Atherton Tablelands (one more time)

I spent a further three days in the Atherton Tablelands, seeing more lakes, more waterfalls, some kangaroos, an old mining town, and a very deep crater hole that came from an enormous volcanic gas explosion 3 million years ago.

Now I think I have seen the Tablelands in enough detail and I can go back on my way south.

A township named Innot Hot Springs has a creek running with hot thermal water. On one side of this hot-water creek is a hotel, and on the other a caravan park in which I stayed a night. Two weeks ago Moni and Florian had been here, and they had told me about it. The park features several pools of this natural thermal water, at different temperatures. The hottest pool is 43 degrees!

Granite Gorge

Granite Gorge is a place in the Atherton Tableland 15 km west of Mareeba. We found it more or less by coincidence and it was such a beautiful, amazing place that I have to tell you about it. There is no Wikipedia article on it so far.

There is a gorge, eine Schlucht, filled with huge massive granite boulders over which you can climb. There is a creek running though too, and the whole scenery is absolutely picturesque. Now I know where the word "gorgeous" (grossartig, traumhaft, wunderschoen) comes from!

There is a caravan park right next to the gorge at which we stayed one night. They sell wallaby food ($1 a bag) which you can feed to the dozens of little rock wallabies that live there. They are very used to people and will come near without any shyness, and eat from your hand! As you can see they are very cute and really an attraction for every visitor. You won't find such tame wallabies anywhere else in the wild. They are almost semi-domestic animals here.

This was Molly's last day with me, she went back to Brisbane on Thursday and will go back to Hong Kong next week. She had not seen the Great Barrier Reef on her short stay here, but she had really enjoyed the tablelands. She had even gone for a hot air balloon ride in Mareeba ($220, too expensive for me).

We visited the Mareeba Coffee Works for a cup of coffee and house-made chocolates, and then the Mount Uncle Distillery where we had a tasting of different liqueurs. Not a bad life, we're having!

And then we said goodbye to Werner and Karola at Yorkey's Knob and thanked them a thousand times for their great hospitality and friendship, and promised to visit again when we come back to here.

Tea plantation

Tea is something you wouldn't perhaps expect here in this region. At least I hadn't expected it. But the Australians are successfully growing and processing tea here in the Atherton Tablelands.

The type of tea grown here is Camellia Sinensis, the same as they have in China. But in Australia they produce no Oolong but only shredded tea (tea bags and loose tea) because that is what the Australian customers want.

Now I have seen tea plantations in Sri Lanka before, and you can imagine that it would be impossible to pick the tea ("two leaves and the bud") by hand in a high-wage industrialized country like Australia. So the only way to do it here is by using big harvesting machines. One man can harvest as much tea as 800 hand-pickers in Asia.

The next picture is also something you perhaps wouldn't expect to see in the Atherton Tablelands. A yogi, and he was very friendly. We had a nice talk with him once he had returned to right-side-up!

He is not from India but from Tasmania, and his name, he said, is Baba. But he has a small ashram there, and he has been to India, and you should have seen the things he could do with his legs! Practice makes perfect, as everywhere.

Atherton Tableland

We are in the beautiful Atherton Tableland. This elevated region, 1-2 hour's drive inland from Cairns, is pleasantly cooler than the coast. But it still feels like summer in Europe here. The tableland is a fertile plateau 600 to 900 m above sea level, but not all flat: it has nice rolling hills. It is very picturesque and rich with waterfalls, crater lakes and other charms of nature.

One of more than a dozen waterfalls in this region is known as Millaa Millaa Falls. It is a waterfall like one you might imagine in the Garden of Eden. You can swim in the little lake at its base and shower in its refreshing waters, and then climb the rocks behind the fall and sit there as if behind a curtain.

And the view up into the trees above the waterfall is just as beautiful.

Molly

Today Moni and Florian had their last day here at Cairns Zoo, watching a crocodile show. In the afternoon they returned their hired campervan and I took them to Cairns Airport. They will spend their last 5 days in Sydney and Brisbane and then fly back to Germany on Friday.

This picture was taken on Ellis Beach where we had great fun riding the waves on the bodyboards I had organized.

This is winter in Cairns! :) It's 30 degrees at noon and the sea is warm; the night temperatures are pleasant. No rain tomorrow. But believe it or not: We just saw on TV that right now it's hotter in Brisbane: they are sweltering at 35 degrees there!

I'm not (yet) alone again because another friend came to spend a week with me: Molly (whom I had met before in Brisbane). She is from China/Hong Kong and is here in Australia during her summer break from university. She has been wwoofing in Brisbane for 4 weeks and now she has a short holiday in Cairns.

We enjoyed the peaceful nature in the Cairns hinterland, seeing some lakes and waterfalls. Much better than the city!

Werner and Karola are still kindly hosting us; you have to admire their patience with 4 guests in the house! I have helped Werner to start up his own blog.

Scuba-diving

Moni, Flori and I went out to the Great Barrier Reef again. This time we did not take an underwater camera, and this was a wise decision because the visibility wasn't as good as before anyway, since we were going in a smaller boat to the "Inner Reef" only and not to the "Outer Reef". But it was still good snorkeling there, and this time I even went Scuba-diving!

This was my first time to dive since 2 1/2 years, but I quickly remembered everything that's important and had an enjoyable dive, for 40 minutes down to 12 m at the deepest point. However I must say that the better corals and fish are up near the surface. So for the second go in the afternoon I went snorkeling again.

In the evening, we went to Festival Cairns. This is the first weekend of the festival, and being Saturday there were thousands of people and lots to see: a parade, a market, life music, and a beautiful fireworks!

Jungle Camp

Moni and Florian caught up with me in Cairns, and together we went up to the very far north, as far as you can go in a normal car: Cape Tribulation.

On the way, near Mossman, we said hello to a pineapple farmer, Ron Schild, who is a friend of Werner. He showed us how his pineapples grow and gave us some to try - yum!

Then we got to a point where you have to cross a wide river that has no bridge -- on a ferry. It is Daintree River. After that, the National Park begins. Welcome to the jungle! We stayed two nights on a campsite that I called our "Jungle Camp".

There are fantastic rainforest walks, some started right from our campsite. There were also kangaroos, wallabies, snakes (in a cage), baby crocodiles (ditto), a white pet cockatoo and parrots. The only animal we didn't see was a big crocodile. I took lots of rainforest pictures on these walks. The example to the right shows a swampy mangrove forest.

We were also at Cape Tribulation Beach -- a beautiful large beach as you can see, with green pristine rainforest covered hills in the background.

And then came the proof of the "small world phenomenon". At our campsite, when we checked in, we noted that just minutes before us other people from Augsburg had arrived as well. I looked at the name, Josef Mayr, and remarked "I once had a teacher by that name".

To make a long story short, it was him! He had been my class teacher in the late 1980s, when I was a student in Koenigsbrunn, and he had also been Moni's teacher in geography. And he had been the supervisor of the student magazine (Schuelerzeitung) in which I had been the editor-in-chief. He is still at the same school, 20 years later. And now we me him, with his wife Uschi, travelling in Australia, by coincidence on the same small campsite.

Werner and Karola

On Saturday morning Alex and I got up very early (3 a.m.) and I drove him to Cairns Airport. He flew from Cairns to Brisbane, then to Singapore, then to Frankfurt, and then another 3 hours by train to Augsburg. Two days from door to door. In just three months I will have the same journey home! Time flies so fast.

I met, and am currently staying with, two new friends in Cairns: Werner and Karola. They are from Germany, from the Kaiserstuhl area near Freiburg, and have migrated to Australia in 1954. They are the grandparents of Renee where I had been wwoofing, if you remember. This is one of the most fantastic things about Australia: you make new friends so easily, and if someone likes you they will not only look after you, but refer you to their friends and relations when you travel to other places.

Werner and Karola are such a loveable couple, sympathy was there from the first minute. Werner loves to tell stories, about his life and every topic you can imagine. When he came here in the 1950s, he had to work his way up from scratch, learn English and integrate with the Australians. He worked on farms (cutting sugar cane etc.), then made a living as a professional wood turner (Drechsler) and cabinet maker (Moebelschreiner) until he retired. Here is a picture of a marvellous side table he had made from red silkwood. I absolutely love and admire freeform furniture design like that, combined to perfection with the beauty of the timber!

Werner also has an interest in politics and social topics, loves to make powerpoint presentations for friends and family, and regularly posts stories on the website TinToTa (search by author for "Werner Schmidlin" or just click here). He says coming to Australia was the best decision he made in his life. Everyone who has met him must agree. I don't know any octogenarian (keinen Achzigjaehrigen) in Germany who is that filled with positive energy from a lifetime of fulfilling experiences.

They live in Yorkeys Knob, a suburb just north of Cairns, only one kilometer from the beach. Werner gave me a tour to show me the vicinity and we drove as far as Lake Morris, high up on a mountain road that gave us some spectacular views down to Cairns.

The last picture is of a rather funny looking tree which Werner introduced me to, called the Cannonball Tree. The tree's large spherical, hard and heavy fruit really resemble cannonballs. The topmost picture above shows the beautiful flowers of that tree. And the flower picture in the middle was taken by me yesterday in Cairns Botanical Gardens.

Great Barrier Reef

We reached Cairns, and made a day trip to the Great Barrier Reef!

I'm sure most of you have heard of that largest and most magnificent coral reef system on Earth. So I need not say much more to praise its beauty, but let the pictures speak for themselves.

We decided to go snorkeling only, not SCUBA diving. And we hired a digital underwater camera to capture what we saw in pictures. I think that was a good idea.

We were really lucky, we had good weather and fantastic water visibility -- at least 20 metres.

Sugar Factory

If you saw a factory like this from the distance, would you want to go in there? We did!

Here in northern Queensland two main products are bananas and sugar. There are big fields of sugar cane (Zuckerrohr), much like those I had seen in Fiji. But while the Fijian farmers still cut the cane completely by hand, here in Australia they now use harvesting machines.

The cane must be processed within 16 hours of cutting, or else it will go bad. It is also rather heavy. That's why they transport it on special railways to the sugar mills. There is one harvest per year and the harvesting season is now, in winter. And so we had the chance to visit a sugar mill and see the whole process in action.

They do tours for visitors in one or two of the factories, and we were in a small group, wearing closed shoes, safety glasses and orange helmets. We looked like "Bob the Builder"! :)

The cane is first shredded and milled and the juice is pressed out. The dry cane straw is burnt in huge ovens; this heat is used to produce steam and electricity. The juice is cleared and boiled until you get a sugar syrup; then they have a way to let sugar crystals grow in that hot syrup, and to extract these in fast spinning centrifuges. Finally the sugar crystals are blow-dried with hot air in giant tumblers.

The output is raw sugar (brown in color, not refined), molasses (a heavy syrup similar to Grafschafter Goldsaft, but here it is used to feed stock), cane mud (used as a fertilizer), ashes, steam, smoke, CO2, and some extra electricity. From 8 tons of cane they produce 1 ton of sugar. Not a bad ratio.

Alex and I always like to do factory tours, and this one was loud, noisy, and interesting. (Da hammer wieder mal was gelernt! :)

Magnetic Island

Alex and I made a good distance towards tropical northern Queensland. We ignored the cities of Bundaberg and Gladstone and passed through Rockhampton (stopping just to visit the nice Botanical Garden and Zoo). We also didn't go to see Mackay or the Whitsunday Islands. Moni and Florian went on their own way. They are going north to Cairns as well, but at a slower pace. Alex and I decided to rush a bit because it's his last week here.

To give you an idea of the distances: Brisbane to Cairns is about 1700 km. Like from Hamburg to Rome. The temperatures got noticeably warmer. Especially the nights are no longer "winter nights" as they were in the Brisbane region. Finally!

In Townsville we went for a day trip to Magnetic Island. A fast ferry took us to the island, where we rented a Mini Moke car. That was not cheap ($73 for a day on which we could go less than 20 km), but we did it because it gave us mobility and independence from buses. And it was fun to drive "something special". Four wheels, four seats, no doors. A picture of Pinocchio on the hood.

Magnetic Island (which got its name from Captain Cook, who thought in 1770, when he passed by, that the island had interfered with his compass) is beautiful and has some nice beaches. We had brought our snorkeling gear and tried it in Florence Bay. But it was a bit disappointing because the visibility was poor and the underwater world was not too spectacular.

The unknown fruit

I had been asked for a photo of the unknown fruit I had mentioned the other day. So here it is. Not very spectacular, I admit. Meanwhile I have identified and tried it. The fruit is called "chocolate pudding fruit" but its real name is "Black Sapote" or "Black Persimmon".

It is related to the Kaki fruit (Sharon fruit) but different in color: dark green outside, dark brown to black inside when ripe. It is also different in that it is very soft, creamy when ripe. Really a bit like chocolate pudding. The taste is not unpleasant but not very strong either. It has some inedible seeds embedded in the pulp like a Kaki.

Wikipedia says that it is native to Mexico. And I say that it doesn't surprise me that the fruit is not widely known in Europe. Its slobbery (matschige) texture means you can't cut or bite it. You need to spoon it out, and the black stuff looks about as pretty on your spoon as plum jam (but not as sweet).

Fraser Island

We (all four of us) have done the obligatory trip to Fraser Island.

The island, now a world heritage site, has long beaches, lakes, creeks, and different types of forests. Fraser Island was formerly used for wood harvesting, but now the big business here is tourism. The roads can only be used by four-wheel-drive cars. Unfortunately all offered trips to the island are pretty expensive, which is why we went for the "cheapest" option ($160 per person), a day trip in a 40-seater bus. The bus is 4WD too -- probably suitable to cross the Sahara desert.

A "normal" bus picked us up from Hervey Bay and took us to River Heads where we got onto the ferry. 40 minutes by boat to the island. Then onto the 4WD bus and a rough ride (seat belts must be worn) to Lake McKenzie, which is a very clear freshwater lake. Then to a place called Central Station where they had built a comfortable walkway for the tourists along a crystal clear creek. Then to a resort where we (and a few busloads of other tourists) had lunch in a big hall.

And then after these rough rides came the better part. We drove in that bus onto the "Great Sandy Highway", in other words right on the beach. Up to 80 km/h speed, a wide beach and no lanes. We stopped three times to look at a creek, a shipwreck, and at a place where 15-minute cessna flights were being offered for those who wanted the extra. We did not see a dingo or a whale.

I think we would all have enjoyed Fraser Island better if we had had a chance to escape the mass tourism and explore the island by ourselves in a hired 4WD. But the hired cars are so crazy overpriced here that we had given that idea up. Too bad. Fraser Island is nice but I don't think it was really worth spending that much money.

In Hervey Bay we stayed for two nights in a youth-hostel-with-attached-caravan-park named "Colonial Village YHA". That place is recommendable. They are friendly, great value for money. And even have a free breakfast(!) there, which I have never had in a caravan park before.

Happy Birthday

Yeah, yesterday was my birthday... on the same day as Barack Obama. I don't know about him, but *I* had a very nice day! :) First of all, my sister Moni and Florian arrived from Germany! They came in their campervan (a nice little "Hippie Camper" decorated with big flowers on the outside) to meet us in Coolum Beach.

It was perfect weather, and we went straight away to the beach, enjoying the view and the sound of the surf and the warm sun and the feeling of just being there. (No swimming, it's still too cold here for that.) Then I invited my guests for lunch to a Thai restaurant (very nice food), having my "Spendierhosen an" today. ;) We did some shopping, bought a prepaid SIM card for Moni's phone, and then drove up to the house of Scott and Sally from Rainbow Love Farm.

They welcomed us very heartily and I really felt a bit as if "coming home". All four of the children were there too. And two dogs. We lit a campfire and sat outside all night until late. Sally cooked a nice Indian curry dinner for all of us, the kids melted marshmallows, the grown ups had beer and wine, and a bottle of sparkling wine to toast to me. It was so nice to be not alone on my birthday, but having so many good friends around me!

And Moni gave me presents and letters and greeting cards from my dear ones at home: from herself and my parents and my other sister and her family and my grandma. Thank you all so much. You really think of me! And I'm thinking of you, too.

And then I got more good wishes from friends by e-mail and on facebook etc. ... thanks a lot, everyone. What you write helps me keep realizing and not forgetting what an amazing thing I'm doing here and how special this all is, and keeps my spirits up in hard times and count my blessings.

Mit Wind bekleidet,
Feuer atmend,
in der Umarmung von Licht
und Finsternis
lasse ich mich hineingebären in den Erdenfluß

This poem was sent to me by Anita, a friend from my Irish Folk band in Germany. Thank you!