After leaving Atherton Tablelands we headed for Cairns and had another catchup with Geoff and Vicki. Then we spent three nights at Fishery Falls south of Cairns. Nice restful weekend and another waterfall! Also got live music and a nice Thai dinner, prepared by the park’s Thai owners, in the CP (caravan park) on Saturday night.
Enjoying a tropical breakfast in a tropical setting at Fishery Falls.The Fishery Falls waterfall. Dick can be seen in a blue shirt in the distance near the falls.On his way back from the falls. Either Dick can’t read or he has trouble following directions!
Finished off some errands in Cairns and decided to see Kuranda and return to Mareeba. For a popular tourist destination Kuranda was pretty empty. We visited the Australian Butterfly Sanctuary – no tours running because of Covid, but we saw lots of beautiful butterflies and learned some interesting butterfly facts. The Sanctuary is the largest butterfly aviary in the southern hemisphere, and was established in 1987. They raise approximately 23,000 butterflies per year in a quarantined laboratory.
So many in the sanctuary that its almost like they posed for us. There are 2000 flying free in the aviary, and their average life span is two weeks.Other butterfly facts – they fly by day (diurnal) [moths fly by night (nocturnal)], they taste with their feet, they are the second largest group of pollinators after bees, they have tetrachromatic vision (humans only have trichromatic vision) so see a larger spectrum of color, female butterflies only mate once in their life, birdwing butterflies mate for between 8-14 hours with the male hanging off the female upside down. The biggest threat to butterflies is loss of habitat as without their special host plants, they can’t breed.The Blue Ulysses was my favorite butterfly at the Sanctuary. We also saw them in the caravan park in Cairns but couldn’t get close enough to get a photo.Also visited Barron Falls – massive in the wet, but not so impressive in the dry season. The river falls 250m (800 ft) onto the narrow coastal lowlands and flows to the Coral Sea, just north of Cairns airport.
In Mareeba we found a place we liked (Trinity Plains), not crowded and they didn’t push us out at 10am. so we kept coming back. Had a good rest day; ie two loads of washing, a uke practice and we got the blog out. The next stop was an isolated station stay at Karma Waters on the Mitchell River, with Chris and Chris.
Our own private camp on a river – very scenic and great for relaxing and chatting.Dick and Christopher trying to work out how to use the sat phone!This picture sums up the tranquillity of our camp spot, and is in contrast to my pain from all the midge bites I got.
Two nights of remoteness was enough so we all went on to Cooktown and stayed in Endeavour Falls caravan park, where we got another waterfall and we also got more private camping as the place was almost deserted.
This waterfall was a 5 minute walk from the campground.It was a beautiful campground with thousands of elegant palm trees, and only us and one other there. Chris and Chris left early before we took this shot.
Since we’d been to Cooktown in 2017, there wasn’t a lot to see, but we needed to get more stuff for my bites and caught the end of the Saturday market.
Then we visited Cook’s Lookout, where James Cook and Joseph Banks stood in 1770 to survey their predicament of finding a passage through the Great Barrier Reef.
That evening we joined Geoff and Vicki at another Cooktown campground where we cooked together in the camp kitchen.
Our first meal prepared and eaten in a camp kitchen. Normally we cook in our van.We also had a fire with Geoff &Vicki, and Dick is able to take photos in the dark with his fancy iphone camera.
From Cooktown we headed to Elim Beach which was supposed to be a nice place to camp and is located beside the Coloured Sands. The campground is owned by an aboriginal elder, Eddie. It was quite crowded when we were there and not so appealing.
At Elim Beach we had a nice spot, but the picture doesn’t show how crowded it was.Decided to see the Coloured Sands on our way out, but the tide was in so we couldn’t walk or drive there. At another time, this could have been a lovely beach walk, but it was not to be, and no one told us that you needed to plan around the tides.From here we turned around and started heading south. Decided to revisit Trevanthan Falls. Must have forgotten about the terrible road in and the difficult walk to the falls but we eventually got there and it was as nice as we remembered.
After another overnight stay in our favourite park in Mareeba, we headed for Tully Gorge National Park (NP) and were faced with more “bug wars”. Gave ourselves a rest day, did a short ‘butterfly walk’ near our camp, so learned more about butterflies and saw heaps there. Drove along Tully Gorge to various lookout spots.
Tully is known for the highest rainfall in Australia, with an average of 4 meters (160 inches) of rainfall per year. It is home to a hydro electric power station and famous for its white water rafting.There was no whitewater rafting on when we were there and we think that it may be shut down due to Covid. Generally this world renowned white water rafting experience attracts up to 80,000 visitors annually.Because we hadn’t seen enough waterfalls or done enough steep climbs in the heat, we decided to do a 1 hr climb to Jourma Falls, on our way to Townsville.
Townsville felt like an abrupt return to civilisation as we stayed in a CP in the centre of town and even ate out in a crowded restaurant. As soon as we’d done our errands and phone calls, we headed out to another NP for a night.
We like being on our own in NP’s so we can play our uke’s without bothering anyone, like we are doing here in White Mountain NP.This emu with her six chicks ran along the road beside us for a while, then she decided to cross in front of us and left her chicks behind. They then ran across in front of us also. Good thing we were watching them.
Our next destination was a sculpture trail we had heard about. It was so good, we’re giving it a blog post of its own.
