Highflyers and High-Fives

Thursday 12th April, Eak flew off to Brisbane for the day.  The flight from Emerald to Brisbane is roughly 1.5hrs long and luckily it was another gorgeous day in sunny Queensland!

Blackdown Table lands from above.

The very flat and expansive area of Central Queensland.

He rocked up to the Qantas Club in Brissy a few hours the lounge had a complete buffet and bar area.  Needless to say, free beers, food and cakes were slaughtered by Michael   - Classic!

Free Beer, Free Food and Free Net = Sweet As!!

Then that Thursday night at the local Mayfair Tavern we have been attending the weekly quiz.  Our team name, 2 K's (Two Kiwi's). We didn't place in the quiz but they have a team "True or False" round which Eak won two rounds of, and he won two bottles of wine!! Man what a sweet day, here I am in all my finery, holding my well earned free wine bottles.  Won by using  useful & obscure general knowledge and a small amount of doing what they guy next to me was doing.

That weekend we decided to take a trip to the Blackdown Table Lands (as seen from above in the earlier pics).  It was a bit of a trek from Emerald, about 2 hours drive, but it was really cool - we were on the look out for snakes but still none to be seen, sneaky snakes! Its 1000m above sea level so it was an awesome place for the Aboriginal people to live.

There were some trippy big ass rocks on the track and some old Aboriginal paintings on the rock face. There was a good campground up there and a few tramping tracks around, which is where we saw these Aboriginal hand paintings. The roads are rough, luckily Hugo handled the ride. Would be worth camping there for a few days, very tranquil.

 Eak has been busy picking watermelons, a very sweaty and a hard job.  We are just ticking along at the moment, but things might be looking up!

xxxx Love Shahn & Eak

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone!

Hope you all had some lovely time off and managed to eat heeeeaps of chocolate!

We have had an eventful Easter weekend, we decided on Thursday night that we would do some tiki-touring around some of the closer towns in Central QLD. On Friday, we left home with a packed lunch and planned to head to Springsure for a look-see.  We also took our togs so we could swing past the dam on the way home!

Central Queensland looks like a desolate place with little to do but hang about, we are wanting to tramp/hike the Minerva Hills that overlook the Central Highlands region - seems no-one in Aussie is real keen on doing that! The area is a dry, sparsely populated but there are some really nice National Parks worth visiting, for example; Blackdown Tableland, Minerva Hills and Carnarvon Gorge, they are all located within a few  hours of Emerald. Why visit Brisbane when you could experience real Australia and get out in the bush and have a look around?!

  

We drove around a bit and decided to head to Old Rainworth Fort, this lovely lady, Colleen McLaughlin had a wealth of knowledge of the history of the area and she had lived and worked on the home  farm (10,000 acres, total of 24,000 acres) - she was a bit of a tough old nut but her family have had 5 generations and 125 years living and working on the farm.

Near Springsure. there was the largest recorded massacre of europeans in all of Australian history, some angry as Aboriginals were pissed (can't blame them as it is reported that 2,000 odd were slaughtered in Queensland alone) about the Europeans taking over their land so they killed 19 people.  As the population was about 300 for the whole area, so they built a fort to keep themselves safe.  At the Rainworth Station they had three building that have been moved there for historical preservation.

 Shahn on the porch of a house built in 1862, the house they built when they europeans settled onto this land.

 Inside the 150 year old home. There was a cellar below the building (it was about 10 degrees cooler in there) and a second level in the roof where a resident Possum lives now.

The building on the left is the Cairdbeign School, built in 1896 and both buildings were re sited here in 1982 to ensure historic preservation.  The building on the right is built in roughly the same era, it was a very old "Queenslander house" and had a massive porch in its day. The house was filled with alot of historical articles from the old occupants.

On the way home, after another extensive yarn with Colleen, we stopped at the public toilets and there was a frog in the toilet bowl! Tried getting a picture but it moved up underneath the rim, not cool! We went for a drive to try head up to the Minerva Hills National Park but it was a bit of a rough road and Hugo isn't 4wd so we had to turn back.

 

These are some wild Brahman cattle, which were on the Minerva Hills Road. They are massive animals and are funny looking compared with what we are used to in New Zealand, but they are used here as they can tolerate the heat, have a thick hide so insects don't worry them. Then we went off to the dam for another lovely dip!

Eak's Dream.... Here is the vehicular device we need to go bush in, so we can look around the outback.  Just need to find a good deal one that is cheap but in good nick, could be a challenge to find one!

Saturday, Shahn had work 8-4pm, was very happy to do this as it was $40/hr! Woo! After a very tough and busy day at the office, we bought some ciders and a cask/box of Midori & Pineapple (to be had with a splash of Sprite) - YUM! Ate some cheese & crackers that Eak so kindly prepared earlier and got prepared to head for the Emerald Rodeo.  It was a beautiful night so we walked about 20mins to the Showgrounds, they had all sorts of events - Bull riding, bucking horse riding, lassoing calves/steers.


On the way to buy candy floss and Mr Whippy icecream (a rodeo must!) stopped off at the Ladies' Toilet and ran into a rather large fellow...

This Green Tree Frog (Litoria caerulea?) was in the Rodeo's toilets, there was another one inside the toilet bowl, but this chap was a lot bigger!

Sunday.  Next on the long weekend events was to head to the Gemfields Fossicking area where we were hoping to get a few sapphires and/or ruby's. We drove 45 minutes to the Gemfields area, we didn't really have a game plan, but drove past Pat's Gems and it seemed quite busy so we wandered in.  Basically you buy a bucket of dirt and then pan it out (shake the shit out of some dirty rocks to get out most of the dirt out) then wash it in troughs (still shaking the shit out of the pan) - there is a technique involved in the washing part so that the sapphires will be centralised in the pan and make them easier to find. Looking forward to getting my own claim and having a bit of fun its not that hard and you could fing a nice gem.

The dude on the right with the black shirt & hat is standing at the shaking of the dirty rocks part and the dude in the blue shirt, bending over is at the washing trough where you wash the dirt off the rocks/gems.

Michael sorting through his pan of rocks and gems with tweezers. Bit painstaking, I know!

 This was our haul after washing two buckets, it took us two hours.  These are all Sapphires! Likely all very low quality/clarity but we were chuffed! There are blue, red and green ones, pretty cool huh?!

 

 

After the gem fossicking, we set off for a dip at the dam.  We took a shortcut, which meant a dirt/gravel road - luckily it was pretty clean so Hugo didn't struggle! Along the road we was two juvenile kangaroos, but we were not quick enough to get pictures to share on here, sorry! Pretty exciting, now we just need to photograph some kangaroos, a snake, lizards, a koala and a turtle!

 

 

Monday, was a quiet day.  We just chilled out preparing for another weeks work, but we went to the dam in the afternoon. We hope you had an equally eventful Easter break!

Until next time...

xxx Love Shahn & Eak

One month gone...

Hello again to our loyal blog followers!!
We are humbled by the awesomeness that is our loving friends and family dutifully following our blog! Thank you for leaving us comments on here and Facebook, its nice to hear that you are enjoying our trials and tribulations!!

We can see you....!

We have been keeping pretty busy this last week! In the last post, the rivers were flooded. It took a full week for them to go down so that they weren't over the roads (many of the miners were stuck, all the main roads were closed into Emerald - couldn't get supplies or the post/newspapers in!)

Compare this pic with the previous posts one... The water is 1m higher than the road! It only rained for a week, harden up! This pic was taken two days after the originally posted one!

We went for a drive with Richard one night, to see the flooding and to see if we could see some "wildlife". Saw this fat little cane toad (Bufo marinus)

We went to check on the John Gay Bridge, and the Botanical Gardens. Went for a wander through the Botanical Gardens but the river was up too high to get to where we were heading  so had to turn back. On the way, a mumma Possum fell out of a big ass gum tree and hit the ground so hard! Had a little baby on her back, hilarious!

She's a bit flooded! The big bridge is where the water flooded over in the big 100 year floods in 2008 and 2011! That's a shit load of water!! It is the main road in and out of Emerald heading east back towards Rockhampton (Capricorn Highway - because it runs East/West along the Tropic of Capricorn)

Because it is so F'ing hot here ALL THE TIME, and Australia to us cold blooded Kiwis equals being sweaty ALL THE TIME, we have been spending quite a lot of time at Lake Maraboon/Fairbairn Dam. Its the only place to swim at and is about 27kms from Emerald, a nice and relaxing place even though their mozzies are on steroids, seriously they are huge!

This is the Fairbairn Dam spillway - at above 100% capacity it spills for irrigation and water for Emerald.

 Looking towards Emerald's general direction...

Going for a swim in the very dirty water (Urenui river would be cleaner than this!), the buoys mark the "swimmers area" as they do a lot of boating in the lake. Very warm, probably around 20 plus degrees water temperature. There are turtles in the lake, you can see their heads popping up for air every now and again, there is fish in there too but too dirty to see them! We bought a Lilo to wallow on too, its awesome fun!

A lovely sunset at the Dam. We concluded that the sunsets in Australia are very yellow probably due to the deserts and that the sunsets/rises in New Zealand are more red AND are generally seen over water... so they are different!

We found Whittaker's chocolate! Wooo! Was cheaper than Cadbury too, double Wooo! It is also utterly ridiculous that NZ Tasty cheese is cheaper in Aus than in NZ (its $11/kg here) You can buy 3L of milk for $3!

Good news... Michael has a job! A 7 week duration contract picking watermelon, 10 hour days/ 6 days a week. Shahn is still working at the cafe, its pretty busy there. They make 300-400 coffees on a standard day, more in weekends and they are open less hours! She dropped two mugs of coffee on herself on Monday, awesome! Very busy days, but staff are awesome to work with and they supply the lunch and as many drinks as one can handle, its a pretty sweet situation to be in.  They reckon they will teach her to make coffees but they seem to be taking their sweet time!

Hope to be able to share some more positive news regarding job situations in the next posts!
xxx Love Shahn & Eak