Townsville to The Tablelands

We awoke to another sunny and hot day. Our motel was right in the heart of Townsville and has a nice cafe which served a continental breakfast that was included with our room. After packing the car, we headed a few blocks east to “The Strand”, the downtown beach / park / pathway about 2.5 km along the ocean. They have done a beautiful job on this park with a jogging path, workout stations, playgrounds, lots of vegetation and sun shades.

That is Magnetic Island known locally as "Maggie" in the background.

There are two beach areas where they have deployed stinger nets to provide areas where people can swim with minimal risk of getting stings from the poisonous jellyfish.

There is also a man made salt water lagoon that has filtered sea water that provides another swimming area but as the signs indicate, nothing is guaranteed!

One interesting thing we saw were some large parrots in a tree along the promenade. These were fairly big noisy birds with some red tail feathers you could see only when they flew between the branches. We later identified them as Red-Tailed Black-Cockatoos.

There were also Rainbow Lorikeets hanging around...

After a couple of hours exploring here we departed for Atherton, which is in the area called ‘The Tablelands”, a fertile plateau at an elevation of 500 - 1250m. This would give us a change in scenery away from the coast. 

We stopped at a scenic overlook of Hinchinbrooke Island while still on the coastal highway.

Today’s lunch was a picnic stop right on the beach in the town of Cardwell Beach. 

There were signs warning about sharing your lunch!

North of here at Silkwood, we turned inland to the “Tablelands”. Again today, we drove past vast fields of sugar cane. There are 400,000 hectares of sugar can grown along the coast of Queensland of which 85% is exported making Australia one of the biggest suppliers of raw sugar in the world. Some cane fields with a sugar mill in the background.

We have encountered hundreds of small gauge railway crossings over the last few days. These are all part of a network of sugar cane railways that are used during the harvest to get the cane to the refineries quickly as the cut cane has to be processed within 16 hours. Luckily its not harvest season. We finally saw some of the cane transport cars parked on a siding…. sort of like a large model train set.

We also drove through some banana plantations. The bags hanging from the trees prevent the birds from eating the fruit.

The next surprise was a tea farm.

We had a quick stop at Paronella Park, a castle built by an eccentric Spaniard in 1935.

Approaching Millaa Millaa we decided to follow the waterfall route and stopped at some wonderful waterfalls for some photos. 

I also saw a beautiful dragonfly….

We got to our accommodation in Atherton just before dusk. 

This was a bit of a lark but we decided to book a room in the Atherton Hotel,a old style pub/hotel to see what this type of accommodation was like. 

So far so good and you only have to go downstairs for your supper in the pub and play the Pokies! After dinner, we retired to the room and managed to log into the free wifi of the McDonald’s across the street next to the Police Station. 

The early effect of the cyclone offshore is starting to show itself as it is now a torrential downpour. The only problem so far appears to be a leak in the roof which drips from the bathroom fan/light fixture but it is almost directly over the floor drain so we should be good for the night.