Tag 19, 13. May, Bowling Green Bay National Park (Alligator Creek)

In the morning, we descended into the Porcupine Gorge again at sunrise. There, we saw some euros, which are medium-sized kangaroos, at the top. Down in the gorge, we went left today, for about 2.5 km, then back. Unfortunately, the sky was quite overcast, so the beautiful cream-colored sandstone walls of the gorge did not really stand out. There were honeycomb-like structures in the walls to admire, yellow-reddish smears in the sandstone, and dendrites in hard lava rock. For geologists, it must be an exciting hike.

Back at the car, we showered off the morning sweat in our built-in shower, had breakfast, and then set off just before 10:00, continuing eastward through the Outback of Queensland, over the Great Dividing Range, a barely 600m high mountain range that separates the coastal land from the Outback. Also, the water is affected, as the clouds mostly rain out here, leading to the humid tropical climate of the coast, while little rain reaches the dry inland.

We quickly noticed that we had now moved from the sparsely populated Outback to the more densely populated coastal strip. Townsville, the second largest city in Queensland (after Brisbane and before Cairns), has almost double the population of Darwin, with 220,000 inhabitants. Nevertheless, it is very sparsely populated compared to Germany.

By 15:00, we were in Bowling Green Bay National Park, at the Alligator Creek Campsite, 30 minutes after Townsville. Nothing special here, but a good stopover for our destination tomorrow. And beautifully located in semi-humid tropical forest by a small mountain stream that comes down from the densely vegetated tropical 'mountains'. The attraction in the camp was the numerous bush turkeys, wild birds the size of turkeys that also look like a turkey: black, with a long black tail, and a bright red head with some yellow in front. During two short walks of 1.5 km each along the creek, both during the day and after it got dark, unfortunately, there was nothing special to discover.

In Queensland, the sun sets even earlier, just after half past five, and we go to bed even earlier. Already at 21:00, the light was out.