Townsville to Malanda, Queensland
Our first day with the 4WD tag-along tour takes us through the wettest part of Australia--the Wet Tropics of North Queensland. Along the way up the coast north of Townsville we stop at a few waterfalls before settling in for dinner and bed at the Malanda Hotel, supposedly the largest all-timber structure in all of Australia.
Weird Wildlife Sighting Today
This large golden orb spider (I think) was sitting in the ginger patch next to Milaa Milaa Falls. Quite spectacular!
Leaving Townville behind, we headed north up the coast, with a stop at Cardwell for coffee two hours later. Cardwell has wonderful views across a small straight to Hinchinbrook Island, a very rugged looking island just a few kilometers off the mainland. We soon came to Tully, the wettest spot in Australia, which gets a good 4000mm of rain a year--about 160 inches. It's wet and green, and they grow a lot of cane around there.
After Tully, we cut inland towards Milaa Milaa. There's a short waterfall circuit, allowing you to take in three falls: Zillie falls, Ellinjaa falls, and finally at the end Milaa Milaa Falls, where we had a lunch break. Milaa Milaa Falls is definitely on the tourist circuit; at least four tour groups came by as we were there, many of them with the 'poor backpacker' look. Still, it was quite beautiful, set in the rainforest. I saw my first Ulysses Blue butterfly--a vibrant large blue butterfly. It looks slow, but it certainly isn't! I couldn't get my camera out fast enough to even try and take a picture.
After that, we headed south towards Ravenhoe, for the fourth and final waterfall. Even though it was only a few kilometers away, the rainforest disappeared and was replaced by open eucalypt woodland. If you've seen the second installment of (American) Survivor, it looks exactly like that. Chris said he gained a new appreciation for the hardships those contestants went through. Even though it's late autumn, the sun was still hot and high in the sky, and the air was humid and a bit stifling.
Millstream Falls was quite wide, with turtles in the pool below. Just up the hill was a wind farm of 20 large wind generators. One of the guys on the trip sits on the board of Snowy Hydro, the huge hydroelectric scheme in the mountains southwest of Sydney, and he really ragged on those windmills as 'visual pollution' and 'horribly expensive'. They're not the prettiest thing, but then neither is a dam or a reservoir with a huge bathtub ring of bare soil and dead trees sticking up out of the water. And as far as 'horribly expensive', well, most hydro schemes aren't done for profit. Can you imagine a private generation company purchasing all the land underneath a potential hydro reservoir--not to mention buying water rights from downstream users? Hydro relies on massive indirect government subsidies to generate power, and they certainly have their environmental costs as well. I think wind power is worthwhile investigating.
Just as the sun was setting, we made our way into Milanda, and the huge Milanda Hotel. We got a basic room upstairs along with the rest of the group. It was a classic old pub--the rooms on the second floor above the dining room and bar all opened onto a huge verandah over the sidewalk below, and the built-in furniture really hadn't' been changed since the hotel opened in 1911. Of course, another wag in the group said 'yep, she's a classic old pub all right--you can hear someone fart three rooms away!'.
After a rather tasty dinner--further validating our proposition that pub food in Australia is Good Value--we wandered around a bit, then headed to bed for the evening.