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Published: August 29th 2015
We camped the previous night near Murray Falls so we took the opportunity of visiting the waterfall first thing in the morning. It's a little way off the highway (and the last few kilometres are gravel) but it sounded like a nice place to see. Access is restricted but there are huge pools where the cascading water has eroded the rocks to make a few swimming pools (although they would be very dangerous in the wet).
We took some photos and drove back to the highway. We went the other side of the highway and down to the beach (at Hinchinbrrok Channel). A really fabulous location although it was misty and a storm threatened out on the water. Further down the road we came across another vehicle parked in a ditch. Seems the locals have difficulty controlling their vehicles in the wet. This was the second vehicle parked in a ditch that we had seen in two days.
Some time later we came across a sign to Wallaman Falls. Now these falls are Australia's longest single drop waterfall (268 metres) and so we couldn't pass by without checking them out.
They were about 50 kilometres off the highway
but we had no plan that we needed to keep to so off we went. We drove through lots of sugarcane country and then came to the base of the mountain range where another sign said, "road not suitable for caravans or trucks". Lucky we are a bus, so on we pushed. Now the road was heading up and the gradient was increasing. Hairpin bends were a regular feature but luckily there was little traffic. We stopped halfway up for some lunch and were joined by five young people in a van. They were visiting Australia from Nice, France.
We got to to the top and parked the bus and went to the Falls Lookout. This is a fabulous view and we snapped some more photos. We said hello to the nice people from Nice and compared photos. There was another lookout (down to the Gorge) and also a walk to the base of the falls but this would take 2-3 hours. We walked to the Gorge Lookout and then we decided to continue on to the base of the falls. We had to rush to make sure we got down and back before the light started to fail.
When we got to the bottom of the falls, the young people from France were still there so we took photos of them and vice versa. It is really "nice" to see young people from other countries here enjoying themselves.
We got back to the bus and checked out the local campground but decided to head off the mountain while it was still light. We got half way down and came across this small parking bay that had a view all the way to Hinchinbrook Island, which was stunning. We pulled in there for the night.
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