The drive from Yungaburra to Cairns took about an hour through some magnificent countryside. It is a fairly winding road downhill with some great views but with a lot of traffic on the road it was difficult to find places to stop and so we didn’t get many photos. We arrived around 4.30PM and our trusty Garmin took us straight to our hotel although it isn’t difficult to find being in a prime position just off the Esplanade.

The Pacific Hotel, Cairns is a smashing hotel with efficient and friendly service and big comfortable rooms with great facilities, including excellent WiFi. A big bonus is the free parking right outside the door.

We were staying in Cairns for only one night to look around the town and to find and book a trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Everything we had read about Cairns told us that this is a fairly rowdy place at night with lots of youngsters making the most of the cheap drink available with happy hour prices, 2 for the price of 1 drinks etc, available in lots of bars. This isn’t our scene and so we decided to stay in the quieter Palm Cove, 27KM north of Cairns.

In the event we liked Cairns and ended up staying here a second night at the end of our stint in Queensland. We would leave Queensland to fly to Darwin from Cairns airport and so we booked to stay another night at the Pacific at end of our stay to give us time to return the hire car to Apex the night before.

Cairns is the most popular place for trips to the Great Barrier Reef and the marina is pretty big with a huge number of boats of all shapes and sizes advertising reef trips, fishing trips and all kinds of cruises.

North of the marina the waterfront apparently was once acre-after-acre of unattractive and unusable mudflats. Nowadays there are still some mudflats but major redevelopment in recent years has created a fantastic outdoor area facing the Esplanade with gardens and a large, dazzling saltwater lagoon, perfect for kids and grown-ups alike.

The Marina is lined with top quality restaurants and the Esplanade has plenty of pubs, bars and eateries. There are endless dive shops, travel agents and tour operators along the front and all over town with many catering to the large backpacker fraternity. There are lots of backpackers of all nationalities in Cairns and once again we were amazed at the number of youngsters travelling alone, many of them girls. Also amazing was the number of British kids working in the pubs and restaurants – everywhere we went we seemed to be served by an English person.

Whilst Cairns is a decent sized city spread out over miles, the CBD and main shopping areas are adjacent to the Esplanade/Marina and it’s pretty easy to find your way around. We called into the Tourist Information office next to the hotel for some advice on reef trips and then, after walking around for a couple of hours looking at the shops and sussing out likely eateries, we ended up at the Crown. The Crown is a sports pub selling well-priced pub grub of the Fish and Chips and T-Bone steak variety. They also sell some good bottled ales (the draft beer here is generally awful) including my  favourite Little Creatures Pale Ale which caused us to linger a while longer than planned.

We left to enjoy a good Indian meal in a nearby restaurant that we had earmarked earlier – our first curry since our visit to Tambourine Mountain! We retired nicely replete. The next day we would make the short trip up the coast to Palm Cove.

Here’s a few photos of Cairns:

On Friday 3rd July, after a leisurely breakfast at the Pacific Hotel, we checked out and headed north. However, before we got onto the Captain Cook Highway to Palm Cove, we stopped off at a diveshop to order a prescription snorkel mask. I’m as blind as a bat without my specs and obviously I wanted to make the most of our Great Barrier Reef trip. I had nearly purchased a prescription mask before we left the UK and I’m glad I didn’t; a couple of calls to shops in Cairns and I had found an expert who could sort me out.

The Guys in the shop were really friendly and helpful and within 10 minutes I had placed an order for a mask which was half the price quoted to me in the UK. The order would be ready for collection at the shop in a few days time.

Mask ordered we jumped back in the car and set off up Captain Cook Highway for the 27KM drive to Palm Cove. Given it was coming up to the weekend, there was a lot of traffic with weekenders making their way north to one or other of the resorts along the coast.

We left Mission Beach on July 2nd to continue our journey north to Cairns. This is a journey of only around 140KM going directly by the Bruce Highway coast route but we had decided to go a rather circuitous route inland to take in the Atherton Tablelands even though the weather was looking threatening.

The Tablelands cover a big area and many tourist guides suggest at least a couple of days and preferably more are needed to see it properly. There are scenic lakes, rivers and waterfalls galore and I guess you could easily spend a week there but we had decided that we didn’t want to drive day after day so thought we would visit some of the main towns and places of interest briefly en route to Cairns. There is a lot of sugar cane, bananas and other fruit grown in these parts so much of the journey is plantation after plantation. Even so it’s a nice trip.

First stop of the day was Mena Creek and Paronella Park.

Paronella Park was built in the 1930s by José Paronella, a Spanish immigrant. José was a self-made man and built facilities, including tennis courts and a cinema and a ballroom in buildings inspired by Spanish castles, to provide entertainment for the public. Jose died in 1948 and since then a fire, a cyclone and several floods have badly damaged the park and buildings.

The park changed owners several times until, in 1993, it was bought by the present owners who have been restoring it to what is now a popular tourist attraction.

There is an interesting story about Jose’s life and the park too long to repeat here – check out Paronella Park on Wikipedia. We didn’t have time to do the tour and it wasn’t a great day weather-wise anyway so we took a few snaps and moved on.

Next stop after Petronella was Millaa Millaa, a small town (population circa 400) at the centre of an area of beautiful National Parks. The town is tiny and consists of a very few oldish timber buildings which bring to mind a cowboy town. The most interesting, for those with time to kill, is the Eacham Museum containing a collection of items from bygone days most of which are not especially old but do bring back memories – old domestic appliances, on old TV and an old telephone switchboard amongst other bits and bobs – including a pot stick!

Millaa Millaa’s main attraction is Millaa Millaa Falls, a waterfall a short distance away and part of a famous Waterfall Circuit. The waterfall is 18M high and so not particularly high in a league table of waterfall heights but still impressive and it’s a nice spot in an area with apparently some really good walking tracks of varying degrees of difficulty. Unfortunately time precluded tackling the walks or visiting any of the other falls although we did call by at Malanda Falls near the town of Malanda but didn’t find it especially impressive.

By the time we had visited the waterfall we were already behind schedule and decided to make just one more call en-route to Cairns. We would stop at the small heritage village of Yungaburra but not before we had visited Curtain Fig National Park.

We had never heard of Curtain Fig National Park and hadn’t spotted it on any map but we saw  a National Park sign on our way to Yungaburra and, as it was only a few KM off our route, we decided to go and investigate. This has to be one of the smallest National Parks in the world and has this status to protect an area of threatened rainforest containing a 500 year old, 50M tall Curtain Fig tree with a curtain of aerial routes falling from the top of the tree to the bottom.

It’s quite an awesome tree and although it’s admittedly not the most exciting of  tourist attractions, it does add to the rich tapestry of the area and gets 4.5 out of 5 by Tripadvisor reviewers.

Yungaburra is a nice little town just south of the mighty Lake Tinaroo, a huge dam popular for fishers and watersports enthusiasts. This is another cowboy town consisting of a hotel and a collection of shops and eateries housed in some lovely timber buildings going back to early 1900s. There isn’t a huge amount to see here but it’s a pleasant spot. We didn’t linger but spent a pleasant hour or so and then got back in the car to head for Cairns.

Back on the road north….

We caught a 9.55 am return ferry back to Townsville from Magnetic Island on Thursday June 25th and were soon back on the Bruce Highway heading North for Mission Beach.

Tropical North Queensland is a huge sugar cane growing area and the Bruce Highway is lined with mile after mile of sugar cane fields. These big plantations are serviced by light, narrow-gauge trains that connect the fields to mills which feature along the coastal strip as far north as Mossman. The trains are used to take the harvested cane to the mills for processing and the tracks cut through the fields of cane and across the main highways. At harvest time these operations apparently cause frequent delays for travellers using the Bruce Highway but thankfully we weren’t travelling during the harvest.

The road travels more or less north along the coast, then inland through the small town of Ingham and then back along the coast. The scenery here is wonderful with the Hinchinbrook Range on one side of the road with the mountainous Hinchinbrook Island just off the coast separated from the mainland by the Hinchinbrook Channel, a narrow strip of water.

We stopped for lunch at Cardwell, a small seaside town, which didn’t look particularly exciting except that it is located in such a beautiful area. This is the first time we came across regular signs warnings against swimming due to crocodiles and stingers (Box Jellyfish).

Like much of the Queensland Coast there is a corridor of coastal wetlands comprising mudflats, mangrove, saltmarsh or billabongs and in some places these are used for crop irrigation. These areas help contain coastal erosion and even though they might not all be wet all of the year, they do provide a coastal corridor for a diverse range of plants and animals, including some endangered ones such as the dugong and leatherhead turtle. There are many wetland walking tracks along and through this coastal strip and the unbelievably varied fauna and flora make these some of the best walking we have done so far.

Continuing our drive north we passed by a number of signs leading to swimming holes and waterfalls, including the Murray Falls, before driving by the small town of Tully. Tully is an inland town with a sugar mill complete with a giant chimney but banana plantations are also a major feature here; this is Australia’s main banana growing region. It also has the reputation of being the wettest place in Australia with an annual average of over 4M and a record 7.2M recorded in 1950. Another half hour or so after Tully we arrived at Mission Beach.

Mission Beach

Mission Beach is a natural mid-way point between Townsville and Cairns in the Wet Tropics of North Queensland which are World Heritage Listed and uniquely, run parallel to another World Heritage site, The Great Barrier Reef.

The town is actually made up of four villages linked by 14 Kilometres of wide, golden beach. The villages are, from south to north, South Mission Beach, Wongaling Beach, Mission Beach and Bingil Bay. This is a thriving tourist area but because it is spread out over a long coast it doesn’t seem very busy at all. It is quite a well-to-do area and there is a nice mix of restaurants of all persuasions from everyday to high-end. Trendy boutiques and art galleries all set against lush tropical rainforest. There is a very nice and friendly small town atmosphere in each of the villages.

This area forms part of the Cassowary Coast and there are road signs everywhere urging careful driving due to the presence of these famous flightless big birds. Ad-hoc signs at the roadside are frequently seen warning of “recent crossing here” but sadly we didn’t see one during our stay.

We had chosen to stay at Shores on Wongaling Beach, a very nice resort of only 5 or 6 chalets run by a South African couple. The resort stands in the midst of a small area of rainforest 50 metres or so back from the beach and each of the bungalows sits in its own area, private and unseen from the others, screened off by tropical trees and shrubs. There is a nice shaded and private outside dining area with comfy bench seats, sun beds and a very conveniently positioned private BBQ area with a great electric BBQ. It’s done in a Balianes style and all very attractive and only steps from a small but adequate swimming pool.

The top right photo below shows a green ant nest. Green ants can be eaten alive as bush tucker but their main use to aborigines is as a cough and cold cure. The ants are crushed and taken as a drink with water or inhaled like a vapour rub.

Apart from the usual walking, the one thing we did want to do here was to visit Dunk Island which is just off shore and apparently has some lovely walks and very good snorkelling. Neither of us had ever snorkelled but we were keen to learn and we had found an outfit happy to take out a couple of novices. After all we would shortly be visiting Cairns – the major jump off for the Great Barrier Reef – and we could hardly go there and not snorkel. Not only that but many of the places we plan to visit in Asia are also renowned snorkel and diving areas and so we really need to be able to do it.

We were warmly welcomed at the Shores by the owners Mike, a retired airline pilot and his wife Marie who thanked us for bringing good weather – we arrived in sunshine but June 2015 had been one of the wettest ever. Unfortunately the good weather wasn’t to last. We enjoyed a couple of warm sunny days with the rest giving us various degrees of dampness including a day and night solid of seriously heavy tropical rain when we just couldn’t get out of the house.

Throughout our week here, even on the warm and sunny days, the sea was rough with breakers and snorkelling trips were postponed. Very disappointing but there will be many more opportunities. Weather aside we had a great week at Mission Beach. There is a really good Woolworths Supermarket and bottle shop and so apart from our first night when we had pizza at Millers Beach Bar and Grill, we were able to make the most of the BBQ and self cater with salads and BBQ steaks and burgers and the like – much nicer than eating out and also wallet friendly.

Whilst snorkelling wasn’t do-able this week, we did manage some good walks. Walking South, we walked a round trip of around 15km down to Lovers Beach on the Kennedy Track.

A few snaps from our walk south to the Kennedy track:

Going North, we did a similar length walk to Clump Point Jetty and with better weather enjoyed a picnic lunch.

As lovely as Mission Beach is, after a week of mostly poor weather we were ready to move on. Hopefully the weather will improve as we move further North.

Magnetic Island

Magnetic Island in Tropical North Queensland sits in the Great Barrier Reef National Park and  is unique in that it is an offshore suburb of Townsville 8km from the mainland.

The island is triangular shaped and quite small at 52 sq miles with over half of it comprising National Park. It is 7 miles wide at its widest point and has 25 miles of coastline. Its highest point is Mount Cook at 497 m above sea level.

The name of the island came about  because of an apparent magnetic effect on the ship’s compass of Captain Cook as he passed the island when sailing up the east coast of Australia in 1770. People have since explored the island with various instruments to try to establish what caused the effect that Cook reported but nothing has been discovered. The local name for the island is Maggie Island.

A sealed road follows the East Coast but there are no roads on the West coast nor much of the north coast except in the Horseshoe Bay area which is probably the most developed area on the island with perhaps 10 or so restaurants, a pub, water sports shops and a few gift shops and the like. Unlike Fraser Island, most of the roads are sealed and so we were able to take our car over to the island.

This is a World Heritage listed island with a landscape of unspoilt natural beauty. The island is hilly with massive boulders everywhere and rocky headlands creating secluded beaches which are some of the best in North Queensland. Some beaches are easily accessible by road, other more secluded ones are only accessible by sea or by foot. A fabulous place.

Over half of the Island is National Park with tall Hoop pines, eucalyptus forests and small areas of rainforest. The west coast is largely tidal wetlands and mangrove with saltwater swamps.      There is an abundance of wild life with koalas, rock wallabies, possum and bats together with a huge variety of birds – curlew are everywhere as are bush turkeys, parrots and cockatoos.

There is a resident population of around 2,500 some of whom commute to Townsville for work. We were astounded at this number of residents but the population and the holidaymakers are thinly spread out mostly along the East coast and so it never seems too busy even in high season.

We spent 5 nights on the island staying at Arcadia Motel on Geoffrey Bay in Arcadia village. The Motel is rather confusingly adjacent to a hotel of the same name in the same complex and there is also a pub with a decent bistro, bottle shop, Italian restaurant and part time (twice a week) Asian restaurant. A top place!

The motel was fairly quiet at the time of our visit and the lovely owner upgraded us to a great upper floor family sized unit at the front overlooking the swimming pool and the beach on Geoffrey Bay. The beach here is lovely but within a few hundred meters around the corner but still in Arcadia is the stunning Alma Beach.

Arcadia Motel

Alma Beach nearby

Our first full day here was spent doing not very much other than a walk around the village and a very nice Sunday roast lunch at Gilligan’s Restaurant Bar nearby.

Ann was still struggling to walk any distance but it was quite a dull day and we spent the rest of it catching up on paperwork.

On our second morning here we completed the Forts Walk, an easy 4km walk up to some WW2 gun placements and look-outs. These fortifications were part of a series of defenses built along the coast to defend against Japanese invasion. There was an American base at Townsville and the town was actually bombed on three occasions but apparently the guns at Magnetic were never fired. There are great 360 degree views to be had from the look out here and it’s a very popular walk.

Rain had threatened as we started the walk but we pressed on and were happy that we did as we saw our first koala bear with baby whilst walking up to the fort albeit they were so high up in a shady tree that we couldn’t get any good photos.

The Forts Walk

Great Views from the look out post

And an unexpected bonus of spotting a koala with baby (albeit we couldn’t get great photos).

After finishing the walk we drove down to Horseshoe Bay and enjoyed a lunch of fish at the Marlin Bar which is in a great position across the road from the beach with views of the wide bay and the boats on the water. Lunch was good but just as we were finishing the heavens opened and there was a torrential downpour which happily we could sit and watch as although we had a pavement table, we were sheltered from the sun and now the rain by an overhead canopy.

Lunch over we drove back to Arcadia but before returning to the hotel we stopped off at an old disused ferry jetty at the northern corner of Geoffrey Bay where we were told me might see rock wallabies. Sure enough we found half a dozen wallabies sipping water from puddles on the ground left following the heavy rain. It seems a local resident feeds the animals and so they turn up each day for easy pickings.

Rock wallabies

Our next day started with a drive back to Horseshoe Bay and then a half hour walk over a steep hill through some fantastic boulder strewn forest to the lovely Balding Bay. This turned out to be a nudist beach but not surprisingly, as is often the case, the only nudists to be seen were the usual type namely middle aged males – much to Peter’s disappointment!

This was a really good walk to a lovely spot and we spent a couple of hours lounging on the beach -unbelievably this was the first time on this entire trip that we had actually sat down and enjoyed a beach for more than an hour.

After a picnic lunch we decided to go back to Horseshoe Bay for more sunbathing and en route came across two small koalas one of which posed for photographs – we felt very lucky to see these, a second sighting in 2 days!

Horseshoe Bay

Our last day ,Wednesday ,was spent in similar fashion walking in the morning, this time to Arthur and Florence beaches, followed by a picnic lunch and then beach and fishing in the afternoon at Horseshoe. Wildlife spotted today was a sole rock wallaby on the beach at Horseshoe Bay.

Arthur Bay

Florence Bay

We got back to the motel for a quick shower and then had a very good Indonesian meal at the pub before an early night in readiness for the next leg of our trip.

We left Maggie Island on Thursday 25th June quite sad after a fantastic week despite mixed weather but nevertheless looking forward to our next port of call, Mission Beach.

Townsville is the largest city in North Queensland and the launch pad for Magnetic Island which is where we were heading next after Airlie Beach. Not sure too many travellers bother to stay here but we had read that it’s a place visiting for its own sake and so we decided to give it a try and stay a couple of nights before visiting the Island.

We arrived around 1PM on June 18 after a short drive from Airlie Beach. Our Motel was in an elevated position, albeit with no views, overlooked by Castle Hill which gives great views of the town, the coast and Magnetic Island.

We booked into the Summit Motel, dropped our bags and wandered into town taking the circuitous route taking in the Strand which is the main seafront promenade and Trip Adviser’s Number 1 of things to do in Townsville – probably says a lot!

The waterfront is indeed very nice with a lovely beach lined with manicured parks and gardens. The gardens were busy with families with kids but the beach itself was strangely deserted. We discovered later from TV news was because there is currently a four metre crocodile living in the bay which the authorities are struggling to capture and remove. The gardens include play areas for the kids and a public swimming pool but best of all for kids is a great little water park (free of charge.) There is also a quieter but impressive ANZAC Memorial Park.

It was 3PM by the time we reached the town proper and most of the restaurants had shut up shop for the afternoon. We were getting hungry and a bit desperate but luckily we came across the Brewery. The Brewery is a large pub formerly a post office with a reputation for good food and with its own micro-brewery which brews all the beer sold in the place – very drinkable too! After a couple of drinks and some lunch, we continued our walk around town and then wandered back to the Motel stopping at Woollies en route to buy some cheese and wine for supper.

The next morning was spent at Reef HQ. This is a reef aquarium which is the largest of it’s kind anywhere comprising a massive tank containing living corals and creatures that live on the Great Barrier Reef including a variety of sharks and rays and a multitude of other fish and sea critters. The natural conditions in the main tank are maintained by a wave machine which simulates the ebb and flow of the ocean. There are many, many other smaller tanks and other great exhibits and touch tanks with starfish and the like which are excellent for small and big kids. One could easily spend a full day here and this really ought to be the town’s number one attraction except that the place seems slightly run down and in need of some TLC and probably investment.

After our Reef visit, we ventured over the river, Ross Creek, that snakes around the town to South Townsville and the Palmer Street area which we found is much more touristy. This area contains most of the town’s bars and eateries but although this was Friday lunchtime many of the places were shut – as were many of the shops in town. This is a phenomenon we continue to see and be bemused by in this part of the world.

After a wander back and forth we made our choice and enjoyed a pleasant lunch in a steak house before Ann left me for a couple of hours whilst she visited a hairdresser! I spent my time usefully completing some reading up on our forthcoming travels whilst at the same time putting a few more of the Brewery’s products to the test. Not such a bad afternoon.

Townsville is quite a big sprawling town and much bigger than we expected. It’s pleasant enough with some nice art deco buildings but some areas are not quite so smart – in particular there are a couple of blocks of older buildings on Flinders Street occupied by nightclubs, restaurants, pubs and takeaways badly in need of demolishing or better still re-developing as the structures themselves have some architectural character. Also, at the time of our visit quite a big block on the main shopping area of Flinders Street was under re-construction and so perhaps we didn’t see it at its best. It’s also fair to say there are a number of attractions, museums, wild life sanctuaries and water based sports and trips outside the town that are available that we didn’t visit or partake in and so others might well take a very different view of the place.

The next morning, Saturday June 20th, we caught a morning ferry to Magnetic Island.