One thing is for sure: there is no shortage of things to do or tours to take around here. There’s a reason for so many travel agencies. This was our first: a tour of three waterfalls and rainforest around Cairns (the Atherton Tablelands to be exact) – or at least, the bits that the farmers left standing. The Queensland government was very good at giving cheap land out providing settlers cleared the rainforest, and they set to work with gusto. The result is lovely rolling hills that tug at your heart when you realize that this was supposed to be lush tropical rainforest, the oldest on the planet in fact.
We went with Barefoot Tours, which turned out to be a rip-roaring good time. We were greeted with a hug and a cheery “G’day!” by our guide, Brett, and piled into the little minivan that would house us and a bunch of Germans, Americans, Austrian, Dutch, and Danish young people who were all a riot. Brett was a fountain of information on all things that had to do with reproduction, and all things that could kill you in Aus. This of course was a goldmine of information for me, and my imagination started going on overdrive. Were all these red bite marks on my arms and legs from mosquitos or deadly spiders?? The kicker came from one of the girls, a lovely American girl living in Cairns, who told the bus about paralysis ticks: little ticks that attach themselves to you, inject you with their poison, and over the course of a week or two effect partial or total paralysis, and if it breaks into your brain fluid (the toxins, not the tick itself), then it’s all over for you.
Her back started hurting and seizing up and she went to a massage therapist, who was the one who discovered the tick…and my back had been hurting for the last two days! The thought of whether or not I had been bitten, and who I’d ask to go over my butt with a magnifying glass, kept plaguing me throughout the day. Mom gave me the pithy bit of advice of not worrying about ticks until I get out on the farms – then I can worry about them all I want – which was a great new thought for me.
Anyway, in between of worrying about my impending paralysis, I saw a Cathedral Fig, which is a majestic tree over 500 years old, with a root system that flows from meters up from the sky into the ground. It was one of five trees that served as a model for the Home Tree (I think that’s what it’s called) in Avatar.
The nest-like looking things that I’ve circled in white weigh about 3 tonnes each. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
It was a quick rest to walk around the tree and take a few photos, when Brett showed us the Tarzan vine hanging off a tree we could touch (climbing the Cathedral tree, if caught, would be a $10,000 fine, one of the fellow travelers informed me), and I discovered that despite the new muscles in my arms from all the Krav, I still have either too little muscle, or too much heft in my bottom half, because I couldn’t climb up that rope to save my life. But I did manage a swing or two (just enough for a photo-op) and a yodel before we headed back on the road. Thankfully the sights of the day were up in the hills, where the humidity dropped to a negligible level, because already at 8:30 a.m. when we left Cairns, the heat and humidity was turning us all into puddles in our seats.
We stopped at two extinct volcanoes, one to drop a 5-pound rock into – made a mighty boom and quite the splash – and the other to drop my own __5 pounds of flesh into. The crater we were swimming in had fishies in there too, and some of the more adventurous kids were hurling themselves from a tree hanging over the lake. While I tried to screw up the ovaries and jump myself, seeing the slick bark of the tree made all my Captain Safety instincts go off, and I puss-wussed out of doing it.
Then we went to a waterfall system, where we jumped into the deeper end of the waterfall pool and then lined our backs up against the fall itself, letting the water pummel our backs in a make-shift massage that went a long way to fixing my back. The water was quite cold to begin with, but I adjusted to it really quickly, and it was just a wonderful refreshing experience. There was a recess in the waterfall’s rock-face, and if you were willing to swim under the falling water so that the current wouldn’t sweep you away and wiggle between the rocks that served as the mouth of that little cave, then you could rest on the other side of the fall and watch the water from the back. I felt compelled to do this daring feat as a way to make up for not jumping out of the tree earlier, and it turned out that on the third try I beat the current and the underwater swim was only a few seconds long until I made it through and up the other side. I felt very accomplished indeed.
The next waterfall was Milla Milla, which is a famous spot for both the 70-foot drop, and for being the site of many a hair-product commercial. At least one Herbal Essences was done here, maybe more. The fall was very pretty and I was floating on my back, staring up at it, feeling very impressed with nature at large, when I accidentally floated into a lady who was standing in the pool of the fall. She grabbled a hold of me as I apologized, and laughed, saying she’d caught herself a mermaid. It was a lovely compliment, and we started chatting, but she kept pulling me closer and closer to herself, and I started feeling quite uncomfortable. She was really very nice, with these blue eyes that had a ring of gold around the pupil, except she was staring at me so intensely that I got quite shaken. I had to extract myself away from her fairly actively, and I got out of the pool lickety-split after that. Just in time too, because the van was piling in to get to our next destination.
Our final stop was at Josephine Falls, about an hour away, which featured multiple stages to the fall, and a natural rock waterslide, and we frolicked in and around it for a good hour. During that time, I discovered some parts of Australian history I was not aware of, and was quite sad to learn of. Slavery was not banned here until 1901 and voting rights were not extended until the late 60’s. I have quite a little bit of learning left to do it seems! Though Canada is certainly in no position to say anything about anything, because the way we have and are treating our Native community is reprehensible.
The day concluded with some tea and cakes, and we got back into town around 8:30, exhausted but happy. We made some new friends on the road and saw some of the beautiful features of the far north, and would be moving from mountain top to underwater in the morning. Stay tuned for adventures around the Great Barrier Reef & The Whitsundays!!
Other things around the region:
