Advertisement
Published: October 1st 2008
On 15 August we headed north from Townsville into FNQ (local term for Far North Queensland). Well actually I don't know where FNQ officially begins - maybe we had been there already - has been looking and feeling quite tropical for a while now ..... have put our winter clothes back under the bed and taken the blanket off the top!
Found a really nice spot to camp at Big Crystal Creek at the base of the road up to Paluma, another small town high in the mountainous hinterland. The Great Dividing Range goes right up to Torres Strait apparently, so no wonder we have spent the past couple of months driving up and down mountains along the Queensland Coast. But it does make this area a very interesting mix of rainforests, rivers, beaches, volcanic peaks and fertile plains. Anyway, Big Crystal Creek had a lovely clear deep waterhole called Paradise, very nice to swim in - lots of small fish and no crocs!
Next day we went to Innisfail, which took a direct hit from Cyclone Larry in 2006 and like other areas in FNQ, is still recovering from the devastation. Had a meat pie with mushy peas
Tropical flower (flame ginger?)
taken at Flecker Botanic Gardens, Cairnsat Cardwell on the way, a local thing, not bad at all! Found a free roadside camp at Innisfail, not flash but convenient. Discovered that the Olympic Rowing finals were on with NZ featuring in 3 races, so we shot down to find a pub to watch. This proved to be a bit of a mission - first pub had league on all 3 TVs, 2nd pub had a flickering TV which was too hard to watch, then we found the ideal pub, no Foxtel (Aussie Sky) so they had Channel 7 on, and it was pretty quiet, just a few local aboriginals sitting outside. (found out later that it was THE aboriginal pub in Innisfail). Well anyway they didn't show the Evers-Swindell Twins winning Gold cos there were no Aussies in the race! Never mind we did see the men come 4th!
Got to Cairns midday Sunday and settled into a central caravan park for a few days. Nice park with plenty of room and a TV in the communal BBQ area so we could watch the Olympics if NZ was on again. Not like the chokka block park that we first called into - we were offered
Little Crystal Creek, Paluma
Roman Arch stone bridge constructed manually in the early 1930's during the depression a tiny site right next to a large tin shed - no thanks! Well anyway there was one downside to our new park - the neighbours! Not our fellow caravanners, but the house across the road. They were really into partying in a big way, and the first night the party went on into the small hours, the 2nd night it went on until about 9.30 the next morning!
What else did we get up to in Cairns? We got the computer fixed - turned out to be minor thank goodness - spent a nice evening catching up with Tiki (ex-NZ) - visited the very lush tropical Flecker Botanic Gardens (have done the complete Queensland coast Bot Gardens set now I think) - did some shopping and "sorting out stuff" for when we go into the "outback" again, and checked out the city centre and the beach... is it a beach? The tides are so big that at low tide it is just a big mudflat! Fascinated to find a crocodile warning sign there, right on the Esplanade! We had Blu's (early) birthday dinner at a Balinese restaurant recommended by Tiki and Loma (yum) and tried out the $14
buffet at the local football club (not bad).
The highlight was a day trip on the Kuranda Scenic Railway, funnily enough to Kuranda, then back via the Skyrail. The train trip is a classic, climbing up through the rainforest covered mountains in a rather spectacular fashion, but the Skyrail is quite amazing! You hop into a gondola at Kuranda at the top of the range (400+ above sea level), and travel 7.5 kilometres back down to the coast across the World Heritage Barron Gorge National Park. A great day out. As expected, Kuranda was a tourist town, but we really enjoyed visiting Birdworld, which has a huge range of birds in a huge free-flight aviary, and Butterfly World which was the same, albeit with local species of butterflies, including the brilliant blue Ulysses butterfly.
From Cairns we went up to Mossman. Spent a whole day at Hartley's Crocodile Adventures on the way up - there was so much to see there and we had a marvellous time! They do a few really well presented shows - snakes, crocodile feeding, croc v. keeper attack show and so on.... but the best part was the boat trip on the crocodile
Hinchinbrook Islands
from the tropical coast between Townsville and Cairns infested lagoon, where the keeper entices the crocs to jump up next to the boat with a chicken carcass! We enjoyed this bit so much we did it twice! They also have other animals and birds in very good open enclosures - koalas, free flight birds, reptiles and cassowaries to name a few. Talking of cassowaries - it is a bit of a joke driving around FNQ as there are lots of road signs everywhere "Caution Cassowaries Crossing next 3 km etc" but these birds are as rare as hen's teeth! But we did see some cassoway droppings on the boardwalk at Cape Trib a bit later on in our trip - and they were huge! Think this might be as close as we are going to get to this elusive bird somehow.
Mossman is a quiet sugar cane town about 20 minutes north of Port Douglas. The caravan park was a bit odd, our site was on the edge of a large carpark - but not to worry - we visited the Mossman Gorge - more lovely rainforest and crystal clear creeks, and Port Douglas which was a very nice resort town indeed. Made a mental note that
Cairns waterfront
is it a beach? We wouldn't swim there anyway! this would be an ideal spot for a relaxing break in the middle of a NZ winter. It is quite small and although there are lots of hotel resorts, it has an easy-going low key atmosphere, with a long sweeping tropical beach on one side and river waterfront on the other. Saw a guy paddling a surfboard into shore neat the jetty, landing right in front of the crocodile warning sign - maybe he can't read....
Left Mossman and drove up the Rex Highway to Mt Carbine, which is a small settlement of 1 roadhouse, 1 pub and 1 caravan park, sited between the Tablelands and the Northern Cape York Peninsula. We had been stressing a bit about the trip up the hill with the caravan in tow but it was fine - just a long slow climb up. We had heard from fellow travellers that we could leave our caravan at Mt Carbine for free while we did our planned trip to Cooktown and down the 4WD Bloomfield Track to Cape Tribulation and back, so we arrived up there to prepare for our 3 to 4 day round trip. Well, within about an hour of arriving, we had
talked to our neighbours on each side, and decided that we would go up to Cape York! All the way to the northern tip of Australia! It had been on our itinerary in the early planning stages of our trip, but we had decided against going that far as we thought the roads might be too rough. But Mt Carbine is a great place to get information about the Cape as pretty much everyone who stays there is either heading up or heading back from the top, so once we found out that the roads were better than expectations, we thought let's give it a go! Time to put those 4WD skills we learnt in Melbourne to the test! So our short side trip is now a 2 week + expedition.
Coming up next: Our Cape York Experience!
PS Mt Carbine caravan park is a real gem of a place - run by a fantastic couple, Robert and Jennifer - as well as storing your van for free, they go out of their way to be helpful and nothing is too much trouble - for only $16 a night!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.056s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0325s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
