QLD - Atherton & Waterfall Circuit

Once leaving the camping area we stopped off at a few more rain forest walks. All of these were lovely and at one stop we just couldn’t help but sit down on a bench for about 10 minutes just listening to the birds chirping in the trees (almost deafening). We recorded the noise, and when we played it back, the birds started up again thinking that we were calling them ;)

We then decided to have lunch, and we were so lucky that at the bench we picked we heard some rustling in the bushes. So we stopped to have a closer look and discovered that there was a Cassowary bird with it’s two chicks!! This bird is almost like an Ostrich but it has blue and red colouring on its head and neck. It is also a very rare bird to see (not to mention with chicks) and is on the endangered species list. This is one of the only places in the world to see these birds, and many people come here just to see them and go away empty handed.

After this sighting we headed off, obviously having to stop off and have some home made ice-cream on the way, and trying the weird and wonderful flavours such as passion fruit, aniseed, black capote…

Once back over the Daintree river we headed on through the mountains and stopped off in Atherton to see a 500 year old fig tree. Fig trees are amazing; they start off just being a seed placed amongst the branches of a rival species. Given time the seed then grows into a climber that ends up wrapping itself around the non-fig tree and feeds off it. Once it’s done with the first tree it spreads itself to another and another as the trees fall over and die, and ends up having a curtain look to it…

We also stopped off at Lake Eacham, which is a very beautiful lake where you can watch the turtles and fish swimming. You can see that this place is the local hang out after school, with the kids swimming and diving into the lake and just enjoying the summer. It was full of chavs though ;)

Our visit to the Red Cedar tree was a bit disappointing, as the recent cyclone had blown it over - although we could still see how huge it was.

Once again Marc waking Evelyn up the next morning, this time to some wallabies bouncing around by the river just outside our tent, real nice surprise. It’s like every morning there is something new to be wowed by…

Our journey today took us to the Innot Hot Springs, where we took a dip in the pools and tested the water from the local spring river - we were amazed to find the river being really hot as the spring it originates from is 76 degrees celsius!!

After “cooling” down at the hot springs we drove on to see some waterfalls, our favourite one was Millaa Millaa, which has a 12 meter drop into a pool, with time catching up with us, we so badly wanted to go for a swim in it as it looked so inviting but we must press on – there were two more waterfalls to see in the area and the sun was beginning to set.

Tonight we ended up camping along the motorway at August Moons – a typical truckers stopover as it was too late to reach our original destination being Mission Beach!!