A Winter’s Day in Bowen, North Queensland

It’s been quite a while since I last spoke about my Queensland coast road trip, so it’s time to get back on the road. Having left Airlie Beach I decided to visit a place called Hideaway Bay. It was absolutely stunning…

This was one of the places I did blog about whilst I was on the road and you can read all about it in my post Hideaway Bay, Queensland: A Small Slice of Paradise. In that post I also mentioned that I stopped off at Bowen, but I didn’t say much about it, explaining that I’d tell you more about the place when I got back.

Now is that time.

Bowen

Map courtesy of Google.

It took me about an hour to get to Bowen from Hideaway Bay, which wasn’t too bad considering my satnav didn’t appear to have a clue where I was. It kept asking me to turn right in 300 metres, but there were no roads on the right, just cane fields.

I wasn’t going to fall for that one, 4×4 or not.

Finally though, I arrived at Bowen.

When I put my state pages online back in 2011, Bowen didn’t quite make my list of towns in Queensland with a population in excess of 10,000. It does now though, just about.

I was only in Bowen for a couple of hours at most, so I can’t tell you much about it. What I can tell you though is it was hot, 25°C, with beautiful clear blue skies. Great ‘winter’ weather.

One thing though does kind of punch you in the face about Bowen; it seemed to me that no matter which direction you drove in, you were heading for the beach.

Bowen had beaches everywhere. Well, either a beach or a rugged rocky coastline overlooking a beautiful blue ocean.

If you look at the above Google map of Bowen though, it’s easy to see why this happens. Head north, head east or head south, either way you will end up hitting the coast.

Even this main road in the town, which was spectacularly quiet, led to the coast.

No sandy beach at the end of this road though, it looked like some kind of major development has begun here. Not sure what though…

Beach safety

I did see a few croc warning signs on some of the beach areas though, here’s one of them…

But people do still swim in the sea in these parts. Here’s the Lifesavers warning sign for the day I was there…

If you can’t quite make out what it says, I can help you out with that.

• UV – Extreme
• Stinger – Risk low
• No dogs, smoking or alcohol on the beach

The most important message of all though, and one I’ve mentioned many times on this website, is swim between the flags! Crocs don’t even get a mention.

As you can see though, beach life is big in Bowen. Beaches really are everywhere. If you want to get out of Bowen, you need to go west and that’s exactly what I did as I continued my journey towards Townsville.

If you like the quiet life, and you love beaches, then Bowen is possibly the place for you. I have no idea what it’s really like to live there, but if you do, I’d really love to hear from you in the comments below.

Next, I travelled From Bowen to the Middle of Nowhere and Nothing.