffle Creek roadside stop for one night, happy to be enveloped again in nature.
En route to Yeppoon, we stopped in Rockhampton to visit the zoo and wetlands. What gems they both were. The zoo was small but had a fabulous chimpanzee enclosure. We watched enthralled as the three generational chimp family searched out their lunch, ate together, groomed and mucked around. In what looked like a homosapien enclosure, we watched other zoo visitors sit while the meerkats climbed over them and nibbled snacks from their open hands.
When we returned from exploring the wetland and parklands we noticed a 20cm crack creeping along the bottom of our windscreen. We'd heard a crack on the drive in but hadn't seen any impact. It was now clear something had hit just above the wipers and a single crack was splintering out, gradually getting longer.
It was about the same time that the air conditioning in the car went fully on the blink. We’d noticed over the last few weeks that both the ventilation and the air conditioning didn’t always come straight on when we wanted them to. By Rockhampton they seemed not to be working at all. So it was a matter of windows down or slowly cook. I’m not sure it’s a problem we can ignore for too much longer.
In Yeppoon we had three nights at NRMA Capricorn Yeppoon Holiday Park. We had to drag the kids away from "tag" and war games with the bigger kids at the bouncy pillow to explore what the popular town had to offer. We spotted turtles from the Bluff Point lookout walk and watched a flotilla of yachts race full sail across an archipelago backdrop. We spent the afternoon at the shorefront Lagoon and Kraken water park and climbed the Double Head lookout to close out the day.
Claire’s propensity for waking up before 6am meant we had no difficulty getting to the wharf on time for the 7:30am ferry to Great Keppel Island. We had a fabulous day out. Though we got an early glimpse behind the paradise facade when we started our trek across the middle of the island. The unmarked walk took us passed what Google Maps labelled a "green waste station" but in reality appeared more like a general waste burning pit. When I passed by again after a detour to a lookout, a mob of about 20 big wild goats was poking through the rubbish piles.
The hiking trails were poorly signed, if at all, and the two marked lookouts that we went to were overgrown. The leaning tin shelter at one looked like something from a remote Caribbean village. The infrastructure beyond the small radius of the tourist centre where our ferry landed was all decades past its prime.
I couldn’t believe it when we walked over a hill and down onto Long Beach that we had the beach all to ourselves, bar one camouflaged sunbather at one far end. Even the recommended snorkeling beach, Monkey Beach, which we headed to next, had only a handful of people on it. I was the only one in the water when I went out for a snorkel. The reef was accessible right off the beach and there was plenty to see under the water. It wasn’t as diverse as Ningaloo but I did swim with a turtle and Matthias, who was more game to venture further out saw a reef shark, moray eel, school of barracuda, as well as a couple of turtles.
In what felt like no time we had to start making our way back for the 4pm return ferry. Conditions were just perfect and the kids loved the 30 minute crossing.
