Tuesday, November 20 Etty Bay – Dingle Cove

     We got up fairly early and went down to the beach to watch sunrise.

Sunrise over the Coral Sea

Morning fog drifting out to sea

    You can travel around Oz fairly cheaply, if you cook your own meals, camp for free when possible or take advantage of fairly inexpensive caravan parks like the one at Etty Bay where we stayed for around $22. Or you can do this:

     [Diana: The prior night while Kevin was writing, I had talked with the young couple camped next to us in a rented camper van. They were also doing a little traveling after the big music festival in the outback centered on the eclipse. I think they were food vendors. They offered us some watermelons, saying someone at the festival had donated a whole cart full and they had a couple left. Later when we had finished dinner they delivered the last two pieces to us, having passed the rest around the campground. That was a nice summer treat – I don't think I had any at all last summer.

   The next morning, however, we got an even bigger treat. The couple was cleaning out the van because they were flying home later in the afternoon. They offered a whole box of unopened food they had not used – everything from corn to pesto to olive oil with oregano. I happily accepted - an early Christmas basket!]

     Our big splurge for the day was having fish and chips from the local restaurant. We ate at a picnic table by the beach, quite tasty!

“How about sharing a little of that with a mate, mate?”

     We decided to move on down the coast. The first beach we stopped at didn't really match up to our expectations, so we drove to Dingle Beach and decided it would be an OK spot to spend the night. I used the barbie to grill up the marinated croc, green peppers, onions, and cherry tomatoes. Tasted like chicken, only there is the thrill of knowing that you've eaten a creature that would gladly eat you, if given the chance. Although now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure a chicken would eat you too if they were big enough. I've seen those chooks, they'll eat just about anything.

You gotta eat the croc before the croc eats you

     (I wrote the following that night at Dingle Beach. Just a little stream on conscious meandering.)

     The sun set over a half hour ago. In the tropics the sun rises and sets quickly, not lingering as in the higher latitudes. It's almost dark now, the light of my notebook computer lighting the keyboard. The steady mild wind blowing in from the Coral Sea is neither warm nor cool, strong enough to flap my shirt sleeves but not a nuisance. I've got a very slight sunburn from swimming and writing with my shirt off earlier today. It's not painful, rather a warm echo of the tropical sun. Surprisingly, there aren't any bugs around, except for the background sawing of a few cicadas. No mozzies, no midgies, no flies.

     The Reef shelters the coast in northern Queensland from ocean swells, the big surf is further south, north of Brisbane where the South Pacific goes all the way to Chile. Here, the waves remind me of Lake Erie rather than the ocean. Of course you won't find deadly jellyfish or stray crocodiles in our Great Lakes, and you shouldn't swim here in the spring and summer unless the beach has a 'stinger' net. But I'm content to sit under the palms and mangrove trees ten yards from the water, listening to the waves and breeze, and now that it's completely dark, the crickets and katydids singing in the trees.

      I didn't know about Dingle Cove before this afternoon. It's a tiny council run park and campground at the end of a single lane road just north of Mission Beach. Besides the resident caretakers living safari style, only one other couple is here, a young German couple who used the barbie before us and with whom I shared a couple pieces of marinated crocodile that I grilled up on the barbeque with onions, cherry tomatoes, onions and green peppers. Unplanned places combined with unscheduled moments such as these make travel spontaneous and exciting, sometimes with pleasurable effect, like today, other times more discomforting and stressful. But after you look through your books and maps and internet searches at home, these kinds of experiences enrich your trip in unexpected ways that make travel worthwhile.