It wasn’t supposed to be a big days drive today. We were going to travel about 370km to get to the Undara National Park. We even took our time leaving Normanton, much to Wazza’s dismay, and had a good look around the historic railway station.
Largest ever authenticated croc replica
The railmotor was built in 1950, to a 1930’s design, and is absolutely immaculately maintained. She looks better than new. They run it on a round trip journey once a week these days, one day it goes to Croydon and the next day it comes back to Normanton. A bit of a train from nowhere to nowhere. A bit of an old truck, she’s only got a 102 HP engine and a 4 speed dog box. Very low tech, but gets the job done in style.
Normanton is a bit of a dangerous place. The kids roam the streets without a care in the world. The guard dogs are truly ferocious too.
Caution: Would rip ya throat out if ya looked sideways
Our stop for the day was supposed to be the Undara National Park. They’ve got the lava tubes there and plenty of walks. However its QLD school holidays now and, as we discovered when we arrived, the place is completely booked out.
This left us with a bit of a problem, as there’s not much else around there to do. A few places we could have camped, but we bit the bullet and decided to continue into Cairns. That would make the day a 720km one, which seemed do-able … we didn’t bank on the journey taking so long though. The stretch from Undara to Cairns was a long, windy, narrow, mountain road, for goats. We figured that we could get there by 6, but the reality was 7:30.
The day ended up being 11 hours of driving and we arrived to blackness. It’s been a long while since we had to setup in the dark. We’ve also been spoilt with huge sites (or paddocks) to park in and the narrow sites here were a bit of a culture shock. A bigger culture shock was the traffic, traffic lights and just general bustle of an actual populated place.
The park is huge and easily has the best facilities (for kids) that we’ve seen. More about that in the days to come. We did a quick setup and went to the park restaurant for dinner tonight. 3 pizzas to share certainly hit the spot.
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