2020 Mystery Tour

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.

After spending one night in the Atherton Tablelands three years ago, we decided to have a real good look around and almost three weeks later we are still here. Its been a lovely area to explore with so much variety in a compact area and extremely well set up for visitors with lots of great places to camp or stay. Its known for agriculture and we think you’d be hard pressed to find another area in Australia that produces the following: fruit and veg, dairy, nuts, tropical fruits, beef, honey, wine, liquors, whiskey, tea, coffee and of course, chocolate!

We’ve done heaps of walks, camped in 8 different campsites and visited lots of interesting places -including some on a food theme (ie two dairies, an ice creamery, coffee, chocolate and a tea plantation), some man-made sights (gems and history) and amazing nature (plants, animals, hot springs and waterfalls) . The photos below tell the story.

Looking for tree kangaroos as we walked along the river at Bonadio campsite, our first campsite. The area had a small patch of Mabi forest; these are critically endangered and only found in the Atherton Tablelands or one other place in Aus. Tree kangaroos live in these forests. I also looked for platypus in the river-to no avail on both accounts.

Genazanno Retreat, a lovely camp spot on Lake Tinaroo, and no one else around. Lake Tinaroo is a massive man-made lake of 86,500 acres with 200 km of shoreline.

On our 5 km walk around Lake Barrine, we looked up at these twin Bull Kauri’s. These rainforest giants are over 45 m(50 yards) tall and more than 6 m (20 feet) in girth. They are the largest of Australia’s 38 conifer(pines) species and are restricted to a small area on the Atherton Tablelands. Kauris mature at 50 years and these are estimated to be over 1000 years old.

There were also lots of fig trees like this along the rainforest walk around the lake. It was a stunning walk.

Looking down on Lake Barrine after our walk around it. Its an ancient crater lake formed 12,000 years ago by violent volcanic eruptions. No streams flow in or out of the lake.

From there we went to see ‘The Cathedral Fig Tree’. The Cathedral Fig Tree is a 500 year old green fig, aka a strangler fig. This one was named for the stately, cathedral-like formation of the roots. It starts life in the forest canopy when a seed is dropped onto a branch by a bat or bird. As it grows it sends out long, cable-like roots; some descend to the ground and others encircle the host tree, which eventually dies.

Having me in the photo shows the relative size of the tree. The crown extends over 2000 square metres (2 Olympic swimming pools) and scientists estimate the full load of leaves at 1000 kg (weight of a small car).

In Yungaburra, which is a lovely, quaint village, we did the Peterson Creek 4 km walking track, along a wildlife corridor replanted by volunteers in 1998 and still maintained by volunteers. Got a stiff neck from trying to see a tree kangaroo there (no luck).

We did see 3 platypus in the creek, without even looking too hard, and we saw lots of turtles.

THE HUNT FOR A TREE KANGAROO CONTINUES – We’d heard that they have two tree kangaroos at the Nerada Tea Plantation, so we headed off. On the drive through some back roads, an oncoming car stopped us and said there was a tree kangaroo on the road.

Here is ‘our own in the wild’ tree kangaroo!!!! SO EXCITING TO SEE, especially as I had never heard of them before.

We caught up to him as he was running along the road and I got out just as he was crossing the road. He didn’t seem afraid of me and then even started walking towards me. I backed up as I didn’t want to be mistaken for a tree!

Here is a close up, from when he stopped and had a good look at me. He is a Lumholz’s Tree-kangaroo, only found in FNQ (far north Queensland), from Daintree River to Herbert River gorge, most common in rainforest fragments in the Atherton Tablelands. I was surprised at how excited I got seeing this guy close up in the wild.

MORE INFO ON TREE-KANGAROOS – Although aboriginal people knew them all along, they were first found by a Norwegian naturalist, Lumholz in 1882. Size – 0.5 m tall, av weight 7kg and a long tail (600-700mm). They are not nocturnal so active day and night (cathemeral), and they are the only kangaroos that can “walk” or move each foot independently forwards and backwards bipedal (which is up on backlegs and helps when climbing). After habitat loss, the biggest threats to them are being hit by cars or killed by dogs when moving on the ground between trees or forests.

The only other species of tree-kangaroo in Aus is called Bennetts Tree Kangaroo and it lives from the Daintree to Cooktown and is larger. There are 14 other species in PNG (Papua New Guinea). After the excitement of our personal sighting, we continued on to the Nerada Tea plantation and saw one of their ‘almost pet‘ ones very high up in a tree near the cafe. All we could see was the back of him – no excitement there! We missed out on the tour of the tea plantation (Nerada is the largest supplier of tea in Aus) so continued on to Gallo Dairyland and indulged in extravagant cheese, chocolate, and ice cream purchases.

Lake Eacham is another crater lake, formed 10,000 years ago. It is a popular swimming hole, in spite of the existence of a resident freshwater croc. We did the 3 km rainforest walk around the lake.

Dinner Falls feature on the top 10 Waterfall lists so we dd the 1.3 km walk to check them out.

Mt Hypipamee Crater, an impressive volcanic pipe, is close to the falls so we had another look at it.

Decided to spend the weekend at Innot Hot Springs and camped by a billabong with lots of birdlife.

We enjoyed a couple of sessions in the hot spring pools in the park, but they were not inspiring to photograph. However, the local pub was!

This band have played in that pub every Saturday night for the last 10 years. We enjoyed dinner and their music. First live music we have seen for months!

Its hard not to visit waterfalls when travelling in the Tablelands.We’d seen 5 on our visit in 2017 so checked out different ones this time and saw 3 in one day -Pepina, Souita and Mungalli Falls [the highest waterfall in the Tablelands and pictured here]

Lunch at Mungalli Creek Biodynamic Dairy where we stocked up with yogurt, milk and cheesecake!

SOCIALIZING IN THE TABLELANDS – Even though there is less socializing happening during these times, we seem to still meet fellow travellers and enjoy sharing stories, playing ukes, and playing games. Ran into fellow Explorer owners, Jeff and Sue, in a Herbeton car park, had drinks with the neighbors, Wendy & Colin, in a Caravan Park (CP) on Lake Tinaroo, had a great uke playing session with Shelley in a Mareeba CP and then enjoyed catching up with Geoff & Vicki and learning a new game, Sequence, with them.

The Historic Village at Herbeton is the largest privately owned historic village in Aus and its set within 16 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds. Its a living museum experience and has been laid out to resemble a tin mining town with a garage, newspaper office, butchers, chemist, grocery store, frock salon, toy shop, coach house, tractor shed, radio store and tool shed; all stocked with period wares.

In 2008 the owners, Craig and Connie Kimberley were on a driving holiday and spotted the closed attraction. Five months later, they owned it and undertook extensive restoration and repair projects to reflect everyday life in FNQ as it was from the 1880’s onwards.