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Australia:more than kangaroos and great beaches.

If you came to Australia and hoped to see kangaroos and great beaches you may get as far as Tooronga Park Zoo and Bondi Beach in Sydney and be satisfied, but no there is far more to this great land than the cliqued ideas about koalas on surfboards or kangaroos hopping down the main streets of cities for that matter. In fact my wife and I, who both live in Oz, have travelled this large country for four years in our camper van and only saw a real image of a large red kangaroo hopping through the desert once and experienced half a dozen really remarkable beaches in all that time. So let me enlighten you as to the more, more, more, of what there is to Australia who some term the 'lucky country.'

Australia is the driest continent on earth so there are vast tracts of desert to explore if you feel like getting off the beaten track and venturing towards what is called the Red Centre. The reason for this term is that most of the topography in this region is a brilliant red, due to the oxidization of the rocks or literally rust of the iron content. It has spread far and wide over the centre near Uluru the Giant red sandstone monolith (the largest in the world ) and Alice Springs. These are unique areas and have been held sacred by the aborigines for thousands of years. If you stay in the central Australian region for say a fortnight, then you must look at the Olgas and Kings Canyon and travelling further north, the Western McDonnel Ranges which have rock formations of the vertical variety glistening like huge gold nuggets in the sun. The outback areas of Queensland, although appearing empty, hold treasures of the dinosaur age at Richmond and Hughenden. Not just any old dinosaurs, but at Richmond you will see a model (the original bones were taken to America in the 1920's ) of a cross between a giant crocodile and a giant pleosaur and it is so big that it would literally eat T-Rex for an entree!. As this area was a vast inland sea many eons ago these sort of almost mythical creatures would have been swimming round outback Queensland. At Hughenden, a little further on there was a creature called the Muttabuttasaurus, which stood 20m feet high and roamed the land when the seas had disappeared.

As you continue on eastwards towards the Pacific coast you will come to Townsville and if you go further south from here you will enter the sleepy town of Bowen which has recently been introduced to the world as the backdrop scenery for

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