Queensland

Hitch hiking (kind of)

So my flight into “Brizzy” was delayed by over an hour, but fortunately I had a long layover. There were a number of passengers who intended to catch a connecting international flight, and were not so happy about the situation. When I landed I didn’t quite know what to do since the bus that goes to St. Lawrence had already left for the day. Another charter company failed to answer their phone despite being during business hours. I started to walk from the airport to town to find the rail station. I ended up stopping and asking two cars that were pulled over and chatting where the station was; it was “just down the way.” I asked if the gentleman was heading that way; fortunately, he was. It was hot walking in lower eighty degree heat! As it turns out, he was the manager of a trucking company and I mentioned how I might have to hitchhike if the train didn’t work out. He said that one of his employees was just getting ready to head that direction. He gave Ben a call and within minutes I was in a big rig heading towards St. Lawrence. Ben had just come back from a five week holiday in Vietnam, where he also just got married! An hour and a half later I was dropped off on the side of Bruce Highway just as it was getting dark. Torrey came to pick me up and we went to Greg and Colleen’s, where he was WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms).

St. Lawrence

So I should start out by explaining a crabbing outing in the Broad Sound and estuaries surrounding the Coyne’s 6,000acres. It is a five minute drive to a dock where the tide changes up to 6m (18ft). In the back of the pickup we have a couple empty bins (for the crabs we catch), a bin of bait (fish heads or shark bits), a couple frozen two liter containers of juice, and two cans of fuel that we fill the boat up with each outing. Greg has one hundred pots set at all times, but each outing we only switch about half of them. We are out on the water between three and a half and four and a half hours, depending on wind, where the pots are, etc. In order to pick up the bots, we use a gaff hook, pull them up, take out the male crabs, switch the bait, and pile them in the back of the boat until it is time to put them out again. Since we are catching mud crabs, whatever one is wearing is filthy by the end, smelling like fish guts and all. We go out with the tide (while I was there, it was typically in the morning), leaving earliest at 6:00am. We did do one night run where we left at 6:00pm and went out via moon and boat light. It was much more challenging, particularly because the few mornings I was out, it wasn’t windy, and this night it was, so picking up the pots was much more difficult due to the rocky boat. When I wasn’t crabbing, I helped box the crabs, take down a fence, or break things down for a dump run. I did manage to finish a book and watch “Killers,” the newer Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigel (sp). Our last evening we went pig hunting but we failed to kill one. We worked four hours each day to cover food and lodging, and the rest of the time we worked we were paid. It was a fun rural experience! I feel like we ate all the time, with three meals a day, including tea breaks, where the snack food was often a meal in itself; I suppose we were working though! Nevertheless, it was a great start to seeing QLD.

Actual Hitchhiking!
We got a ride with Colleen back up to Mackay. It was Sunday though and much of the city was closed, including the Greyhound bus station. I had the number from when I called when I first arrived and tried them, but found out that the bus wasn't coming for eight hours. We walked through the Sunday market, grabbed a delicious apple, rhubarb crumble and headed to the highway; our goal: to head to Townsville (400km north) to catch a ferry to Magnetic Island, where we had a place to stay. After an hour and a half we were picked up by this guy Mike, who has been living on the road for the past eight years. He was going to party before working in Cape York for a few months. He drove us just outside of Airlie Beach, gave us energy drinks and sugar cane and we stuck out our fingers again. Within five minutes another "bloke" picked us up who was heading just south of Townsville to go fishing. He listened to cricket the whole time and was not very chatty. He dropped us 50km outside of Townsville. Elated that things were going so well, we were picked up again within ten minutes by a father of nine, with only one child in the car, and his dog. He took us the half an hour to Townsville on his way up to Cairns. We were 7km outside of the city and started walking in with our fingers out. A german guy, Hogard, and his Malaysian wife, Eta, Townsville residents, although heading the opposite direction stopped and asked us where we needed to go. We told them the ferry terminal and they were happy to drop us right there. Talk about a successful trip up the coast! We got to the ferry station six and a half hours after our start of hitchhiking (a straight drive probably would have taken four hours), and a half an hour past when we would have left Mackay had we waited for the Greyhound. We took the ferry across, caught a bus to the Stearns.