16th October - ROCK Hampton

Tired, hung over and drunk from our Airlie beach end of boat party, which was awesome, as there were alot of drunk people doing drunk things, we left quietly to continue on down south. A stonking 3 plus hours to Rockhampton with nothing in between, an easy 320 km.

We did give a lift to our friend Thomas, a German native with an excellent Arizona accent, who we met at Dreamtime backpackers in Cairns and luckily saw in Airlie. He had been working on a farm picking Zucchinis, but it all got a bit weird there because he was accused of stealing a quarter of a chocolate cake, and he had to escape from the middle of nowhere. So we dropped him off at Proserpine and hoped his next job would be better.

Then we stopped for lunch in Marlborough, though totally different to the one in New Zealand, for a start there is no wine regions there and there was just a one street town that looked like a Spaghetti western. We didn't stay long.

About 30 km from our stop we got to the Capricorn Caves. These are natural limestone caves that have been born into the ground by water erosion and plant roots. They were really cool and we got a few cool photos too. We were out of season but sometimes in december the sun is just right that it shines down through a few holes and it gives the impression of ghosts. Gutted we didn't see that but there is a famous photographer in Oz called Peter Lik who has the perfect shot of it, so google his ass to see.

The caves are called capricorn because we are slap bang on the Tropic of capricorn at the moment and there is a statue somewhere that we need to find for some silly photo opportunities.

Rockhampton was the city we stayed in last night. It was ok, nothing too special here unfortunately. Though they do have 2 million cows in the surrounding area and claim to have good steaks here, we tried some and they were good, the Rocky Rump. But Staines Steak house was still better!

We did manage to watch some tv in the bar too which we haven't seen for a week or so now. Strange invention really. Sarah also came up with her novel idea for a movie, Snakes in a campervan. Stay tuned for more on that later.

But need to do some washing and clean the van.

Laters for now
Pricey

P.S. Big birthday props to the following - sorry we weren't around to drink beer with you - Uncle John from Jamaica and the lovely Jo!