Monday, 14 May 2012
It wasn't quite sparrow fart when I emerged from the spare room to start tapping out the travelogue, but the scent would still have been in the air.
Our host emerged shortly after the word count had passed four hundred, so there was a considerable backlog to catch up on when we pulled into the Atherton Tablelands Motor Inn around five that afternoon, but with breakfast despatched we were on the road around eight-thirty-five, which wasn't too bad for a day where the driving quotient was around four hundred kilometres when you took a couple of planned sidetracks into account.
Anyone who has done the Townsville to Ingham drive knows there isn't much of interest for the first half, given the fact that you're still in the dry tropics. While the rainfall might be a little more generous than it is in the Bowen to Giru stretch, and Townsville's inexorable outward sprawl will eventually transform everything up to Bluewater (at least) into the regular major city arterial road landscape, it's still not a very interesting drive.
Once you've cruised past Rollingstone and the Paluma turnoff, of course, things start to green up, and we cruised into Ingham intent on taking a break and grabbing a new battery for the torch. That proved slightly more difficult than anticipated since someone had decided to relocate or conceal the supermarket I seem to recall lurking on the left as you dogleg out of Lannercost Street.
No drama, however, since a diversion into a what looked like a pretty close to brand new IGA did the trick.
Back on the road, I was anticipating delays on the Cardwell Range, where there's a complete reconfiguration in progress, but we sailed up and over the crest without delay and the existence of a roadworks depot ensured we kept on going until we passed Port Hinchinbrook and debated whether to stop in Cardwell.
There has been plenty of publicity about the locals doing it tough since the devastation wrought by Cyclone Yasi, but the beachfront seemed to have recovered fairly well, and having breakfasted, given the fact that it was too early for lunch, the to stop or not to stop question came down to the need to fuel up or the necessity of a toilet break. Neither applied, so it was on to Tully, where we'd refuelled last time, and they'd probably need the money too. Lunch in Cardwell on the return leg, on the other hand, looks a strong possibility.
The run down from the top of the range had provided frequent reminders of Yasi's presence fifteen months or so ago, and while a lot can happen in a year and a bit there's still a long way to go before the rainforest along the way is back to its full verdant glory.
The clearest reminder ran along the ridge lines as we headed north out of Tully. At ground level, looking across the flats towards the mountains while you can see the effect on individual trees there's enough depth there to disguise things, at least to a degree.
For most of the way down from the range the ridge line had been out of sight, and from Kennedy to around Euramo it's far enough away so you can't quite make it out, but heading out of Tully the ridges were close enough to see the gaps between individual trees rather than the continuous green line that runs along there normally.
The Golfer and I passed through the same area four months after Larry did his thing across the same section of coast and with another eleven months or so for the vegetation to recover things weren't quite so stark, but a full recovery is still going to take a while.