Day Eight: Townsville to Paronella Park.
It’s amazing what difference a couple of letters can make. Peter and G’s fridge bloke was called Mark. Denise and Ricard’s, Mick. Just two tiny letters different!! Mick turned out to be a fridge guru who could not do enough to fix the problem in the Sunland van. Mark tuned out to be late for his appointment and less than capable. Consequently the Sunland travels on with a beautifully cold fridge, whilst the Zone plugs along with a 190 lite storage box at room temperature, its void being filled by a cheap XTM cooler picked up at BCF.
With fridge issues behind us we all did a bit of stuff separately in Townsville. Denise and Richard went to a wedding whilst Peter and G finally had a run of luck at the Cowboys Club winning a chicken tray and a meat tray. These were donated to our friend Elle because she a place to keep them!
Heading out of Townsville to meet up with our travelling crew at the Frosty Mango, we noticed that the ‘Cancel Culture’ has finally had its long awaited victory. Near a power pole stood a cardboard cut-out of a safety human pointing upwards. The poor thing had neither colour nor gender to offer this mixed up world.
Denise and Richard had arrived at the Frosty Mango a bit before us but that did not stop us grabbing the time we needed to have scones and mango ice-cream. Funnily enough the day before in Townsville the staff from the place had a tasting at a coffee venue. When asked what Peter’s favourite flavour of ice cream was, he replied, ‘My mum’s mango ice-cream’. Not sure it went down too well with the crew to know a 95 year old lady had outdone them at their specialty.
Not that we are weird or anything, but we felt the need to drop into the Ingham Cemetery for a look. Well what a cracker of thing to do when you a bit of time to kill. This place is the final rest for a large number of the Ingham community from a time when the area was incredibly rich with a strong Italian influence. Consequently the tombs are like small buildings. Adorned with marble tiles and ornate decoration they are a sight. Peter noted that one even appeared to be so big it had its own rubbish bin outside!
The journey north highlighted the dangers with cane trains crossing the road regularly. We passed heaps of signs telling us to engage out ‘Train Brian’. As time and distance passed we entered banana growing territory so switched to engage our ‘Banana Brain’, before a bit later seeing signs for Custard Apples. We decided to give the brain games a miss after that. Not before however, G indulged herself in the science of why the banana plantations have different coloured bags over the bananas. Apparently more research is needed to answer this vexing question.
We continued north finding our way to Paronella Park via the longer but apparently quicker way through South Johnstone. Soon we were parked up in the Mena Creek Caravan Park and pretty much settled in with only a couple of u-turns involved in the journey to stay on track.
The Mena Creek publican told us that we had better have dinner early so as to catch the night show at Paronella and was convinced by G and Denise to stay open after the show to make us Sticky Date Pudding. Dinner was some good old fashioned food and tasted pretty good. The chuckle of the night however was when Denise went to the ladies and came back telling us there was a sign advising patrons to only have one person in the each cubicle at a time. We figured there must be the odd wild night at the Mena Creek Hotel for that to be a necessity.
It’s hard to describe Paronella Park. It’s even harder to appreciate it when you hear the story of Jose Paronella and the immense amount of work he put in to build the place pretty much by himself. Indeed he built a stone cottage for his wife in three months. We imagine at that time in the early 1900’s he did not have to be bothered with council approvals though.
The short story is that Jose had a lovely young lady betrothed to him in Spain before coming to Australia. He came out here, made a fortune then returned to pick up his bride but found out she had moved on. Undeterred he took up the offer of her sister that her mum and dad had prepared earlier. She apparently wasn’t too keen initially, but he become much better looking when she found out he was rich. So Australia bound they went. The rest is history.
The night show at the park was sensational and the sticky date pudding was pretty good as well. We headed off to bed with promise of a good day tomorrow.
