Elad’s blog

In 24 May, 1770 Captain (at that time, still Leutennant) James Cook made a small stop in his exploration of Australia’s east coast. Hw went to the mainland and in the occasion put a flag there and declared it an english soil. After a short ceremony he came back to his ship, and continued his sailing north.
The austrailans marked this very event by building a small village on the exact landing point, and giving it the historical name “1770″. In digits. So when you look in the map there is this special coast town, the “town of 1770″, which is marked only as a number. I am camping in this town tonight, and tomorrow I am going to take a small sailing from it and have a couple of dives at Lady Musgrave Island, which is a corral cay at the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef.

In the way from Rainbow Beach to 1770 we passed two places worth to mention. First we went to Harvey-Bay, which is a coastal town just north of Rainbow. I went there to a small museum created by a guy who works as a shark hunter; most of the museum was dedicated to man-eating sharks and how much they are dangerous and how brave this guy is. There was a frozen giant white shark which was fished by this guy; and there were numerous films describing how he hunts the sharks, how dangerous they are, and so forth. One film claimed that sharks have no veins; their blood just runs in the extracellular matrix. I wander if it’s true, and if so - does it mean that they have no heart? If anybody knows or cares to find out, please comment me on this. In another film he hunted a shark, and then opened its stomach. It was fascinating: he found there food from the shark’s last five days, including a whole dolphin and a giant poor sea turtle (these sharks are really, really, big).

After the museum we didn’t find anything else to do in Harvey-Bay so we continued to our next destination - the famous city of Bundaberg. Famous, because it has a rum distillery (Bundaberg Rum) which is probably very famous (Uri, do you know anything about it?). Before visiting the distillery we looked for a place to sleep - there was none! It is high season for fruit-picking, and this city is packed with travellers who work illegally and earn tons of money (around 14$/hour). We ended up in a caravan park (actually, the second we checked, because the first one was full, in addition to all the hostels!). Thus I finally used my camping equiptment - it was wonderful. My tent is huge, I have this inflating bed, the bed-clothes and everything required. They also had showers and kitchen in this campsite, so it was really good. In fact, today we also stay in a campsite, just because yesterday was so good.

Today we visited the rum distillery. This is the center to which all the sugar-cane fields around send their product. They crush the canes into molasses, which they store in huge pools (5 meters deep, the smell can just drive you crazy) . Later they refine the room from it. They also send some very interesting products like Rumn-Cola, Rum-Ginger-Lime, and other stuff. The tour included two tasty glasses, and in fact we even bought some rum (it was really good) for later use in our four-days sailing of the Whitsunday islands scheduled to this Thursday. After this nice tour, we did some shopping and just headed to 1770, where we camp tonight. Tomorrow I have to wake up early for my Lady-Musgrave trip, so probably Roey and Alex - who don’t join me for the dives - will cook most of Shavuot Dinner by themselves.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2005 at 12:21 and is filed under Travels, Australia East Coast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.