Airlie Beach and Bowen

Airlie Beach is a typical tourist resort town with many cafes, hotels and gift and souvenir shops. The town’s accommodation is aimed mainly towards the tourist with many apartments, hotels and back packer hostels. This area also has many caravan and camping parks and we stayed at the Flame Tree Tourist Park approximately 10km towards Shute Harbour near the Airlie Beach Airport.


The town has a lovely boardwalk area around the harbour and marina and a park in the centre of town with a man-made lagoon provides a safe place for children and adults to swim and picnic.

It rained most days during our stay but we did manage to have a great drive to some of the beach side towns in the area and had a huge hamburger lunch at the Dingo Beach Pub.

After six nights at Airlie Beach we moved northwards again to Bowen. Bowen is the home of the “Big Mango” as this is a large fruit and vegetable growing area. The Sunday morning Queen’s Beach markets are a great place to buy fresh, cheap fruit and vegetables as well as the usual mixture of market type products. Bowen has spectacular 360^o views of the town, coastline and harbour from several lookouts in the area.
 
A natural wetland in the centre of town is home to a large range of birds and animals. Many of the old buildings in town are adorned with colourful murals depicting the history of Bowen. Bowen was home to a Catalina Base during the second world war and part of the old concreted area adjacent to the landing area in the harbour can still be seen near the memorial for the Catalina seaplane crash which happened during the war.

The Christmas in July evening at the caravan park was great fun. A roast dinner and dessert was served, music provided and a raffle conducted to raise money for breast and prostate cancer and over $3000 dollars was raised.

From Bowen we travelled towards Cairns, our first stop being Home Hill for a loaf of bread and lunch. We passed over the spectacular Burdekin River Bridge. Known as the 'Silver Link' and longer than the Sydney Harbour Bridge it spans the flood plains between Home Hill and Ayr. We discovered
that many of the rest areas in this area at this time of year are full so we checked into a caravan park at Bluewater and the following night was spent at Babinda Rest Area. We by-passed many towns including Townsville but will visit them on the way back in a couple of months.