Oh my gosh it is cold in New Zealand. Well, winter has definitely set in and coming from the tropics it is quite a shock to the system. Yesterday I was lying by the lagoon in Cairns in my bikini smothered in suncream and today I wore a scarf out and was still cold. Small small world. But I shall get to New Zealand in a bit, but first need to finish off our Queensland journey…
Last post I left us just outside Townsville where we spent the night listening to turkeys and wallabies rustle around in the undergrowth. From there we spent the morning in Townsville catching up with internet admin and booking flights etc etc yawn yawn before catching the passenger ferry over to Magnetic Island. The island is only 8km from the mainland but about 50 years behind! It has a small permanent population residing in 4 or 5 beachside towns and the rest of the island is inhabited with eucalyptus forest and wild creatures.
We stayed in the YHA on the island which comes with it’s own mini wildlife park with a baby wallaby, koalas, cockatoos and crocodiles. We spent the afternoon exploring around the hostel and of course had some beach time at Horseshoe Bay.
There’s not much going on around Horseshoe Bay of an evening so luckily the hostel has it’s own bar and it was trivia night! We came a reasonable 4th being that there was only 2 of us, and now we know all the countries in the world beginning with L.
As part of the mini wildlife park, the hostel hosts a champagne bushtucker brunch with the koalas each day and we couldn’t turn that one down. We toasted bread over a fire, ate raw honeycomb and a few other random bush foods whilst the keepers brought round a baby crocodile (Barbie) and a snake for us to touch. After brekkie we had our meeting with Barney the Koala and got to stroke his soft fuzzy fur and learn all about koalas from his keeper.
Barney is an old codger and is a bit fed up of the tourists gawping at him now:
Magnetic Island is one of the best places to spot wild koalas – still quite tricky to spot as they don’t really move all that much and just appear as a motionless grey blob in a tree. But we did see a couple on our mammoth (in the heat) walk from the hostel up to old ruined WWII forts. We could have just got the bus but the distances on the map didn’t look too far… It was a sweltering few hours tramping in the bush wearing flip flops (shoes in van on mainland oops) with not enough water. Gatorade and a cheeky dip in the sea were well needed when we reached Alma Bay.
We headed back on the ferry that afternoon after a very pleasant twenty four hours on the island. We made it a couple more hours up the coast before dark, laundry and showers called us into a campsite just off the highway. We were the main attraction that night as we were at least 40 years under the average age of the other campsite residents… we were greeted with ‘Hello young people!’ in the morning by a lovely 75 yr old man on his winter caravan trip with his wife :-)
We set off early to make it to the Atherton Tablelands that aftrenoon and stopped for lunch at Mission Beach – a beautiful long sandy beach popular with the backpackers wanting to chuck themselves out of planes…
We drove a convoluted wiggly route through the Tablelands – evidence of old volcanic activity which has resulted in a high plateau covered in farmland and sprinkled with waterfalls and lakes. The place is beatiful but I was driving so haven’t got any pics I’m afriad. We stopped the night at Lake Tinaroo – cue the mossies appearing in droves at dusk. We drove the scenic route out of the Tablelands heading through some almost proper outback for 50km or so – there were even termite mounds. We stopped for a break at Mossman Gorge which is a nice swimming spot but the water was a bit too chilly for us – some crazy British backpackers were lolling around quite happily though! We continued North across the Daintree River cable ferry to Cape Tribulation. This is one of the few places in the world where rainforest meets beach and is spectacular but the light was a bit tricky to get decent shots.
We spent an afternoon and a morning exploring the Cape – visiting a mangrove boardwalk and an ice-cream company and watching out for stray carrowaries – odd emu like colourful birds only found in Northern Queensland and Papua New Guinea. We didn’t see one. Saw a crocodile though on the banks of the river and also saw the biggest non-tarantula spiders ever – it was bigger than the photo shows! ugh
From Cape Trib we headed south (as the sealed road runs out) back down to Port Douglas to spend an afternoon louging on the beach and pootling around the toursity shops. It’s a lovely little seaside town and we had a few glasses of wine whilst listening to some local bands play – big night out for us as we usually watch tv on the laptop in the van!
We continued south to the Cairns area and spent our last van night in a very out of the way NP campsite near Kuranda, about 30km from Cairns. We’d driven another 2700km of Aus sie roads which takes us up to over 8000km in total for our 3 roadtrips. That is a lot of driving done and sweets eaten!
Here’s a map of our Queensland trip:
We spent our last day sorting our van out and swimming in the lagoon (until it rained darn it) and then had an early last Australian night as we had to be up at 4am to catch our NZ flight :-(
So we’ve now said goodbye to Australia for a wee while but we will be back sometime soon… Now for the Kiwi adventures to begin…
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