Day 189, Year 2: First Trip into Bundaberg
Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Weather: Mostly Sunny
Location: Bundaberg Port Marina, Australia

Bundaberg Port Marina is just at the mouth of the Burnett River on what is called Burnett Heads. From here it is probably about fifteen miles to the center of Bundaberg. Every day the marina runs a shuttle into town at 9:30 and again at 10:30, and once in town you can return on Duffy’s City Bus. So at 9:30 this morning, we hopped on the marina shuttle and made our way to town. Donna and Gerry of Scot Free II were also on the bus, but once we arrived we went our separate ways. We looked around
and saw a K-Mart, a Woolworth’s, and an IGA–all familiar store names. Mark and I also spotted a second-hand shop and we ducked in to see if they had any $2.00 suitcases like ones we had bought in New Zealand last year for our trip home. They had one really large soft suitcase for $8.00, so we bought it. We only had a $50 bill, and the shop had no change, so we had to run across the street to the IGA grocery store to get change. This looked like a good place to buy the food items we were after,
so we decided to walk around town and return here just before the 2:15 bus home to pick up our suitcase and buy our groceries. After getting the change, we went back to buy the suitcase and left it in the store saying we would pick it up later in the day. We then continued our walk about town. We had only walked a few blocks when we spotted Donna and Gerry in a park talking to a gentleman. We stopped and found that the man was a city employee working in the park and he had given Donna and Gerry
lots of leads on interesting places to visit. This man, like most everyone we have met here, was so very friendly and helpful. Our next stop was the Tourist Information Center and we found really helpful people there as well. The most exciting thing we discovered is that early next week the sea turtles start coming ashore just south of here to the Mon Repos Conservation Park. The turtles coming to nest represent the most significant loggerhead turtle nesting population in all of the South Pacific.
So I know we will be making a trip to Mon Repos in the next week or so.

Bundaberg is a town that appears to have been built in the late 1800’s and not much has changed since then. It has a population of around 50,000 and evidently the Bundaberg Rum factory is the biggest thing going in town. We found more stores with familiar names–Blockbuster Video and Target being two of the largest. We went with Donna and Gerry down to the river and found the Mid-Town Marina. Mark really enjoyed looking through the chandlery to see what he needed to buy, and Gerry and Donna checked
out the prices of keeping a boat there. We had lunch with Gerry and Donna, and then Mark and I visited a great little book store and went to Target to look for new pillows. Ours are sadly flat. We found out that you can’t buy queen-sized pillows here, only standard or king. Oh well, standard will just have to do. We slowly wound our way through town and back to our starting point.

Today was a good introduction to Bundaberg. I know we will return many times to buy all of the items on our shopping list, and we felt like we got a good handle on what is here today. When we got back to the marina, we made visits to the yard where boats are put on the hard and we visited the only canvas shop out here. Bevin runs the chandlery and owns the canvas shop and he is coming to Windbird tomorrow to give us an estimate on a new and improved cockpit enclosure. We ended our day with a
dinner on Ranger, who is by the way, our next door neighbor. We were neighbors in Whangarei and now here in Bundaberg.

When I wrote last night’s log, I thought the Port-2-Port activities began tonight, but I was a day early. Tomorrow evening the festivities begin. Maybe we will have our first XXXX beer. It is the official beer of Queensland and some say it is XXXX because no one could spell beer. Bad joke. We’ll have to wear our Boston Red Sox t-shirts tomorrow night to celebrate the Sox triumphant win of the World Series.