How to see northwest Queensland in one day

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Friday, 18th April 2008,
Well, we had scheduled a drive trip to the Great Barrier Reef today but when we checked with the dive guide, the trip was canceled “due to high wind”. It has been windy this week but I believe the trip was canceled due to low bookings. The boat holds 150 people and this is the off session. Anyway, we can all this way only to miss out on the one thing we both wanted to do so very much. (the boat did go out on Saturday but we had to leave in order to ensure we met with the Church in Perth on Sunday).

Plan ‘B’ was to hire a car and drive to Cairns (pronounced Cans). We got up early, hurried to return Rocko and make the 8:25 ferry. We hopped a cab to the airport where we hired a car and set off on a long day of sightseeing. It’s amazing how quickly the climate changed from Dry Tropics to Tropical Rain Forest. We drove north on the Bruce Highway 1 through sugar cane fields. Turns out that this area is a very large producer of sugar being shipped out through the port of Townsville.

As we drove, we noticed these very narrow railroad tracks that we kept crossing. These are rails used to harvest the cane. The cane fields vary in their level of growth with some fields being harvested. Best we could guess is that the cane grows year round and is planted in stages in order to facilitate a continuous harvest.

Next we encountered palm looking trees with large plastic bags hanging on them. Turns out they were banana trees. They were planted in rows on large fields. Looks like the bags were to keep birds off etc. We turned west at Innsfail and headed up into the mountains. We stopped at three waterfalls, each more impressive than the last. The impressive thought to us was that this area was once entirely covered with tropical rain forest. Settlers had cleared this forest to grow grass for farming. We saw many dairy farms in the area. The grass looks to grow so fast that the livestock can’t eat it fast enough.

We turned south into an area called the Tablelands. This is a high mountain valley with beautiful rolling landscape surrounded by gorgeous mountains covered in rain forests. The area has a lake, wineries, orchards etc. We turned east towards Cairns and stopped at the Barron River Gorge where there is an impressive water fall. This time of year the water flow is low but we saw post cards with a raging river flowing over the falls.

Evening was falling so we headed down the mountain to Cairns. The drop in elevation was swift and dramatic. I have been on steep crocked roads before but this one topped them all. We stopped in Cairns to have a look around on the water front an do some souvenir shopping. Once we got back to the car, we realized we didn’t leave much time to drive the almost 400Km back to Townsville to make the last ferry to Magnetic Island at 12:30 AM. We hit the road making only one stop at McDonalds in Innsfail for coffee and a bio break. We made the ferry with about 30 min. to spare. We had been gone from our room for 16 hours. Needless to say, failing asleep was not a difficult thing.

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