Trains, planes and automobiles.       We have purchased the handy Spirit of Queensland rail pass to make our way down the coast of the state of Queensland between Cairns and Brisbane – 24 hours of travel if taken in one shot.      The 9-hour trip from Cairns to Proserpine gives us the bonus of watching the countryside unfold over the miles.     Palms dot the countryside, with tropical varieties of parchment trees and evergreens.   The surprise for us is the vast amounts of sugarcane fields that started as far north as the Daintree rainforest and continue down the land-side length of the Great Barrier Reef.     A small gauge railroad runs beside the fields to haul the harvest to processing plants wherever they may be.     China is the trusty trading partner for nickel, whose custom helped Australia cruise through the recent recession unscathed - not so with sugar, Chinese don't use sugar in their cooking so buyers are found elsewhere throughout the world.        

Our tickets are offered to overseas travellers, require that you travel only one direction and complete the trip within a month .     A good gig.     It also includes a bus shuttle from the Proserpine train station to Airlie Beach, a 30 minute drive to our ultimate destination here.

Another lovely town, a variation on the theme of Queensland coastal towns to the north.     Another handy manmade lagoon, a smaller but pleasant waterfront, a great array of beachie shops, backpacker accommodations and restaurants for all dress codes.    Shirtless and shoeless being one.       Like a tide, you can set your watch by the exodus of boats shuttling tourists, divers, snorkelers out to the islands and reefs that start at 8 in the mornings return back to dockside by 6, just after dark.

We spend a week here, with three main outings shaping the visit.        On a lark, we grab a 'ferry’ to Hamilton Island, the largest inhabited island of the Whitsundays – a group of 74 islands that are seen as the swishest of the Great Barrier Reef areas.   We figured a ferry would be a ferry price – but $250 later, we are on our way to the island 25 minutes offshore .     Neither of us was quick-enough afoot to catch the cost before boarding.   Hamilton Harbour has a yacht club built to emulate a manta ray, a large marina with sailboats and catamarans of all sizes, a waterfront of upscale shops and eateries…..and roads that are largely populated with golf carts.    And restaurant railings that are populated with cockatoos (reminding me of the villain in Rio).     A free shuttle around the hilly island is a bonus, to see the place where George Harrison had a home among other luminaries.

Another Whitsunday must was Whitehaven Beach.       A 7 km white silica beach on a national park island.       Lovely and tranquil as few people are ever allowed there at any given time.      The ever-present lycra suits are donned to protect against the stingers….which just dims the experience a bit.    The irukandji jellies are just a titch larger than the head of a wooden match.     Recent incidents include a young fella who wore a suit, but the jelly rubbed up against his face .      Another is a girl who didn’t wear a suit who was still in hospital a week later.      The locals don’t seem to be alarmed – most don’t wear the suits, some just swim in an ebbing tide, and others swim whenever they want.  Aussie’s aren’t generally scaredy-cats or the sky-is-falling types, so we have dutifully heeded the warnings and worn the suits every time we were in the water – either that or stayed in the buoyed zones.

Our final outing was a salt-water crocodile day.    This one was recommended by a variety of different people and we weren’t expecting much.     Turned out to be a day where we learned a ton – a hallmark of a great day, especially for John.      Our guide is one of those classic competent, one-with-nature dudes.  This guy pilots the heavy-gauge metal flat-bottom river boat as he rubber-necks the shoreline for crocs and any other wildlife.    He knows them by name, points out the babies from this season and priors – and matter-of-factly explains all but one or two will become part of the food chain .    He doesn’t use food to ensure sightings; he figures we have paid to see nature and nature doesn’t offer guarantees.   The males are the largest croc in the world, reaching up to 6m and over a ton in weight.      When we head back to the jetty, he pulls on a buoy that raises a mud crab trap he set earlier that morning, to show us the catch.    Nothing is set up – he didn’t know if there’d be a crab or not.    There were two females.   He has no tolerance for those who don’t respect the power and nature of crocs, and can barely contain himself when people get drinking, decide to jump into the river, get bitten (or worse), and then the croc is hunted as a villain.      He contends the croc has done its job – natural selection and all that.    In his view there is only one truly invasive species in the world – and that is human.

The second part of the tour is a tractor with a few sitting compartments behind pulled through the woods and fields to a billabong (water hole) .       We get intros to the uses of the flora and fauna by indigenous people, see varieties of birds and learn that the wallabies we see are actually kangaroos of a certain size.         Lunch is an outdoor BBQ of barramundi (an awesome fish, caught in the tidal river we were just on), sausage, chicken and veg, and then for tea, a pot is hung over a campfire to cook "damper", a simple raised bread with sultanas eaten on the trail in days of old with a cross between molasses, maple and corn syrups, to “dampa the appetite” until more substantial food could be sourced.