Back on down the Queensland coast

Once we spent some time in the Daintree and on the Great Barrier Reef, it was time to head back south from whence we came. Luckily there is so much to see and do on the Queensland coast that we were able to do totally different things on the way back down than we had on the way up, and we still left multiple things undone. I really liked the town of Port Douglas, with its historical church...

...beautiful bay views...

...and its own stretch of those perfect beaches that Australia is just dripping in.

As we continued south through and out of the Wet Tropics, the sugar cane continued to keep us company, and this time we even saw the "cane train" in action, since it's harvest time.

We enjoyed a quick stop in Townsville, with its AMAZING view from the top of Castle Hill...

...and a lovely rainforest walk in Eungella National Park.

SR even got one more "big things" picture--very appropriately, after all that sugar cane we've driven past, with a cane toad.

The beach at Cape Hillsborough National Park was particularly beautiful, and though it's sad to see the wing of a blue tiger butterfly that has seen better days, they move so fast we couldn't get a picture of a live one, and I just love these colors.

We spent a couple nights in Agnes Waters / 1770, and got to see the beach where Captain Cook first landed on the Queensland coast back in...1770.

We also went on a sunset kayak trip from 1770.

One of our last nights with the camper van was spent at Norval Park, right on the beach at this incredibly peaceful spot. A pretty perfect way to start closing out the trip, with beautiful sunset colors and dolphins frolicking offshore.

Not quite done yet, but can you feel the bittersweet mood of a fantastic trip about to draw to a close? I sure can....

Plates

There will still be a couple more Australia posts, but the trip is (too quickly) drawing to a close, so I thought I'd bring out the plates! Now that we've been to every Australian state/territory, I have pictures of license plates from all of them. The ACT (Australian Capitol Territory) one is kind of a cheat; I hadn't started taking pictures of plates when we drove through Canberra, and that state being as tiny as it is, you don't see many ACT plates elsewhere. So I had to nab the last photo from one on the wall of the Daly Waters Pub in the outback. Anyhow, in no particular order...

 

 

 

Great Barrier Reef!

Huge splurge: taking an overnight sailing trip out to the Great Barrier Reef from Cairns! And SO worth it. We visited three different reef sections: Flynn, Miln, and Moore, and went to several sites on each. There was spectacular snorkeling at all of them, and I made the splurge even bigger by doing three scuba dives as well. I rented an underwater camera for a day but somehow missed getting pictures of some of the most incredible things, like dolphins swimming alongside the boat, sighting a sea snake (from the safety of the boat, thank goodness), jellies and a small shark...all of it was so incredible. Here are some of the pictures I did get, which don't even begin to do it justice.

 

The Daintree

The end of the line (as far north as we're going on the east coast) for us was the Daintree Rainforest, which was probably one of my favorite areas we've been to on this trip. I loved the cable-ferry crossing of the Daintree River to reach the upper parts of the forest, and I just in general love the atmosphere of the jungle. The beautiful flowers...

 

...and fruit tree orchards with misty rainforested mountains as their backdrop...

...complete with these ENORMOUS bats (which I assume are fruit bats, since they were hanging out in fruit trees?).

Even more fun animal crossing signs up here, and though we didn't see any turtles traversing the road...

...we did see two southern cassowary crossing! This is so exciting, as this species is very endangered (only about 1000 animals remaining), and they're just plain awesome-looking. SR and I are both baffled how neither of us managed to get a clear, good picture of either of them when they walked leisurely past, directly in front of our vehicle, as if to invite us to photograph them. But this is the best I've got.

We spent a lot of time exploring the rainforest-lined beaches of the coast. I particularly love how the mangrove roots are fully exposed at low tide.

SR particularly loved the ropes we kept finding hung from high trees for people to swing on.

This pic, from the Alexandra viewpoint just north of the Daintree River, is special in that it shows the only place in the world where two World Heritage-listed areas abut each other: the Wet Tropics of the Daintree cascading down into the Great Barrier Reef shore. Pretty much my idea of heaven.

And by the time we crossed back south of the Daintree, the weather was FINALLY starting to lift, with some promising sun poking through the persistent clouds of the past week...

North through Queensland

After Byron Bay, we just went north, north, north up the Queensland coast. We took a couple of lovely walks among the Glass House Mountains, which are 25-million-year-old volcanic plugs (i.e., just my kind of thing).

 

SR got to continue his "big things" photo series with some of the tropical fruits of the area (pineapple and mango, here).

There are a gazillion things to do on the Queensland coast, and a gazillion tour operators eager to sell you trips to do these things. As we tried to get a mental grasp on all the options for Fraser Island, the Whitsundays, the Great Barrier Reef, and so on, things were complicated by some unfortunate weather rolling in. Clouds and wind and unusually cool temperatures had even the eager tour operators telling us we'd be wasting our money going out on the water in these conditions. So we decided to delay all decision-making until the weather forecast improved, and in the meantime, just focus on driving north and collecting what info we could so that by the time we made the same trip back south, we might have a better idea of where and how to spend our money.

So for several days, we were mostly just driving. Luckily, we found some really fantastic (and free!) places to park the campervan for the night along the coast. This is moonrise over the beach one night on the road.

I got into the tropical fruit spirit with mango ice cream made from mangoes grown in the orchard surrounding the ice cream stand.

And eventually we crossed into the "Wet Tropics" of northern Queensland, a World Heritage Area due to its natural beauty and exceptional biodiversity, among other things. This means that we're now in the territory of the highly endangered southern cassowary, a bird roughly similar to an emu (and designated "southern" because its northern cousins inhabit Papua New Guinea).

Check out the birds sitting atop the cows. This is just funny to me, so I thought I'd share.

Something maybe a little more share-worthy: spectacular Wallaman Falls, the highest single-drop, continuous (through the entire year) waterfall in Australia, and TOTALLY worth detouring an hour inland to check it out.

 

One of the many things I've been learning about Australia, and Queensland in particular, is that there is a LOT of sugarcane here. I didn't think of Australia as a place that grows sugarcane, and I didn't recognize this as sugarcane, because it looks so different from the sugarcane that grew in Madagascar. But that's what this is--fields and fields and more sweeping fields of sugarcane so ripe for harvest that it has these lovely flowering tops.

Even in the intermittent rain and under the cloudy skies, there was great beach-walking nearly every step of the way north, and the landscape getting more and more dramatically gorgeous. Coastal Queensland is BEAUTIFUL.