Camping: Whitsunday Island National Park
After picking up Pat in Noosa Heads, having a leisurely lunch at Cafe Le Monde, we hit the road for a 1000km drive to Shute Harbour and our 7:00am departure for the Nari’s Beach campsite on Whitsunday Island. Sort of. First, we spent 20 minutes lost among the countless, nearly unmarked roundabouts of Noosa, trying to find our way to the Noosa Civic Shopping Centre, to pick up a cooler and stove fuel at the BCF (Boating, Camping & Fishing) and some perishables at Woolworths to stock the cooler.
Even using the map on my iPhone (with Pat hassling me every 2 minutes about using my iPhone… naturally), it was nearly impossible to navigate the winding system of roads and roundabouts. The name of nearly every street, subdivision, district, town, and all other points of interest in the area includes “Noosa”, which is in itself difficult and problematic for navigation. Added to that problem, most intersections in the area are roundabouts—the Aussies really do seem crazy about roundabouts, using them whenever possible—without street signs. Instead, they have large signs as you enter, giving you a list of destinations in one direction and “all other destinations in the other directions(s). Maddening! For someone who has no idea what area or district a particular point of interest might be located in, this is a nearly impossible system; essentially, you have to be guided by some mysterious combination of intuition and luck; a limitless supply of patience is essential. What took us 20 minutes would undoubtedly have taken anyone familiar with Noosa no more than 5!
Eventually, we got all geared up and on the move. 1000km is a long way to go, especially if you don’t start moving until almost 3:00pm, but we had no choice other than to push through. Scamper, the boat for Whitsunday campers, was pulling out of Shute Harbour at 7:00am with our without us… unless it wasn’t. Even as we were departing Noosa, we still weren’t certain whether or not we’d be able to head to our campsite the next day. For the past week, Cyclone Ului had been hammering Northern Queensland. The Whitsunday Islands were particularly hard hit and it wasn’t clear if any of the campsites would be reopened by the Parks Service. We started driving despite the uncertainty and finally, at 5:30, we were told that Joe’s Beach, our original campsite, was too damaged, but that we could use Nari’s, which was close by and allegedly a nicer beach.
13 hours, three large KFC combo meals, two fuelling stops, one 2-hour nap while Pat drove, and an Australian version of the 5 Hour Energy shot later, we made it to Shute Harbour just in time for a strong squall. I was worried that the rain meant our whole drive would be for naught; there was nothing we could do but hope. It was tough to sleep when I had taken the energy shot only 2 hours prior, but I did manage about 2 hours of fitful sleep in the car, in the parking lot of the harbour.
None of us were particularly well rested when 6:30 rolled around, but we were ready to go. The harbour was in pretty rough shape. Signs were torn down and missing; several yachts were tossed up on land or resting below the waterline in various states of disarray; it was quite obvious that they weren’t close to recovered from the Cyclone. Unfortunately for them, the power hadn’t even been restored; fortunately for us, this meant that the parking meters were offline and we could park down by the water, in what would normally be short-term parking, for free.
Fortunately, the Scamper was not numbered among the wrecked ships, so we and two other groups of adventuresome campers were onboard at 7:00, heading out to the islands. As it turned out, not many of the sites were in working order yet, so although there were only 3 groups of campers and nearly 20 campsites throughout the Whitsunday Islands, we ended up with a couple from Britain at our campsite. This was a bit of a bummer: we had expected a bit of isolation and seclusion and now, because much of the site remained uncleared and unusable, we were shoving three tents into an area that would hardly fit two. At low tide there was plenty of space on the beach for hundreds more tents, but the water there rose somewhere between five and ten feet, almost to the edge of the forest-covered campsite, so anyone foolish enough to pitch a tent there would wake up soaking wet and-or drifting out to sea. Our poor fellow campers from Britain ended up pitching their tent on the somewhat slanted path from the dining table to the bathroom; they were gracious and didn’t seem much bothered, but it wasn’t an ideal scenario.
Fortunately, the Brits (Noami was actually Swiss but lived in Britain with her husband) were both nice and they spent much of the day away from the campsite/beach on their rented double kayak. The guy, Matt, was pretty interesting and kind enough to humor me when I pestered him with questions about his cool job and even cooler photographic equipment. He worked as an electrical engineer for a super-high end British hi-fi company, but his real passion was photography.
Most serious amateurs in photography these days—a category in which I would include myself, albeit at the very least serious end of the spectrum—content themselves with a prosumer DSLR, like the Sony A700 (mine, lower end) or the Canon 5D (higher end). Matt, however, was in a whole different league. Despite being extremely tech-competent, if not entirely tech-savvy, he still hadn’t moved from film to digital. He had a whole array of cameras and lenses—from your run-of-the-mill 35mm SLRs up to several large format cameras—several of which he actually brought with him.
The coolest of Matt’s cameras, which fortunately he had brought to the beach with him—was a fully manual large format camera he bought in China. Although it was only a year or two old, it looked much older with its wood frame and old-school accordion-esque style, he even had an attachable tarp to provide a dark space for the ginormous viewfinder, like old-timey cameras of yore. The camera could handle several different film sizes up to 7x10cm. By comparison, most prosumer DSLRs provide you with something in the 12-20 megapixel range, while a professional scan of a 7x10 exposure would result in a several-hundred megapixel image, if not gigapixel+. With the proper printing equipment, you could practically cover the side of a small building with an image from that camera. A professional scan of even lowly 35mm film would yield approximately 25 megapixels. With the output of even high-end professional DSLRs barely keeping pace with simple 35mm film, Matt felt that moving from a nice film camera to a DSLR would be like going from a power tool to a toy. The downside to Matt’s super camera was its extreme bulk and the nearly 20 minutes required to set up, prepare and capture an image. The more time I spent talking with Matt about photography, the more inadequate my A700 seemed.
Beyond Matt & Noami, we soon discovered that we were sharing the campgrounds with a 4-foot monitor lizard. Black with bright yellow markings, formidable claws and very quick when he wanted to be, the lizard would have been pretty disconcerting if he had been more aggressive. He made his first appearance while the Brits were off kayaking and we sat around the table eating PB&J sandwiches. Looking into the forest to discover the source of a soft rustle, we saw him, perhaps 10 feet away, slowly circling the campsite. If we made any move to approach him, he’d scurry away in a flash. He’d reappear periodically, in different places around the campsite. ”He’s got us all surrounded,” we’d joke.
Our joke was closer to the truth than we realized when we discovered a second lizard the next day, then a third. We spent a lot of time just watching them laze about and try to sneak up on one another. When we first discovered the 2nd lizard, it was clear to Alissa from their markings that the first was a male and the second a female, so we named them Richard and Virginia Lizard, in honor of Grams and Pops. Richard was a sneaky little rascal, or so he thought, because he’d spend a lot of time trying to get the drop on Virginia, without ever enjoying much success as far as we saw.
As time went on, they grew more comfortable with us, until their distance from us shrunk from 10+ feet to, at times, nothing. If we sat up on the table, Richard would come crawling right up under us; as Alissa walked past him on the beach at one point, Richard whipped his tail out and struck her on the shin. Bad Richard!
With no kayaks of our own and murky post-cyclone water mostly unsuitable for snorkeling, our main source of entertainment each day, other than watching the machinations of Richard and Virginia, was walking along the shore at low tide. With the water level at its nadir, vast expanses of jagged moon rocks—complete with scurrying crabs and the occasional tide pool—were revealed on both sides of the beach.
The first day, Pat and I hoped to find a cliff suitable for some Australian cliff jumping, but the water below was always too shallow. The next day we set off in the other direction to get a look at Joe’s Beach, our original campsite. Before we had quite made it to Joe’s; however, struck up a conversation with a man fishing in a small craft just of the shore. Buddy was a “7th generation convict” who lived on a boat in the Whitsundays and wanted us to tell the Brits we were camping with to pass on the word back home that “the convicts are happy here, thanks.” He had four small cod and another small fish, which he said he’d normally use to bait his lobster traps, but which he graciously offered and we eagerly accepted.
The cod were very spiky, so we carried them on sticks threaded through their gills back to camp. Pat cleaned and filleted them, then Alissa worked some of her culinary magic. With a bit of butter, garlic, salt and pepper she created a seafood masterpiece; having some just-caught fish also helped. The fish guts also proved irresistible to Richard Lizard, who hopped on top of the table while we were on the beach and tore the plastic bag we had put them in to bits, stealing all the fish remains. That had us worried that the monitors were getting a bit too aggressive, but they mostly left us alone for the rest of the time there.
That afternoon, we also donned our full-body blue lycra stinger suits—the coast of Queensland has many marine stingers, especially during the summer months (November-May), including the extremely deadly box jellyfish—to attempt some snorkeling in spite of the cloudy water. Sadly, visibility stayed extremely low and our snorkeling adventure was short and mostly unsuccessful; we did, however, get an awesome team photo in our Zisseu-esque protective gear.
That night we were struck by some rain. Rather a lot of it, actually; nothing biblical or cyclonic, but enough to discourage midnight bathroom breaks. There were a couple of really small holes in my tent’s rain fly, which hadn’t been a problem yet, in spite of some light rain and dew in New Zealand, but which allowed in enough water to dampen some things in the tent, including Alissa and me. That, combined with the fact that a cold I caught about the time we picked up Pat was peaking with a vengeance, meant that I had a very difficult time sleeping that night. When we woke up the next morning, it looked as if the weather wasn’t going to improve much, so we left a day early when the boat came to pick up Matt and Noami.
