Atherton Tablelands

We had a lovely day today! The sun shone (most of the time) which was a nice change from the torrential rain of yesterday. We rented a car and drove out to the Atherton Tablelands which are west (and inland) from Cairns. As the guidebook says, it’s a “lush, green, fertile plateau …” Lots of dairy farms, sugar cane, tea and coffee (which surprised us) - and to get there, we had to drive about 20 km up the most windy (as in ‘whine-dy’ - not lots of wind!) I’ve ever been on with glorious views (so of course we had to stop every few feet to take more photos!) We rewarded our efforts with a cream tea at Lake Barrine which is the remains of a volcano - very picturesque. (For the uninitiated, a cream tea is a scone loaded with jam and THICK cream lathered on top - no wonder we are getting stout!) John took some lovely flower pictures there so I thought I’d put one on the blog. Then we went on to Yungaburra (you can’t pass up visiting a place with a name like that) and had lunch there. This area seems to be full of little communities that have got stuck in the ‘60’s - hippie-style VW campervans abound, complete with psychedelic flowers on their sides, as do dreadlocks, bare feet and dreamy expressions of bliss! Just outside Yungaburra, there was a sign to the Curtain Fig Tree - again, how could we resist? I’ve put up a picture of John by the tree (just to prove that I am capable of pushing the button on the camera occasionally), but it really doesn’t do justice to this amazing tree. How it starts is that a fig seed lodges in the high branches of a host tree and puts down aerial roots which eventually turn into this huge “curtain”, by which time, the host tree has bitten the dust. Then we were off on the waterfall circuit - there are many, many waterfalls in the area and I’m sure we visited most of them. Even though we thought there had been a lot of rain recently, none of the falls were particularly spectacular, but there’s something elemental about seeing and hearing streams of water rushing over rocks. When John asked (rather wistfully) if “that was the last one?”, I brought out my trump card - a visit to a dairy farm (called Out of the Whey) which the Lonely Planet had assured me had the best cheesecake in the world, made on site. Another long, windy road - and the cheesecake was indeed amazing (ditto with the stout remark from earlier in the day). When we got back to Cairns, we walked into town to finish our Christmas shopping just in time to watch all the fruit bats wake up and fly off to do whatever fruit bats do. There were literally hundreds of them wheeling about and squeaking. I always thought that humans couldn’t hear bat-talk, but these guys were really loud. You were a little afraid of looking up too much though .…..
We pick up our campervan on Sunday and then it’s off to Sydney. We have a month to do about 2,500 km and there is so much to do along the way. This really is turning into the most amazing trip - we’ve had some wonderful experiences, met some interesting people and had a few fraught moments (e.g. today when John went to pay for gas and couldn’t find his credit card - panic while we turned everything up-side-down only to find that it had somehow got itself stuck onto the cover of his i-touch. Oh, isn’t technology a wonderful thing!