Mission Beach and Palm Cove (Road Trip 2)

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June 12th 2007

Published: June 12th 2007

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Matt and Leanne

Mission Beach

This is how close we slept from the beach

Tue 12th: Mission beach
Woke up right on the beach, had a cup of tea and saw sunrise. It was nice, although still overcast. We decided to go for a snorkel as it’s not stinger season here. The water was far too cold, and so is the land and the air. So we showered and got dressed very quickly.

Being a bit bored we went for a walk up to the lookout point and along the way saw about 6 million different types of bad spiders. In Australia there are 2 poisonous ones - The Redback and the Funnel Web, unfortunately neither of us know what one looks like.
Matt did spot a great big thing though called a Golden Orb Spider, which is about 5 inches long. The male is a tiny 1 inch brown thing that crawls all over the woman spider.

Later we drove down to a housing estate they haven’t finished building yet that has loads of Black-faced wallabies running around it. Watching them was fun.

Then we went back to our campsite, and found we had 2 new neighbors. A couple of Irish lads that had just done SE Asia in 5

Mission beach

South of Cairns

weeks and gone terribly overbudget.
Matt and Owen swopped tales of woe over both missing their dogs (Matt missing Kelly, and the Irish lad missing his cocker-spaniel), at one point he tried to tell a story about tea or something and Leanne laughed at him because he kept reminding her of a character of Father Ted.

Everyone went to bed a bit worse for the wear - Boxed wine again.

Wed 13th: Innisfail, Josphine falls and Babinda boulders
Left early, and arrived at Innisfail again. McDonalds again. Then we shot straight off to Babinda.

Babinda is dubbed the rainbow town. It receives more rain than anywhere in Australia 4466 mm in a year, and 139 mm in 3 hours once. That’s a lot of rain. But that’s why it has a rainforest. So we stopped at the tourist info lady, who judging by her enthusiasm and excitement hadn’t seen many tourists, or for that matter anyone else, for quite a while.

Stopped in at Josephine Falls and then headed on our way up northwards to Babinda boulders, found the free campsite and did the walks seeing the boulders.

So then we drove to get supplies

Leanne and her prize

The best thing about mission beach - the coconuts are free - whilst Matt cooked, Leanne spent ages and ages getting the outer shell off and then opening the nut - it was worth it though!

in town and stopped to use the internet, slowest connection ever - dial-up in this day and age. Really. Then back to campsite where we camped up for the night.

Thu 14th: Cairns city and Palm Cove
Got up at 4.30am whilst still dark. Matt saw the park rangers van through the curtains which had come to re-grit the road. He was very excited about getting dressed and seeing a UFO, which wasn’t. Then he was excited about going to the zoo, which isn’t until tomorrow.
Second time round we got up at 8 or 9 and we set off, straight back to Cairns and Leanne (finally gave in to Matt nagging her) and treated herself to a new camera. A nice Sony Cybershot W30i, and then we wasted a few hours in town whilst the nice man at the camera shop charged the battery for us.

Then we drove the 50km or so, which is nothing, up to Palm Cove, just North of Cairns.
It was nice, and it had a stinger net so you could swim, but it’s too cold here.
So we just beachcombed walking the coast admiring the posh hotels and then finally