Water, Water Everywhere

Greetings from a very wet Queensland. Most of you probably followed all the floods on the news. Lots of deaths, people being evacuated, 73000 people without electricity, and according to the reports, the worst is yet to come. The flash floods have now hit major cities like Brisbane, and they might be used to heat and drought, but since 1974 not to floods. To give all you people from Europe some idea of the scale of the chaos is here from the Guardian:

Queensland has been in the grip of floods – blamed on a La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific – for several weeks, and an area the size of France and Germany has been affected

Meanwhile, up here in Burrum Heads it's still ok. We have a lot of rain, but no floods. All around us (Bundaberg and Rockhampton to the north, Maryborough and Brisbane to the south) all the floods have hit, but up here at the coast we're still quite safe. (Look for interactive map here)

What we notice here is that we've been cut off from the rest of the country. All the roads have been flooded and there is almost no way in or out of the village. There is no mail untill at least monday, no newspapers, and food is on ration. You're only allowed one loaf of bread and one packet of eggs each, for instance. People are stocking up food, for the end is not in sight.

In between the rains, we have had sunny days as well. Last Saturday we went on a little trip to the dam around here. It was a massive sight to see. The lake was overflowing and the dam was almost not able to hold the water. The forest surrounding it was overflowing as well (see the top picture of this post.)
The bumpy trip up there (the roads are not as good as they used to be) was very interesting as well. Hundreds of thousands of trees, almost black in color, being used for the logging industry. The trees are almost black because of former forest fires, but they seem to have recovered quite well.

After that we went to the (now unreachable) town of Maryborough. A real interesting town to see. Buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century, some well preserved, others a little less. I was not able to take a lot of pictures for we had to leave pretty fast when the storms were about to hit, but I'll definately head over there when the weather gets better.
Well, that's about it for now. We will be safe aound here, although right now, another big storm has just started and it's raining big time again.