Away from Cape-magic and back among the flocks of winter migrants …..

After countless hard Ks, we booked the Beast in for a check-up and service in Cairns and then, all nuts and bolts secure (we hoped), we headed south through tropical fruit and sugarcane land stopping in at some gorgeous beaches. Our decision to making our way down the coast, rather than taking the inland route, was rewarded with stretches of lush plantations of fruit and the like as well as tropical forests - quite lovely. No trip to the area would be complete without a stop in Ingham in the heart of sugar country and which boasts the Tyto wetlands, a birdwatchers paradise home to well over 200 bird species. Having been eaten almost down to the bone – slight exaggeration! - the previous day on a walk through one of the many patches of rainforest with a zillion mozzies hitching a ride on my legs mistakenly thinking I was the blood bank ouch!!! Needless to say Lindsay walked the many Ks of the wetlands alone..  I seem to have been the ‘meal of the day’ throughout our trip and having not long recovered from the last bout of being sucked almost dry, yes I picked up another load walking through another ….. patch of forest. What can I say? I am a tasty thing – at least if you are a mozzie or a midge!

We did the mandatory thing and checked out the local beaches near Ingham, the famous Lucinda off-shore sugar loading jetty which stretches 6 Ks out to sea, and then headed to the mountains and Wallaman Falls which, at over 300m, is Australia’s highest sheer drop waterfall – awesome actually and dizzying gazing down into the drop pool.  It’s heritage listed and, as I learnt while wandering around there, so are the wet tropical forests in eastern Qld as they are the oldest continually living rainforests in the world.  Yes I was a bit flabbergasted by that too, but looks like it is true. 

We Aussies should be very proud of our amazingly diverse and beautiful country. We have seen grasses as high as an elephant’s eye, waving stretches of many grasses coloured pink, red, brown, purple and black some with feathery heads like the softest watercolour brush, others with seeds tiny as dust motes suspended in cobwebs yet others with bristles and geometric seed clusters waiting to snare a passing trouser leg.   Dazzling flowers and mammoth prehistoric-looking seedpods and ………………… as I said, we are a luck people!