As we arrived in Cairns our money ran more or less out. Our comfort was that we would soon get more money, but in the meantime we had to wait and make due with what we had. Luckily Cairns has awesome free public showers with warm water. It's also easy to sleep in the car. Just find a parking spot in the dark away from the street lamps. In the week or so we camped in our car we only got asked to leave once during the night. Cairns also has nice picnic benches for cooking dinners. Not only is Cairns a good place to be for a broke backpacker, it is a nice city for anyone that likes warm days and tropic weather. The only thing it lacks is a beach, but it only takes 10 minutes north by car to find that. To make the days pass we used the free wifi at McDonald's a lot. We also went to the Cairns botanical gardens where I saw these two spiders!
I am sure some of you back home are following the Football World Cup in South Africa. The world cup fever is also noticeable in Australia especially among backpackers. We have been watching as many games as we can. The main problem is the time difference. The first matches start at midnight and the last ones as late as six in the morning. We have still watched a good deal of games, even the late night ones :) Almost every pub here in Cairns show the world cup games and a few have massive screens making it all the more fun. I am hoping USA wins, Annina is hoping for Germany, and we both hoped for Australia as well, but they are now out after the group stages.
North of Cairns
The next morning we visited the Port Douglas market. The market is full of various vendors selling everything from fresh fruit and vegetables to hand made items. It took quite some time to navigate the whole place and look at all the different products available. The most interesting booth featured a man pressing the juice from sugar canes and making lemonade. It tasted delicious and refreshing.
We now had two choices to continue our trip. Either head south again and take the "ferry" back or drive north on the Bloomfield track. We chose the second. The Bloomfield track is an even narrower and steeper dirt road running some 30km north from Cape Tribulation to south of Cooktown. It's 4WD only and this became clear right from the start. We had to cross several creeks with water over the road, drive up hills so steep I never thought the car would manage and traverse sections of the road that were only rocks. It was a lot of fun! Almost through the track we came upon roadwork. In addition to the roadwork vehicles a number of other people driving the opposite direction all had to figure out how everyone were going to pass each other. This was while standing in an impossible steep hill. It all worked out somehow :)
Safely on the other side of the Bloomfield track we continued north towards Cooktown. Along the way we shortly stopped at Black Mountain national park. Black Mountain is a large hill made up of big granite boulders scattered into a big pile. There is hardly any vegetation growing and the hill looks very odd in the surrounding landscape. Apparently magma from underground was pushed upwards and weather broke the granite into pieces as it surfaced. The color on the rocks comes from an algae growing on them.
Southwest of Cairns
Atherton Tablelands is a great spot to see a Platypus, an unique Australian animal that looks like a mix of a badger and a duck. We went to a small village south of Atherton where they had a Platypus viewing deck. We got very lucky because we saw a Platypus after just a few minutes waiting. It was swimming up and down in the water catching food and eating it. Because the viewing platform was a little bit away from the water the picture is not that great. It was the best I could do :)
The next morning we started the Atherton waterfall circuit. A series of waterfalls all located a short distance from each other in the tablelands. The ones we visited were: Malanda falls, Dinner falls, Millstream falls and Millaa Millaa falls. There are over triple as many in total, but it get's boring to go look at too many so we picked the (in our opinion) best ones. There are no really impressive waterfalls in Australia in my opinion, but then again I always compare waterfalls to Niagara falls. Still, the waterfall circuit was nice and worth doing. Fun fact: The Millstream falls are the widest falls in Australia.
A few hundred meters from the Dinner falls is a steep crater in the ground. The distance from the viewing platform at the top of the crater and down to the water that fills it is about 60 meters. Then there is another 80 meters underwater that has been verified. It is speculated that the crater goes much further than that underground. The crater was formed by a gas explosion due to a old volcano located not far away. The green color on the water is a layer of duck weed growing on the surface.
On our way to Millaa Millaa falls we drove a scenic road along the hills of the tablelands. At some point along this road we must have punctured a tire, because when we arrived at the falls the air was almost gone from one of them. As I mentioned earlier the weather was also not that great with rain on and off for most of the day. We ended up having to change the tire in the rain next to the falls. Wet and cold we headed back to Cairns and a night in a hostel.
The last thing we did that I will write about in this blog post was the Crystal Cascades. Just a short drive from Cairns is a stream coming down from the hills and forming a series of beautiful cascades. A short walkway took us along the stream about a kilometer inwards. There was also swimming spots along the cascades but the weather was still gray and drizzling so we didn't go swimming. Every time I start writing a new post I tell myself to make it shorter so that it is easier to read, but I realize that this one is enormous as always. I hope the wall of text is not scaring you readers away :P. I promise the next few posts will be a lot shorter and I have some great things to write about as well. So stay tuned! Miss you all!
On the ferry from Denmark to Sweden I talked to an Australian who told me that they drive on the left side of the road. Have you really been driving on the wrong side of the road in a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side all this time? I am impressed. It'll be hard getting used to continental european driving when you come back.
ReplyDeleteHaha, yeah! I guess I haven't written about that. Yeah I drive on the left side now :P
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