Froggles Travels: Croydon, Normanton and Karumba 05.06.2016

We arrived in Croydon on the fifth of June and settled in to the small caravan park. There is not much to see and do in Croydon and we managed to travel the length and breadth of the town in less than half an hour.

We thought that in light of the fact that we were stuck here for the night and that being a Sunday we would go and have a meal at the old hotel and pub. The hotel was very old and quaint and dates back to the days when Croydon was a bustling gold mining town.

The picture below shows the entrance to a small museum dating back to the mining days. This museum was unfortunately closed being a Sunday afternoon.

The following picture is of a statue made of steel plates of a miner holding a pick

We met with some very nice folks at the pub and the two guys whose name come to mind are Skiddy who has a haulage and quarry business in town and his employee Alby (In the photo below)

Skiddy is obviously a successful business man and has his own private light plane which he uses to travel to work in Croydon from Mareeba and Alby who is his brother in law was a very pleasant chap to talk to and very informative on the topic of mining and the small town. He took us on a small walk not too far from the pub where we saw some of the old workings and claims that the old miners (mostly Chinese) had worked.

Most of these pits were being filled in at the time as the Croydon Council had deemed them to be too dangerous and a tractor slasher had almost disappeared in one of the mine shafts a couple of weeks previousl. Fortunately no one was injured.

We went to a look out and saw a rather large pit which had come to the end of its economic life recently and was now fast filling with water.

The sign above is of the butterfly open pit gold mine and is hardly legible and closed down in the nineties.

We had dinner at the pub and few cold beers and left the next morning to go to Normanton.

Normanton is a small town (which has no less than three pubs) in the middle of nowhere and boast having the largest crocodile shot by a lady. There is not a lot to do in Normanton so we only stayed there for a very short while and decided to do a day drive to Karumba. Normanton has a large Aboriginal settlement and we found the town rather depressing.

The photo below shows a replica of the largest crocodile shot in the area which was 8.63 meter long which is roughly 5.32 times longer than Shirley’s height.

We drove to Karumba which is situated 70 km from Normanton and we were very disappointed with the small fishing village. We were told to have lunch at a particular fish and chip shop called Ashes and was advised that they serve the best sea food in the world. Note on the emphasis “in the world”‘. I am a bit of a bullshitter myself but this takes the cake, we ordered prawns and a serving of fish and to my dismay we were served battered fish and prawns which were very ordinary to say the least. Obviously they would need to take a leaf out of the book from Jimmy killer prawns or Ocean Basket or even my favourite La Perinhea in South Africa.

The photos below are of Karumba and a restaurant overlooking the sea, which was pretty special and possibly the only attraction in Karumba.