{"id":7475,"date":"2026-04-20T06:57:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T06:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/?p=7475"},"modified":"2026-04-20T06:57:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T06:57:15","slug":"20-last-weeks-in-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/?p=7475","title":{"rendered":"20. LAST WEEKS IN AUSTRALIA."},"content":{"rendered":"

Back on the coast, it’s somehow comforting.\u00a0 I know we were barely half the width of the state inland, but that’s still two an a half hours by plane.\u00a0 There, roads are straight and horizontal.\u00a0 Townships are truly well spaced out.\u00a0 Between them there are very few signs of human presence apart from miles of fencing and road signs offering advice on which roads are closed by flooding!<\/p>\n

One of our first ports of call was Point Cartwright.\u00a0 The magnificent surf beach at Buddina stretches for miles to the south.<\/p>\n

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Magnificent it may be, but dangerous too.\u00a0 If the sharks and sea snakes don’t get you, the dynamic waves might.\u00a0 Sadly, a young off-duty surf lifeguard lost his life here the other day.\u00a0 A sad reminder of the power of the waves.<\/p>\n

The local council has established a photographic beach survey here.\u00a0 You place your camera on a sturdy mount …<\/p>\n

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… take a picture and add it (electronically) to the collection.\u00a0 So we have contributed to a long string of photos of exactly the same scene!\u00a0 Very useful!<\/p>\n

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It’s always good to catch up with the local fauna.<\/p>\n

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I discover that there are at least 15 different species of goanna or monitor lizard in Queensland.\u00a0 This fellow is a Lace Monitor, about a metre long.\u00a0 Normally slow and lumbering, they can move surprisingly fast and will shoot up trees with agility when threatened.<\/p>\n

It’s coming to the end of our time in Australia.\u00a0 But there’s always time to take the boys bouldering.<\/p>\n

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Glenda’s brother, John, eventually got to Australia and we were lucky enough to spend some time with him revisiting some of our favourite coffee and lunch haunts.<\/p>\n

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And the final one of these was La Balsa Caf\u00e9, where, by chance, we bumped into Peter and Beryl.\u00a0 Talk about leaving meeting with friends to the last minute!<\/p>\n

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Before we leave the Antipodes, we have our “routine” skin checks.\u00a0 Suffice it to say, Glenda emerged with eight stitches in her thigh and I went for the record this year with some 200 stitches.\u00a0 Well, 29 anyway plus an undisclosed number of internal self dissolving bits of embroidery.\u00a0 Thank you Kate Jin!\u00a0 Her super customer-focused service concluded with a call with the histology results… while we were at the departure gate at Brisbane Airport.\u00a0 I just can’t imagine that sort of thing happening in the UK.\u00a0 EVER!<\/p>\n

The day we arrived at Robin and Linda’s place, Wayne moved in to start re-landscaping the pool area.\u00a0 After two months, on our last whole day in Queensland,\u00a0 he officially finished the operation!<\/p>\n

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After eight weeks of work, the pool now has a legal fence, very posh aggregate\/concrete surround and planted areas.\u00a0 Very snazzy, but sadly we haven’t been swimming once.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is waging war in Iran.\u00a0 Things may never be quite the same in the future.\u00a0 There’s certainly some instability in the financial markets.\u00a0 The three large airlines of the Middle East, Etihad, Emirates and Qatar are more or less shut down.\u00a0 Most of their flights have been cancelled.\u00a0 Thousands of their customers are looking for seats with other airlines.\u00a0 It’s chaos.\u00a0 Flights are being over-sold like nobodies business.\u00a0 Not only that.\u00a0 Because of the enthusiasm pilots have to avoid airspace over war-torn countries, and bearing in mind that as well as the wars in Iran and Ukraine, Afghanistan and Pakistan are at each other’s throats.\u00a0 All air traffic is being funneled through narrow corridors.<\/p>\n

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Air traffic control is “stretched” in some areas, further limiting the number of planes transiting these bottlenecks.\u00a0 Our flights home may be a bit “interesting”.\u00a0 They are certainly causing us some concern…\u00a0 We are just hoping that Cathay Pacific has got enough petrol to get us home!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back on the coast, it’s somehow comforting.\u00a0 I know we were barely half the width of the state inland, but that’s still two an a half hours by plane.\u00a0 There, roads are straight and horizontal.\u00a0 Townships are truly well spaced… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vietnam-and-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7475"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7525,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475\/revisions\/7525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}