Sanctuary & A Spanish Dream

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30/11/06 - 01/12/06 Mission Beach

We picked up a hire car (Toyota Avalon GSX Mk III, no less) and headed south. The guidebook says 2634 km Cairns to Sydney, for which we’d allowed 21 days.

Our last night in Cairns we hot-footed it to Johno’s Blues Bar for some live music and although the headline act was far from blues, we did get chatty with a lady by the bar who told us that we absolutely must stop at the Sanctuary at Mission beach for a couple of days if we had time. Did we have time?... of course!

What an absolutely amazing place! High up in the rainforest, the cabins look across forest and out to the ocean. The en-suite shower had glass walls so you can enjoy the same view as the balcony and be warmed by both the hot water and the early morning sun at the same time!

The 50 acres of rainforest are both a sanctuary for humans and, more officially, for cassowaries. Early evening we went looking for Barbara, the resident matriarchal bird of the area. She wasn’t in her usual spot, but as we started heading back up the track she started to emerge from the bush right beside us. We quickly ducked down a side track, giving her the necessary space that cassowaries require and watched her stroll, rather elegantly passed.

Earlier in the day we had spotted an adult and adolescent birds crossing the road in front of us, but this was a much closer encounter!

An unusual piece of history in Australia is the ruin of a Spanish castle - Paronella Park. A young Spaniard, Jose Paronella, arrived in Australia in 1913 in order to seek his fortune and then head home to marry his betrothed. Eleven years later, he had indeed made his fortune, but on returning to Spain, found that his fiancée Matilda had already married someone else! Don’t feel too sorry for him though because allegedly he had sent no word to her in all the 11 years. No dramas! He simply married her younger sister Margarita and took her back to Australia with him instead after a years honeymoon traveling round Europe looking at castles! On arriving back in Australia in 1929 he started to build Paronella Park, inspired by his recent castle tour and memories of Catalonian castles from his youth.


He created a cottage and castle with a huge ballroom (including glitterball), a movie theatre and landscaped the surrounding 13-acre grounds, planting over 7000 trees. Using a waterfall, he built a hydroelectric plant in 1933 - 15 years before the rest of the area had electricity. He built tennis courts, diving boards over the lake and changing rooms for swimmers. Many fine balls and weddings were held in the grounds.

After 3 sweeping floods and a huge fire, only the concrete ruins of the complex now remain.

We wandered through the grounds, feeding the giant eels, turtles and fish in the lake, and spotting the micro-winged bats in the ‘tunnel of love’

Some local aboriginal descendants put on an indigenous cultural show of traditional dances and music in one corner of the park.

People rave about Paronella Park as being an amazing tourist destination - maybe we are spoilt in the UK with the amount of National Trust houses and castles seeping with history, but still Paronella Park has a peaceful ambience and romantic story of one man fulfilling his dreams. As their motto states, “The dream continues…”

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Photos

Barbara
The resident matriachal cassowary at the Sanctuary at Mission Beach

Kaori Avenue
The pattern on the bark of the trees is used by the Australian military for their camouflage colours

Aboriginal dancer
of the indiginous show, Paronella Park