Nov. 7-14 (Above – Green Tree Ant Anybody?)
After losing a full week with the breakdown, (and with a view to reducing our expenses!) we decided to return to Brisbane via the coast but had to travel via Atherton to pik up mail that had been forwarded.
First stop was Rocky Creek War Memorial Park, a free camp with a 72 hour limit just 10km North of Atherton. They had severe storms through here last week that made a mess of the trees so there had been some clearing done and a lot of the ground was quite soft from fresh dirt. This Park commemorates that this area was a major training ground in WW2 with upt o 300,000 troops here at times. The Nissen Hut over the road is the old Rec Hall which is being restored for community use.
From Atherton we descended back to the coast via the Gillies Range. This is a much longer winding section of road than the Cairns-Kuranda route and narrower; just a fairly slow 19km of second gear. The bottom of the range brings you to Gordonvale, the sort of outer Southern suburb of Cairns. Turning South on the Bruce highway we continued down to the free camp at Babinda and on our second visit still have not seen the tops of Mount Bellenden Kerr or Bartle Frere – still low cloud (though not as much rain thank goodness).
..and so further South through Innisfail and stoppng at the Bilyana Rest Area. An unexpected find here was a small grove of rather large bamboo.
Continuing on we needed to stay North of Townsville so that we could prepoll vote for the Queensland elections in Townsville on Monday. So first we returned to Toomulla Beach for three nights, much greener after the recent rain that when we were here in September.
For the final two nights before moving South we stopped at the Bluewater Park Rest ARea, one we didn’t use on the way North.
