The day #9 of #powerTrip360 was a ‘rest’ day, a well-deserved one after the 900 kms run the previous day. And it was spent loitering around Airlie Beach area, trying to explore it on the Ducati Panigale 1299 and the Ninja H2.
The Airlie Beach is one of the getaways for the Great Barrier Reef. The beaches, the atmosphere, and the people in party mode reminds me of Goa back home, though with much lesser people & much wider roads.
Day 10 we started drifting away from the coastline as we took left and started riding towards the inland. Population will get thinner now and the weather will get hotter. Charters Towers, a small town on the Flinders Highway in Northern Queensland, was the destination for the day, which was just around 350 kms from Airlie Beach.
It was also the day when we suffered a major setback as we crashed our drone into a sugarcane field just a few kilometres away from the Airlie Beach area. It was heart-breaking as we were looking to use the drone extensively during this roadtrip. And this crash meant that we won’t be able to use it for quite a number of days as we’ll have to send it back to Melbourne to get it fixed and the only big city where we will be able to get it back again would be Perth as the postal services to most of the towns inland is not fast and we won’t be staying long enough in any of the towns either.
Anyways, staying in Charters Towers overnight was another experience. The town was calm and quiet, and the empty roads and the old buildings gave it the look of a movie set. The bonus was finding kangaroos jumping around in our resort itself. Finally, I managed to see a live kangaroo in Australia, otherwise all the ones I had seen till now were unfortunately the dead ones on the road.
