Another unexpected stop along the trip was the much-recommended Cape Hillsborough National Park, just north of Mackay.
The plan was to reunite here with the convoy of travel buddies. Unfortunately, two of them got waylaid by car trouble. In the end Estef, Olivia, and I met up with two friends, Karin and Kayla, and we spent the day together hiking around the park.
The scenery at this park was different from what we’d seen along most of the coast. There were lots of rocky shorelines and tall hoop pines; it reminded me a little bit of Canada.
We hiked Andrews Track, which started on the beach, then took you up and around a big hill, stopping at several viewpoints overlooking the ocean. At one spot you could look down and see turtles swimming in the water far below (from that distance, they pretty much looked like swimming green dots). The walking track was also full, all the way around, with hundreds of beautiful Blue Tiger Butterflies:
In between the outlooks, the forest was so lush – just a wall of green:
Group photo at one of the outlooks:
The walking track took about two hours if you did it as a circuit. When we were one hour and forty minutes into it, we realized that the last twenty minutes of the walk were meant to be along the beach – at low tide.
It was not low tide. Instead of a sandy beach, there were tall rocks.
The options were to either walk an hour and forty minutes back the way we came, or come up with a creative solution. We were all starving, and when we looked across the water we could see the beach where we’d first started, only about 200 metres away. So we decided to come up with a creative solution…
Climbing along the rocks… probably wondering, how far will we get?
We managed to go on the rocks all the way back to the beach:
Once back on the beach, we were greeted by a real local:
Yet another beautiful spot on this adventure.
THE WANDERING YEARS 